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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?'"
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.
Waffles rock.
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.
:P
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
Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.
Aristotele
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. :-)
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
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 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.
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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.
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.
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