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?'"

Comments

Neither.

[ookabooka]

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. . .

Re:Neither.

[Anonymous Coward]

"While probably is true, I think this statement is a gross over generalization. Broadband is available in all major urban areas."

Fine. Take the broadband in dense urban areas and compare them to the densely populated cities around the world. The US is behind by multiples.

Oh, AND we pay more.

Oh, AND that so-called digital divide, is greatest in these same urban areas.

"The fact that rural areas lack broadband skews the statistics."

No, the problem in the US has nothing to do with statistics, but political crap and payoffs. Politicians are slow to change compared to the available technology. They sit on comittees, give lip service, kiss the ass of corporations, and stifle competition. Customers are left with limited or no option while telcos and cable companies grow fat, and those companies in turn pay off politicians again and again. Once entrenched, it is impossible to get them out; if you come up with a better way, they buy politicians to say that "jobs are at stake" and suddenly your new company is bankrupt because the telcos swept in and took away your customers you worked hard to get, because of the "venture capital" provided by tax breaks and relaxing of previous hard to come by right of way rules.

Back to your comment--you want to say rural areas skew the numbers. Fine. Then simply compare the same demographics, similar population densities then. The numbers are all there. Providers want to focus on expensive services. They want to run lines to high end neighborhoods. They were, for years while getting fat tax breaks and incentives, running good lines to serve all even in the same population dense areas.

"In terms of broadband coverage, it's going to be a lot easier to connect a dense country like Germany or France than it would be to cover the US."

Based on what? The whole point of a star network is the ease of running homeruns.

AND still doesn't explain why many urban areas, frankly, don't have good internet options. There is plain-faced evidence to back this; just look at Verizon's sudden competition and rush to enter urban areas in the last year or so.

"The amount of cable/fiber alone needed to connect all of the rural populations could probably completely wire a couple medium sized countries with dense populations."

True. But doesn't tell the entire tale. See, you conveniently never were told, or even forgot, that many of these telco companies WERE PAID to run lines to rural populations and simply DID NOT. For example, Verizon in Pennsylvania apparently had agreements with the state government and regulators it seems, that they would get high speed internet service areas, tax breaks, rights to lines, etc. and they were supposed to get something like 80% penetration into rural areas.

They didn't. I think they even redefined what broadband or high speed was too so they could deliver subpar service or to bolster their statistics and make like their broadband penetration was higher than it really was.

Know what the assembly losers did? They threatened and then ran cowering into the corner. Verizon pretty much blew them off. Those areas still are underserved or there is only one provider (like Comcast, so they have no competition or incentive to give better service, and Comcast has gone downhill significantly where I am). All Verizon had to do was suggest that jobs would be at stake, and they were exempted from their previous promises. In turn, they pocketed something like $4 billion in estimated incentives.

Recently, Pennsylvania had "hearings" held by legislature committee. There were clear objectives to be met and discussed. The end result? Little to no substantial changes. I listened to some parts of them, and it was amazing to listen to committee members pretty much sit there and pretend that rule changes might bring about drastic change they weren't prepared for (aka competition, paperwork, etc.--iow, the job they were there to do in the first place). It was amazing to watch a cable

Re:This may be a dumb question, but...

[matts-reign]

Software on their routers examines each packet going across the network, and if it looks like one from bittorrent, it'll be throttled accordingly. Encryption exists to beat this.

Re:Which portion?

[boaworm]

Blizzards World of Warcraft updater uses bittorrent to quickly distribute the frequent and obese patches to millions of users. That gives atleast 8 million legit users straight-up, even though this of course only counts for a fragment of the traffic itself.

But as always, it comes down to the bucks, if your ISP allows unthrottled bittorrent traffic, YOU will pay the costs in the end, by higher fees. Or possibly, your ISP goes out of business :P

Re:Correct me if I'm wrong...

[dgatwood]

You are correct. Whoever asked this question clearly does not understand what network neutrality is about. To put it in terms that the person asking the question can understand: It is not about preventing degradation of BT, but rather about ensuring that BT can connect to all trackers with equally degraded quality. :-)

Backwards

[CarpetShark]

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.

Re:This may be a dumb question, but...

[whois]

I used to have that opinion and in some ways I still do. As a user, I claim I want a fixed rate for passing data traffic, any data traffic I want. What I really want is a CIR (committed information rate) or Minimum rate I can pass data. If I truly had that and it was say 6Mb then I might be happy for a while.

