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Net Neutrality and BitTorrent - No More Throttling?
Umaga's Purse writes "Will ISPs still be able to throttle BitTorrent traffic now that a significant proportion of it is legit? It's a tough question, especially for ISPs like AT&T (which agreed to run a neutral network in order to gain approval for its merger with BellSouth from the FCC). It's not just a problem for AT&T, though: 'ISPs that have made no such agreements may not need to worry about BitTorrent taking over their networks, but they do need to wrestle with the issue of how to handle it now that so many legal uses of the protocol are available. Do they want to irritate their BitTorrent-using contingent, or let BitTorrent flow unhindered at the risk degrading the experience of those who don't download torrents?'"
Will ISPs still be able to throttle BitTorrent traffic now that a significant proportion of it is legit?
Says who? Not that I disagree, but it would be interesting to read a study done on the matter...
...how does an ISP recognize BitTorrent traffic? As far as I can tell, it's really easy to change the port numbers used by the BitTorrent tracker and by the end user. I now that my uTorrent client is set to randomize a port and then use uPnP to ask my router to open it.
So, if the tracker port number changes and the client port number changes, how is it being blocked?
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
"Will ISPs still be able to throttle BitTorrent traffic now that a significant proportion of it is legit?"
On what, exactly, are you basing this assumption that "a significant proportion" of BitTorrent traffic is legitimate?
#DeleteChrome
Do they want to irritate their BitTorrent-using contingent, or let BitTorrent flow unhindered at the risk degrading the experience of those who don't download torrents?
Neither. Instead, focus on upgrading the infrastructure and giving people more bandwidth, the US is already behind pretty much the rest of the world. . .
If you are about to mod me down, keep in mind that this post was most likely sarcastic.
...but I thought that net neutrality didn't make QoS illegal
I would imagine the ISP would haev to use their best judgement, like any business. If they throttle/block BT and a bunch of people start leaving or complaining then they need to rethink it. If no one complains, sales don't drop and (*gasp*) someone actually compliments them on better respoinse times or faster connections then they have nothing to worry about.
I guess the tricky part is at teh beginning when too big of a change may trigger a mass exodus. If they slowly start throttling it down and don't see much change in their business then they can keep that up until it becomes a problem.
Personally I think if/when ISPs do this they could avoid a lot of hassles by explaining it to people up front, in plain English, instead of burying their right to throttle your "unlimited" bandwidth in a cryptic and massive Acceptable Use Policy.
Creationist Textbook Stickers Declared Unconstitutional by CowboyNeal
Throttle back some protocol that only a few of their customers have even heard of, or keep the average user from having a good experience. Hmm. Tough choice.
Most users don't download torrents.
"Will ISPs still be able to throttle WorldWideWeb traffic now that a significant proportion of it is legit? .. Do they want to irritate their BitTorrent-using contingent, or let WorldWideWeb flow unhindered at the risk degrading the experience of those who use e-mail and telnet only?'"
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
Call me crazy but I haven't noticed any slow downs on the internet except for the occasional outage that can be explained through a a tracert. Torrents have their weak point: connections. If you make too many active connections with your torrent client you effectively kill your ability to surf the web simultaneously at least here in Florida with Comcast.
- John
http://www.jabcreations.com/
BT throttling is already done in a net neutral manner--all torrents, regardless of legality or origin are throttled equally. There is no attempt (as far as I know) to throttle torrents originating from one company but not others.
Throttling BT downloads generally falls as a quality of service/defense of network integrity issue to rather than a censorship for profit issue.
ISPs have a right to throttle users that are using excessive bandwidth, but it should not be protocol based.
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/01/20/011121 5&tid=217
If Robert X. Cringely is right, then Google has indeed calculated well.
I claim first use of "Error No. 0B" - or "No. 0B error." It'll be the new ID 10T!
