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

Which portion?

[3p1ph4ny]

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...

Re:Which portion?

[SCPRedMage]

Says who?

Says "Umaga's Purse", apparently.

But for the record, there were ALWAYS legit uses for BitTorrent. It's just that they're legitimate POPULAR uses now.

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:Which portion?

[mordors9]

Pr0n? And now even faster than ever... all is right with the world.

Re:Which portion?

[irc.goatse.cx troll]

Blizzards World of Warcraft updater uses bittorrent to quickly distribute the frequent and obese patches to millions of users. I disagree with that statement.

Blizzard undeniably uses bittorrent for the wow updater, yes, but me and all of my friends would argue the "quickly". It's dog slow and unreliable. No, its not a router issue or anything, we all torrent perfectly fine elsewhere (and if we were able to load the torrent in a good client like utorrent, maybe we wouldnt have a problem with this one). In the end a lot of people just close wow's uploader and wait until its up on fileplanet/filefront/etc.

I don't know whos fault it is, but I just had to throw that in there.

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:Which portion?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it's because it's an older version that doesn't have an upload limiter, so it saturates your uploads, which means the ACK packets for your downstream don't get through, which reduces the rate at which you can download as well.

Apply that throughout the whole torrent and the net effect is a slower rate of block distribution.

Blizzard have a constant HTTP seed providing blocks, so the torrent is never in an unseeded state, and at least one primary seed has a significant amount of bandwidth!

Incidentally, I think artificial throttling of protocols beyond the user's control to a given speed which is less than a reasonable "breathing room" overhead, or deprioritisation of a protocol to an extent that degrades performance, is an abuse of QoS techniques, and should probably be prohibited under net neutrality rules. QoS is meant to increase the overall performance of a user's connection, and of the network as a whole as a result.

Throttling should never be used as a method to increase contention or reduce costs - backend networks must continue to be expanded as traffic levels grow, or your whole branch of the internet will stagnate and be unable to keep up with growing demand.

The trouble with abusive QoS is that it invites the traffic classification rules to be evaded by protocol masquerading, scrambling and encryption techniques, so that the user can once again return to the reasonable level of performance they believe they are paying you for; and that means that other, beneficial QoS techniques can no longer be used on that protocol by you or anyone else.

In effect, abuse it and you lose it. Please don't abuse it.

QoS is a good technology when used appropriately to maximise the performance of a connection and network while minimising latency, but a bad technology when clamping everyone's torrent down to 5 bytes an hour because you "can't afford the bandwidth".

The Internet needs to continue to grow to maintain acceptable performance, and if you can't accommodate that at the rate you need to, your country will have a second-or-third-class backbone before you can even blink, and that's a competitive disadvantage for your whole country, and a national issue you need to deal with.

This may be a dumb question, but...

[VGPowerlord]

...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?

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

[Shakrai]

...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.

More to the point, I can set my BitTorrent client (Azureus) to encrypt all traffic. Currently I have it set to default to encryption and fallback to plaintext -- but it would be a simple matter to reject unencrypted connections.

Throttling traffic is stupid. Build your network to support the load or stop selling "unlimited" service. My cell phone provider doesn't get to decide who I can talk or what I can talk about. Why should my ISP?

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

[DaHat]

Back when Napster was the horror of school network admins everywhere it was not uncommon to block the common Napster port. In response students would change the port to a more common one... such as say... 80 and be able to keep on downloading... that is until the admins spent a few more bucks or upgraded their existing equipment.

Classifying network traffic based only on the port went out the window well over 5 years ago when modern packet shapers came to the market which were able to analyze the very contents of packets and classify them based on the type of service they contained rather than the port they used.

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

[drinkypoo]

That said, the point I wanted to make was that perhaps the problem lies in selling as "unlimited" a finite resource. In the end it shouldn't matter if I use 100GB of bittorrent or 100GB of VPN to my office. If they don't have the capacity to be selling it as unlimited then perhaps they shouldn't be selling it as unlimited.

Amen to that. In fact NO provider in the US will give you unlimited of anything but dialup and that only because it's too slow to be an issue and they don't even run the modem banks any more, they pay someone to send their users to the right places.

Comcast cable limits you to 90GB (through human intervention, not automatically.) Hughesnet satellite limits you to 350MB/4 hours. Et cetera.

Oh AND, your cellphone provider WILL terminate your service if you roam too often, which makes you unprofitable. So you're wrong about that anyway.

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

[Shakrai]

went out the window well over 5 years ago when modern packet shapers came to the market which were able to analyze the very contents of packets and classify them based on the type of service they contained rather than the port they used.

Hence why my bittorrent client supports encryption. My two cents says that it's none of my ISPs business what my packets contain. It may be their business how much bandwidth I use -- but it shouldn't matter if that bandwidth is VoIP, bittorrent, HTTP or a VPN. 100GB is 100GB regardless of what protocol generated the traffic.

