Slashdot Mirror
ISPs Fight Against Encrypted BitTorrent Downloads
oglsmm writes to mention an Ars Technica article about a new product intended to detect and throttle encrypted BitTorrent traffic. When torrents first saw common use ISPs would throttle the bandwidth available to them, in order to ensure connectivity for everyone. Some clients began encrypting their data to get around this, and the company Allot Communications is now claiming their NetEnforcer product will return the advantage to the ISPs. From the article: "Certainly, increasing BitTorrent traffic is a concern for ISPs. In early 2004, torrents accounted for 35 percent of all traffic on the Internet. By the end of that year, this figure had almost doubled, and some estimate that in certain markets, such as Asia, torrent traffic uses as much as 80 percent of all bandwidth. However, BitTorrent is an extremely important tool that has many uses other than what everyone assumes it is good for, namely movie piracy."
If you build a better mousetrap someone will fling a couger at you.
You don't want your customers actually using the stuff they're paying you for, after all.
there is no need to sign your posts. this isn't usenet. your username is right there above your post. stop it.
"in order to ensure connectivity for everyone"
No, that's in order to continue selling people bandwidth they couldn't deliver, known to ISPs as "statistical oversubscription". Then when we want to get what we paid for, they take it away entirely. Unless you're watching the telco's own IPTV, which somehow has as much bandwidth as they need to sell it to you, for an additional charge.
Blocking competitive services to support ripoff monopoly business models is the reason telcos and other big ISPs hate Net Neutrality.
--
make install -not war
Wow, stunning efficiency, or bad statistics.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Look, I use Bittorrent and it's great. But I also run an ISP.
The thing is, bandwidth isn't cheap. People bitch that ISPs "oversubscribe", and that we can't really deliver our advertised bandwidth to everyone all of the time. This is true, but how do you think we manage to sell people 5Mb connections for $40/month? Do you know how much 5Mb of bandwidth costs and ISP? It's a lot more than $40. In the market I'm in, we pay THOUSANDS of dollars for that much bandwidth.
The real problem is that bandwidth is too expensive in this country, thanks to the likes of AT&T and MCI and all the other big players. They've got tons of unused fiber lying around, and it costs them next-to-nothing to use it, but it still costs the end-user (in this case, the ISP) a hell of a lot of cash.
2: Sue them under the DMCA for reverse-engineering and breaking the technological protection method used to protect your content.
Use either, or both, as appropriate.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
In response - I was able to contact my ISP and mentioned this problem. They then put me on a service that had no blocked or throttled ports but also made me agree to accept any civil proceedings brought against my IP address.
uh... how about we ban analogies completely from /. Who's with me?!!
In the meantime, I will point out that the flaw with this particular analogy is comparing a service (broadband) to a physical object (an acre of land). You can oversell a service, but it doesn't work with physical objects. People tend to want to get their hands on a physical object and it becomes apparent very quickly that it's been oversold. Most of the time, users will be surfing the web or checking email. They won't be using their full bandwidth. When they do occasionally use their full bandwidth, most likely it will be available.
...seriously, who's with me?!!
Finding other idiots on
This made me realize that there is even a better way of visualisng the problem: think traditional telephone companies. They also provide, for a fixed monthly fee, unlimited access to the telephone network. If they operated on the same principle as the ISPs, you would get nothing but busy signals if more then 0.1% of people decided to call each other. Furthermore, if their response to the problem was like that of the ISPs, you would see people's calls being monitored and those made by teenagers would be terminated prematurely, because they make the system too busy for Grandma to call her grandkids. In other words: total nonsense. Instead the telcos of old did the only sane thing: expanded the switching capability until the odds of the system reaching its capacity were so small as not to impede its normal use.
ISPs simply believe that no sane rules apply to them because they operate in this magical, fantastic, cosmic, new wonder medium of Internet. Its time someone hit them with a sizeable clue bat and made their noses contact the firm ground of common sense, violently.