FYI - Just so no one gets their panties in a bunch. Prioritizing traffic, does not mean that BitTorrent is going to get hurt. It means that when the network is constrained, BitTorrent traffic will be given a lower priority. And, when the network is no longer constrained, it won't. Traffic engineering is not illegal under Net Neutrality. You just aren't allowed to sell the service of high priority queuing. Or, worse than that . . . You can't put every VOIP provider but your own into a low priority queue unless they are willing to pay a fee.
So, high/low speed BitTorrents are not likely to be protected by Network Neutrality laws. They are not mutually exclusive.
...please note that the article said "significant" proportion. If the relative quantity is small in comparison to "illegitimate uses" [as defined by RIAA, I presume], it may still be significant, depending on the nature and influence of the "legitimate" data providers. The article mentions Hollywood studios and Blizzard, and discusses growing corporate use of Bittorrent. Point is, if enough moneyed interests are behind the technology, the ISPs will have to deal with a contentious issue if they're throttling the flow.
Just because TFA's summary is imprecise doesn't mean the point of the article is not valid.
Tags != Comments, and -1 (Troll) != -1 (I Would Respond Angrily To This Poster So They Must Be Trolling)
Stop overselling your infrastructure by such ridiculous margins.
Maybe if you could actually deliver what you charge for (or only charge for what you can deliver), people wouldn't get so easily pissed about "degraded" service.
=Smidge=
All the net neutrality stuff I saw was aimed at keeping companies from discriminating based upon the source of traffic, not the type. What does it matter if you throttle or shape or prioritize bittorrent traffic (or traffic on any given port) so long as you apply it equally to all traffic in your network. The idea is to keep network operators from extorting some customers or degrading some service offered by a competitor. So long as they treat all bittorrent traffic the same how are they not being neutral?
All without doing anything squinky: just identify which torrents are hot, add one of their own. It's what BitTorrent does, after all.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
I buy bandwidth. You buy bandwidth.
I want to send and receive 0's and 1's. Any interference with this is imposing on my freedom to communicate.
We should all quit arguing about this and that. Keep the argument simple. Are we going to allow this for our future or not?
How about before the ISPs even think of throttling down BitTorrent or any other type of traffic - they make even a casual effort to throttle back the 95% of email that is spam? If bandwidth is so precious that they need to consider slowing down one kind of traffic, why not start with the kind that is known to be illegitimate. Considering all the BS that is crammed into EULAs these days I think it would be actually reasonable to include a clause that says if your PC gets hijacked and zombied and is spewing garbage then we're going to cut you off until you fix it. The ISPs can certainly implement some algorithms to detect likely zombied computers, cut them off and redirect them to a page explaining the situation and common tools/resources to help fix their boxes, then the user clicks some link to get their connection reevaluated to regain net access. I'm in favor of net neutrality and no traffic throttling but I think the hypocracy of these ISPs should also be addressed. If half the money spent lobbying for net neutrality were spent tracking down spammers and helping users to identify and fix trojaned PCs then spam would be on the decline, not doubling every 3 months. Or here's an idea, how about using some of the no-doubt tens of millions of dollars that's about to be spent to change all the Cingular signs back to AT&T signs on fighting spam and botnets? But no, better to let the problem fester and the spammers grow richer and better armed (digitally) than let the company logos go un-revamped. Farking rediculous. [/rant]
-- I'm not a pessimist, I'm a realist. It's not my fault that life sucks so much. --
I can't help but wonder why you trolls even bother. Sure, you've got me to respond which is a result in your book, but what is the point? Most, if not all, Slashdot users have learned that goatse links are not worth clicking on. I'm wasting my time with this post I'm sure, but you trolls are surely wasting much more. I just don't get it. Trolling is outdated surely. celardore
You're crazy.
No kidding. Back in the day it was easy to notice slowdowns. You could almost feel them if you had, you know, a couple telnets open to various places, and maybe an irc. These days the internet is such a big hairy mofo with so many paths that it has a much greater tendency to route around problems. You lose a few packets, your application (or your kernel, depending on protocol) recovers, and you usually never even notice.