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

[teh_chrizzle]

there are a number of ways, from deep packet inspection (studying packets and throttling those that appear BT-ish) to just cutting the uplink speed for a naughty subscriber. i think i my ISP may have done that to me already, judging by my ratios.

i do my own traffic shaping in my house with a linksys router running openwrt and x-wrt. i do all my BT stuff from a vmware machine dedicated to all things BT (a win2k workstation running uTorrent) and i told the QOS config to file all traffic to and from his internal IP as bulk. i also use QOS to give priority to all traffic to and from my VOIP telephone adapter.

in case you are not a linksys firmware freak... putting openwrt on your router is like upgrading your PC to openBSD. loading x-wrt on your openwrt router is like installing KDE on your openBSD machine.

the result is BT can leech and seed 24x7x365, the humans in the house can surf and game unimpeeded and phone calls suffer no jitter from MMORPGS or BT.

i feel sort of like a hypocrite for being a net neutrality fanboy and using QOS inside my firewall... but at least i can trust myself to not degrade my access in favor of my own proprietary offerings.

some may say i am a little too trusting, but i have known me for a long time... i think we can trust eachother.

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

[Dan Farina]

This may work in an ideal world, but the fact is that different applications do have different needs, and to make the Internet useful for more things it is necessary to have different levels of service -- and I don't mean company A paying B for higher priority -- I mean apps VoIP, which requires moderate bandwidth but also low latency, for example, should get a higher priority than your bittorrent packet, which can build in in a queue before being unloaded to you after some VoIP is done. Similarly, Bittorrent shouldn't be throttled per se, but just relegated further back in the queue because generally one doesn't care about latency in the system, "just" throughput.

A sensible approach to make you happy (maybe) would be to limit the amount of bandwidth at each QoS level defined. If you want to burn your 500mb/month of highest QoS on bittorrent then so be it. Make the lowest tier of QoS truly unlimited. or some scheme like that.

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? :)

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

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

Using QoS on bittorrent is akin to my phone company telling me what I can discuss on the phone. In the end it should only matter how much bandwidth you use.

This isn't so, in general. QoS restricts traffic by type. So throttling bittorrent and prioritizing Web traffic is more like making sure regular voice on phones has priority over text messages, where that speed is less critical. The basic idea of QoS as it was initially conceived was to insure VoIP and video conferences did not lag, at the expense of a Web page loading a little more slowly or a bittorrent downloading a bit more slowly yet. This can be misused, say by degrading service on the ports used for one type of VoIP, and not on another, when your competitor offers their service on the one you're degrading. In general, however, encrypting packets makes this less important.

What is a real concern and needs to be addressed by net neutrality legislation is assigning quality of service that is different for the same traffic type, but for a different origin. Assume everyone moves to strongly encrypted packets and network operators have no idea what is in a given packet. That still doesn't stop them from assigning higher priority to packets that originate from their own VoIP servers and low priority to packets transiting their network from an origin that hosts their competitor's VoIP service. Worse yet, it does not stop some network operator who has no relationship with anyone but peering networks from going to Google and telling them all packets originating from Google's IPs are going to be set to a a lower priority than packets coming from MSN and Yahoo, unless Google is willing to pay an extra fee, and then going and doing the same thing to MSN, then Yahoo. Net neutrality with regard to who, rather than what, is a lot more important, in my opinion, than this focus on traffic types. I fear it is being overlooked in the discussion of this topic in the news and what that bodes for the resultant litigation.

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.

Did I miss something?

[93 Escort Wagon]

"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?

Correct me if I'm wrong...

[kailoran]

...but I thought that net neutrality didn't make QoS illegal

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. :-)

Trade off

[just_another_sean]

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.

It's obvious

[JoeWalsh]

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.

Put in other words..

[wfberg]

"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?'"

The easy solution:

[Smidge204]

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=

Value added

[overshoot]

Or (just a notion here) -- they could cache Torrent traffic and speed up the traffic for their customers while reducing their external traffic load.

All without doing anything squinky: just identify which torrents are hot, add one of their own. It's what BitTorrent does, after all.

Here's an idea

[Jtheletter]

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]

Re:Here's an idea

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

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?

Why? Spam doesn't take up a significantly large portion of internet traffic and is a lot harder to separate out of the mix, than bittorrent. Even zombies performing DDoS attacks don't generally make up much of the overall internet traffic, although the spikes they create are problematic.

In reality, a number of large network operators don't want network neutrality. They want the opportunity to offer services and make sure competitors are unable to compete. They want to shake down companies individually by threatening to degrade their service and not their competitor's. They care about money; no hypocrisy there.

Re:Here's an idea

[QQ2]

Interestingly enough there is actually an ISP in the Nehterlands that does this. XS4all.nl let's you do nearly anything on your own personal connection, including the hosting of servers. However, if you start to zobie out spam or virusses you are immidiately cut off. (they do however provide you with a proxy you can use and and verry good help in finding and removing any virusses or worms causing these problems So I guesse that if more ISPs where like xs4all.nl the entire net would be better off.

Regards QQ2

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.

Re:Bandwidth Limiting

[Dunbal]

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.


      I agree. Either give me exactly what I paid for (even if you have to adjust the price upwards), or advertise the REAL bandwidth (ie average connection speed), not some made up maximum theoretical speed if you're the only one on at 4:45 am. Overselling the service = selling something you don't have. That's tantamount to fraud if you advertise something you have no intention of providing.