The problem is that none of us are paying what it costs the ISPs to deliver 6Mb download. We're still paying the same prices or less for what we were paying for ISDN 10 years ago, or DSL 3 years ago. Now companies are upgrading their pipes over and over, mainly the "last mile" so they can provide as much bandwidth as possible to the users.

The problem is all this has to go through upstream "choke points" where 5000 people on 100Mbit connections to the internet all go through one or two Gigabit links (at least in our ISP, this is the case).

You can say "upgrade" if you want, but you're not paying enough. So we look at other ways to make it work. We're not rate limiting usually, just "smoothing" the traffic. If one person is using 45Mbit for a while and nothing else is going on then fine.. but rarely is that the case. Usually if it's during peak hours we want to throttle back the 45Mbit torrenter and open up the bursty traffic. The torrent guy doesn't really notice (he's probably not even sitting at his computer, and it just takes a little longer to get the file) and it keeps the web browser people and the mail sending people from complaining.

Having been on both sides of the fence several times I can say this:

If you want real bandwidth, pay for it. Sprint doesn't throttle anyone and almost never lets their pipes get oversubscribed (at least not at the edge). They're massively expensive though.

Don't want to pay for the cake but still want cake? Open an ISP that provides "true 10Mbit up and down to users, no gimmicks no rate limits no oversubscription" and market the hell out of it. Most people would say the business model would fail, but as a customer you know what you want, maybe you can make it work? :)

I do work occasionally for some local isp's

[codepunk]

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 it wrong

[Spazmania]

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.

Re:Got it wrong

[zimm0who0net]

"An ISP may not block, impair, degrade, discriminate against or interfere with the ability of any person to utilize their broadband service to access, use, send, receive, or offer lawful content, applications, or services over broadband networks, including the Internet."
Therefore, if you degrade my service (which is 100% bittorrent) and don't degrade your service (with is 100% VOIP) then you're in violation of Net Neutrality.
Read the bill (the quote is from it). The notion of "every packet must be considered equal, regardless of source, destination or content" has generally been inferred from the phrase in the Net Neutrality bill.

Re:Which portion?

[Joe The Dragon]

Linux downloads make up a big number of users as well.

Re:Which portion?

[Ruff_ilb]

It's probably due to the fact that (at least as it seems to me) very few WoW users seed their torrents; they view it as a traditional patcher, and they download the material and then don't leave the thing running. Any torrent without any seeds is sure to move slower than a "healthy" torrent with a high seed:leecher ratio.

Re:This may be a dumb question, but...

[billcopc]

The problem with QoS is that it can be faked, trivially. Unless there's actual packet sniffing being done to identify traffic, which is rarely done (costly), you can simply hide your traffic on a "privileged" port. A certain nameless cable ISP throttles p2p traffic down to near-nothing, but users in-the-know just set their clients to use the VoIP ports, which are unrestricted. The result is a beautiful screw up where the lowest priority data eats up the highest priority band. I don't know if the cable phone users encounter any issues as a result of this workaround, but that's just what the cable company deserves for their antics. Had they let p2p traffic flow normally, managed through proper traffic shaping and prioritizing, there would be little incentive to piggyback on the VoIP ports and everyone would be happy. Well, everyone that matters anyway.

Re:Which portion?

[Eskarel]

The other problem is that it runs on the default bittorrent ports, which are very likely to be shaped.

And of course the background downloader is actually throttled by blizzard so that it doesn't eat up your connection, even if you have a dial-up modem(I suppose it should be smarter than this, but blizz didn't really want complaints). The actual downloads on the day(at least up until the last few weeks) have always been quite snappy.

Re:This may be a dumb question, but...

[Arker]

That's very well thought out, well written, but still wrong.

They're charging more than enough to provide the service they promise. That's not the problem.

In Sweden I could get that 10Mb/s symmetrical connection you mention - for less than I'm paying in the US for the cheapest available ADSL connection. That's a market with far more regulatory overhead, and LESS effective subsidy as well. Here in the US we've already PAID the telecom companies, in the form of public subsidies, for end to end fiber optic across the country. The telecoms took the money and laid some dark fibre but never opened it up. They're creating artificial scarcity to keep their profit margins up.