But what I suspect they're actually talking about is things like overuse of the local loop. For instance, cable modems are on segments and there's only so much bandwidth available per segment. If everyone on your street is torrenting like mad it's going to hurt your transfer rates.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Simple - one can easily draw up a case for the benefits of distributed downloading for service providers - distribution of traffic is always a good thing, and if it's for this one protocol, rules are easily assembled on how to distribute that traffic to capitalize on the distribution to an even greater extent. One simply needs to assign a dollar amount to the savings or efficiences gained to garner acceptance.
----------------------------
Esobofh - Currently drinking fresh mango juice.
I suppose one way for an ISP to reduce traffic outside of its network, would be to create a cache which hosts the more popular ligit downloads, which would adjust according to the varying demand. The only question: how to tell the difference between legitimate content and illigitimate content?
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
It's innocent until proven guilty, not guilty until proven innocent. Furthermore, ISPs are not self-appointed judges/juries/executioners. They have NO right to single out bittorrent for traffic shaping.
On the other hand, they do have a right to make their networks perform as efficiently as possible for their customers, and for the good of the web in general. The problem is that there's a fine line between the two.
For those wondering how ISPs filter bittorrent traffic... it's called layer 7 (or application layer) traffic shaping. Various other names, too. But it's nothing (very) new -- it's old enough, in fact, to be installed *FOR* ISPs, by default, by some upstream providers.
In my humble opinion, the ISP's claim to provide you with a certain speed and bandwidth for downloads and a certain speed and bandwidth for uploads. If you're paying for bandwidth (which you are) you deserve to have that bandwidth available.
We've been footing the bill since the dawn of the Internet and for them to limit our bandwidth as if their job involves somehow ensuring that _we as internet users_ don't break the law - is totally ludicrous.
There should be a law in effect that says NO ISP can sell bandwidth past a very specific ratio of what THEY THEMSELVES pay for and have available. Right now there are actually dial-up providers out there that offer ultra, ultra cheap internet access but you can't get it because their phone lines are always busy and ONCE YOU DO get on, they've split a relatively high-speed connection across so many damned people you can't even get a full 56k download - and we all know that's totally ridiculous.
If ISP's had to ENSURE bandwidth past their own networks was sufficient for what they were selling off - these questions would *never* be raised.
speaking of never being raised.
Ace
If bandwidth is scarce, how should an ISP allocate it?
1. For pay -- the more the customer pays, the faster the service
2. For cost -- the more costly the customer, the slower the service
3. For QOS -- the more time-critical the service/customer, the faster the service
4. "Fairness" -- equal bandwidth to everyone (throttle the hogs)
I suspect that Torrents lose with all four strategies.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
they should stop giving the Execs bonuses larger than many people's salaries and buy some of that dark fiber so they can handle the traffic?
"Da ist ein Technölüst in mein Unterpanten!"
I was under the impression that torrent throttling was a dead issue, now that torrent encryption is in mainstream use. It certainly is a dead issue for me, where Rogers Cable's (big canadian ISP) throttling no longer affects me in any way.
How to handle Bittorent traffic:
1) Charge by the (giga)byte of any data traffic (ignore protocol)
2) Scale networks to meet demand
3) Duh!
4) Prof.. (do I really have to fill this one in?)
I commonly do work for some local isp's to throttle and even block bit torrent clients on their networks. Just a couple of bit torrent clients on the network can just about saturate the connections. The ISP take on it is rather simple, first of all serving content either via web server or p2p client is against usage policies. We attempt to block a user first and give him a call and tell him why, the second violation of the usage policy is suspension. The ASP does not care if they loose that user because the cases are few and far in between. Profit margins on the connections are razor thin anyhow loosing one of these users means increased profits not lost profits.
Got Code?
Oh come on, people.. first we allow Ma Bell to recombine like the T-1000 and now we stand idly by as she starts a neural network? Will nobody think of the children? On the playground? With the.. big.. mushroom thingy?
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
This technique is known as packet-sniffing or packet-shaping.
My university uses one to block all filesharing apps. It's done because there are about 15k people living in halls and these things eat up all the bandwidth. In fact, a number of people have recently been disconnected for using p2p software when they shouldn't be (it's against T&C, besides we're on an academic network).
Don't you just hate it when people reply to your signature?
Net Neutrality is not about the type of traffic, its about the source of the traffic. They can still refuse to let you run servers on your residential line (peer to peer makes your machine a server). And they can disrupt your attempts to violate the contract by throttling BitTorrent if they so desire.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
Ninjas use italics.
There are illegal uses of all protocols (HTTP, FTP, Telnet, SSH, whatever), but you don't see ISP's slamming the gates down on them. The technology itself is not good nor evil, but its use makes it so. I see my ISP as a means to provide me with bandwidth and data; what I do with it is none of their business.
I don't make predictions, and I never will.
Shouldn't it be AT&T's business and mine, what kind of service I buy from them if any? If they say they (or refuse to say) how they will throttle my torrents up or down, I will then decide if I buy the service. No politicians, lawyers, freaky cyberrights nerds need to bother.
You want politically controlled net services, you hate "big companies" and "cartel power"? Go to China, there the politician decide what the net looks like and how it works. And if China would pull the impossible and implement democracy and still keep the socialist, politically governed system, I doubt it would make much difference to what it is today. Market freedom is even more important than democracy. I'd rather have the first (like Singapore) than the second only (impossible actually), if I can't have both.
Anssi Porttikivi / app@iki.fi
If bandwidth is scarce, how should an ISP allocate it?
/.) with this argument anymore. ISPs need to get off thier collective arses and up the bandwidth.
That's a nice straw man you setup there. How about about ISPs quit overbooking bandwidth? Also, prove that there is a speed difference due to torrents.
1. For pay -- the more the customer pays, the faster the service
This is already in effect. See AT&T's DSL packages or RoadRunner's packages.
2. For cost -- the more costly the customer, the slower the service
So I shouldn't stream video and a slide show to people without paying again for it?
3. For QOS -- the more time-critical the service/customer, the faster the service
Then all I have to do is mark everything high priority. Else, who decides what is important to me?
4. "Fairness" -- equal bandwidth to everyone (throttle the hogs)
First, find the offenders, the harder you look, the better they will hide. Once you find them, find the offensive things in the bandwidth. The harder you look the better they will hide the activity. Besides they already do this (see response to number 1 above)
I suspect that Torrents lose with all four strategies.
Number 1 can be perfectly valid for torrents as it's already working now.
Number 2 can also be perfectly valid and work as it's only another way to put number 1.
Number 3 will never work and any of the Pro-NetNeutrality arguments can refute it.
Number 4 some ISPs are already doing this and they will lose as it's an intellectual arms race.
Define "lose". Making people pay more? OK you win, you're right, making people pay more will work. However, the gold stars were given out already to companies that tier their service and are getting millions from people like me who is paying $79.99/mo for the "Elite - Static" AT&T DSL package. When if I goto S. Korea I could have had fiber right to my apartment. Mind you when that wired article was printed too, back in 2002.
Please don't come to me (or
That's why I usually tell my torrent client to only go at a certain speed, like 100 or 150kbps.
Sure its not as fast as it could go, but then, say when I'm showing my friends youtube videos,
there won't be as long of a loading time either.
Instead of overselling their bandwidth. They wouldn't have a problem otherwise. I have little sympathy for AT&T when they put themselves in this predicament with taxpayer funded networks, yet over bill said networks and then complain when they become saturated. Pathetic.
Here in Spain, i'm sure that if our ISPs did this, everyone would sign off their DSL connections. Why on earth would anyone want a broadband connection if they cannot download music and films from the p2p networks? I'm glad here in Spain 'piracy' is absolutelly legal whilst it's non-profit (ie. when you download a film and then sell it).
Network neutrality means you can't write a filter like this:
throttle protocol X
or this:
throttle protocol X unless connecting to partner Y
As long as you disclose it, it does not mean you can't write a rule like this:
throttle customer's connections if they use more than X bandwidth in Y time
So you can still throttle bittorrent as long as you discriminate based on bandwidth use and not based on the protocol or the host that the user is trying to connect to. The idea is that you don't want to kill innovative technology companies in the crib by blocking/throttling a particular service delivered over the internet. It's analogous to the free flow of cash in a capitalist society, except that it applies to bits. Network neutrality does not mean that the ISP has to provide the same level of service to all their customers. It is just a reinstatement of the principle of best-effort delivery that made the internet such a blockbuster success when compared to all the competing non-best-effort-delivery networks that died off in the 1990's.
The best analogy would probably be a Starbucks store which sold Bolivian and Java coffee, but whenever you ordered a Bolivian coffee they spit in the cup because the Java roaster had paid them to do that. Network neutrality just says that if they feel like spitting in the cups they must spit in both Bolivian and Java cups or must spit in your cup based on some other criteria such as the color of your clothing, the brand of deoderant you use, how often you buy coffee there, etc.
While I agree with you that upgrading the infrastructure is the obvious solution, it certainly is a whole lot more expensive than simply throttling traffic. And what incentive does anyone have to upgrade infrastructure, when you can just say that users get X mbps even if that's only true for a tiny fraction of the traffic during off-peak hours?
- Murphy's Corollary: - It is impossible to make things foolproof because fools are so ingenious.
This is probably true, but I'm not sure that most ISPs even bother to do it. They just wait until you run over some predefined traffic limit -- for Comcast, I've heard 90GB tossed around as a figure -- send you an emailed warning, and then cut you off if you continue to push too many packets.
I've heard of people who've gotten bandwidth warnings as a result of very heavy VOIP and video use, not even Bittorrent.
I'm not really sure that the ISPs care that much about what protocol is generating the traffic, they just care that you're using more than your "unadvertised allotment," which is ironic given that they advertise it as unlimited service.
Sure, they could use packet shapers, but it's easier just to look at raw traffic in a given period, and go after anyone who gets more than a few standard deviations away from the mean.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
But surly i pay my isp for an ip address and an ip transit. If they are looking at the tcp / udp layers on the protocol they are doing an intercept on my private data. It doesnt matter if they see it or not because they are making a traffic shaping decision on it there kit is reading it for them.
This surly is the same as a telecom looking at what numbers you dial how often then offering you a better service to dial long distance or local calls to make you stay with them.
All in all what i see is a different thing. I started on a 512kbit dsl line in the uk i have been paying the same for it for 5+ years. I am seeing the same speeds but now the line is 6mbit. So really whats changed ? Well when their network isnt overloaded i get really fast downloads of stuff.
Shaped != Throttled
It's a *good* thing to shape the traffic so that it doesn't interfere with higher priority activities (I personally have HTTP, telnet, SSH & co. prioritized, with all else on low priority).
It's a *bad* thing to have BT throttled down to 5 kbps just because.
Yeah, I'll admit to downloading fansubs via BT, but there are lots of legitimate uses out there and it REALLY helps you get popular files. I see plenty of things people couldn't have distributed without BT because they'd have to supply enormous bandwidth to match the demand. Honestly, more people should be using it--any time you have lots of people who want large files, you should be thinking about providing a torrent.
> Will ISPs still be able to throttle BitTorrent traffic now
> that a significant proportion of it is legit?
Yes!
After all, from an ISP's perspective nothing has changed - they still do not have sufficiently large pipes and still have excessive contention ratios for the new Broadband era.
What other application out there, when it's active, both initiates and receives anywhere from dozens to potentially hundreds of connections from IP addresses (that don't point to popular servers) all around the world?
I thought BitTorrent was supposed to reduce total bandwidth usage from single ISPs, networks, and servers... not increase it. What would happen if BitTorrent suddenly was unavailable at all? Which ISPs and networks would crack under the added strain?
Please correct me if I am wrong. I don't understand the fine details. How does BitTorrent help service providers SAVE money? Or does it?
Didn't think of updating the cable modem. I'll check into it. Thanks! Your explanation or idea makes more sense than the tech support's.
Limited bandwidth should not be sold as "unlimited". Amen to that. My Dad has satellite, and they have a web page where you can check your upload and download for the month. I have Cox cable, and even though the AUP specifies monthly bandwidth limits, there is no way to check. You don't even get a usage statement on your bill. I can guestimate using iptables, but who knows what traffic the cable modem actually sees. Even worse, there is no specific penalty for exceeding the limit (paying a premium would be a reasonable penalty). Just vague threats. I guess the idea is to scare you into using far less than the stated limits. I've complained about this over and over. The last time, I got a tech person I had already complained to, and they were irritated. Too bad broadband is a monopoly in my area. (Satellite is not an option with its high latency.)
what they will do is either keep it throttled or throttle it more. Reason would be, the number of people who use it now is much less than what it looks like the future may hold. If it is throttled now, new people wont be the wiser, and all those people never take us early-adopter-techie-pure-hearts seriously anyways
insight through the mind
Competition may happen. We may not "pay" more -- users in other countries have more than an order of magnitude faster speeds than I have, yet I'm being charged probably 2-3 times as much as what some of them pay.
:-(
The Capitalistic system is charging the highest price that you can for each level -- don't provide faster or cheaper service unless your competition demands it. It's not that they _couldn't_ provide faster speeds at cheaper costs -- it's just not AS profitable. It's more important to extract the maximum profit from each incremental improvement than it is to provide a significantly better improvement.
If you have a "CPU" that runs at "1GHz", then say you have the option to provide a new CPU at 2GHz, do you offer it -- even at a 2x price? Of course not. You sell the same part labeled as a 1.2GHz, 1.4, 1.6, 1.8, and a 2.0. The idea is you entice as many customers as possible to buy the lower spec'ed parts at the highest price possible -- because they will eventually need an upgrade, and the lower-spec'ed part you sold them, the sooner they'll need an upgrade.
Same w/electronics. Often you'll see 4-5 models that are identical on the inside. They put a different box on the outside and program the lower models to have fewer features or don't provide the "buttons" to access the features. The sick part -- all the models cost the producer virtually the same. They *could* give all the customers the high-end system for the cheap price -- but they cripple the lower end systems to make the higher end systems appear more valuable (even though on the inside, they aren't).
The same goes for telecoms and such. Around 10 years back a major telecom provided local unlimited calling for a fixed price. They found out that even though they made money on the deal, it was too much less than the established players -- they could make more money by giving less service for the same price. Now, 10 years later, multiple companies provide such plans (for about 40-50% more than what they were first offered for 10 years ago). It's not that it wasn't technically feasible. It's not that it wasn't profitable -- it just wasn't the most efficient way to extract money from the masses. Better to provide tiny incremental steps so the eventual price for the 10 year old technology is 50% more (and 10 years late). So now, we _could_ have had phone service that would be from 10-15 years in the future, but our standard of living has been artificially held back to enable the profiteers to better extract value out of smaller, incremental, and less advanced changes.
This is yet another sign of the growing failure of a pure capitalistic system. It beat out a heavily communist system, but it is also flawed, in that what is good for society as a whole -- what benefits the whole society (not just makes them "richer", though they would be because of an increased standard of living), is not the best way to incrementally extract the most money from the masses.
That you believe that "WE" MUST PAY for these tiny improvements, only underscores the success of the corporate spin doctors.
FWIW, in regards to "Intellectual Property" laws -- why bother to create new things that are real when you can create non-tangible property that must be purchased again and again and has no implicit worth. The latest example of this: the creation and selling of "virtual" properties in an online "game". It's great! Production costs are near 0 for creating tons of "virtual" property. Selling people "nothing"...
Sad to see how much of the world's resources are wasted on tiny, incremental "improvements" rather than "real progress" to forward the society.
That's why unlimited packages (it's called flatrate over here) aren't sold as unlimited, but rather as "limited by a fair use policy". This most likely means that when the ISP feels that you're downloading too much, they can kick you off any time they like. I'm saying "most likely" because there's no real way of telling what a fair use policy really means.
I'm all for intelligent QoS, VoIP goes first, mail/html comes next, p2p comes last. Simplified for early morning perusal. But, I guess that anything that can get exploited for the good of the ISP instead of the customer, will.
of money.
Of course, it is a small fraction of the money I *have*, but I still wouldn't turn it down.
similarly, there are a significant number of Mac owners. A minority of the HUGE number of computer owners out there, but still a significant number. If you pissed them all off, you'd be in trouble.
I doubt it has to do with your ISP. In the past I used a Linksys BERSR11 and it crumbled when my P2P ate up thousands of connections. The situation continued when I switched to a WRT54G. It would be easy to blame the ISP for not being able to support the large number of connections, but after some reading up, I was glad to know that the fault in my case lies with the router.
Somehow, Linksys routers have a low limit of maximum number of connections. On the WRT54G, it is a mere 512, which means that your web experience would suffer when BitTorrent sucks up 500+ connections. Thankfully, I managed to change this limit from 512 to 4096 (through the DD-WRT firmware) and I am able to surf and use P2P at the same time. In addition, I enabled the service-level QoS feature in DD-WRT such that P2P traffic gets the lowest class while real-time traffic like SSH and RTP get above-normal class; this allowed me to download and upload the latest Linux distro torrent while at the same time, remotely administer Linux boxes through SSH.
w00t
I mean, did someone not solve the issue by making 3rd party changes to the bittorrent protocol and adding protocol encryption to bypass throttling?
If you don't believe that a government-regulated internet won't throttle bittorrent, you are fucking high. Government + regulatory power + money from lobbyists @ RIAA etal = NO bittorrent. I don't care how many people are seeding Azumanga Daioh, not a single one of their pimply weaboo asses is going to emerge from their parents basement to speak nihongo to power
Maybe if you could actually deliver what you charge for (or only charge for what you can deliver), people wouldn't get so easily pissed about "degraded" service.
My understanding is that a 3 Meg DSL would really cost about $70 a month to operate. I'm all for it, I don't think most of my friends and family are willing to trade off price for quality.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Or (just a notion here) -- they could cache Torrent traffic and speed up the traffic for their customers while reducing their external traffic load.
:)
It doesn't even have to be that complex - the BitTorrent protocol has a nice feature called 'choking' whereby it selects its peers, and the algorithm to choke can be variable. Implementations will typically use a round-robin selection, or maybe find the fastest peer. A slight modification to this could make it find the path to each peer and talk preferentially to the ones which are network-close. Perhaps slighty slower, but none of the traffic has to cross the ISP's Internet demark more than once (ideally) which is where it costs them big money.
If the Internet peers are closer than other local peers, all the ISP has to do is improve the interconnectivity of its network, and it gets faster and cheaper for everybody. Neat incentive, eh? I can see a world where ISP's prefer bittorrent transfers because they cost them less in terms of Internet transit.
Verizon/Comcast/et. al. would probably see an ROI of about two hours if they decided to set a programmer on this kind of task.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
3. For QOS -- the more time-critical the service/customer, the faster the service
I run my neighborhood's network and this is the only one that actually works. The trick for scaling up is that I'm a benevolent dictator - you're unlikely to find those inside BigCorp's NOC Management.
I keep coming back to 'the internet is a best-effort network', not because it's the 'best' solution on paper, but because it seems to be the one that actually works. For all the other solutions, somebody can figure out a way to muck it up.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)