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ISPs Hate P2P Video On-Demand Services
Scrumptious writes "CNET is running an article that highlights the problems associated with video on-demand services that rely on P2P technology to distribute content. The article points out that ISPs who throttle traffic on current generation broadband, and negate network neutrality by using packet shaping technology, are hindering any possible adoption of the services offered nervously by content companies. Many broadband consumers are unaware of how hindered a service they may receive because of the horrendous constraints enforced by telephone network operators. This was a topic widely covered in 2006 in the US, but is now practiced as a common method within the United Kingdom."
You're telling me a set of companies with aging infrastructures who engage in deceptive business practices and loathe nothing more than giving their customers what they pay for hate having their infrastructures taxed by customers trying to get what they're paying for?
Inconceivable!
Face it ISPs have oversold their bandwidth. Basing their capacity on bursty web page loads by subscribers. Real use of bandwidth is not in the ISP's business model.
You can't really blame the ISP's as providing full bandwidth to all would be overly costly and ridiculous given the original traffic patterns but they are going to have to adapt to the new data patterns of their subscribers or lose to those who will provide it.
Of course, it depends on your definition, but the best definition for "network neutrality", for which we should all push, is simple:
ISP's will not discriminate against packets based on their origin.
ISPs need to do traffic shaping to remain competitive. Let's not try and take away any truly valuable tools from them in our fight to keep the Internet free.
Beer is proof that God loves us, and wants us to be happy.
No P2P provider has ponied up the "protection" money to ensure that their traffic gets the full bandwidth. I wonder how long it will be before one does to get the edge over competitors?
Or maybe this emerging set of content providers will band together fight the ISPs because they constitute a threat?
Then again, maybe a big media conglomerate will merge with AT&T to screw us all...
Insisting on "correct" English is like saying that there is only one, definitive recipe for chili.
I'm not at all surprised by this. The majority of ISPs would love to sell $50 a month internet service to everyone and tell them it's a 5 MBit connection with a 100 GB traffic cap and have them only use it for eMail and browsing sites that contain mostly text. However, I think that things are going to have to change in the future. With all the high bandwidth content being offered online, they are going to have to accept that some people are going to be using a lot of traffic. And they should start charging what they think is fair and stop complaining that people are using their allotted bandwidth.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Im sorry but when will ISP's realise that the vast majority of people only shell out for uber > 10mbit connections so they can download / upload torrents faster?!
Granny smith who checks her email and reads news and weather reports will see be no better off with a 20mbit connection compared to a 1mbit connection
The ISPs have largely brought this problem on themselves. If only they actually provided the service that they claim to provide then this wouldn't be an issue. Instead of upgrading networks to fiber (for which telcos have received *many* billions-with-a-B of US taxpayer funds to do, and largely haven't) and other infrastructure improvements they have dragged their feet, taken profit when they should have rolled money back into upgrades, and basically lied the whole time about what the service is really capable of. The fact that in the background the infrastructure can't actually handle every subscriber using the pipes to the amount advertised is not the fault of consumers expecting too much, it's wholesale bait and switch!
Look, if you sell someone a car and tell them it gets 1000 mpg, but in reality this is only achievable when the car is pushed, don't be surprised when they call you out for fraud when it doesn't perform as advertised.
In my opinion these state-sanction monopolies need to be checked hard, and held accountable for every single dollar given them for fiber upgrades that have never materialized despite huge budget and schedule overruns.
-- I'm not a pessimist, I'm a realist. It's not my fault that life sucks so much. --
why not just make a few deals with some isp's like the bbc did http://support.bbc.co.uk/multicast/ the video quality was pretty high and it didnt stop and start like other live streaming p2p services i have tried.
Enter the "new" industry of VPN service for the everyman specifically designed and marketed to thwart ISP packetshaping and allow ungimped p2p access. I'm using it now and it works great although you have to wonder how long until ISPs start trying to block or throttle traffic destined for the more popular public VPN service sites.
- Toby
'The tyrant will always find pretext for his tyranny.' - Aesop's Fables
It should be noted that TFA is talking about British ISPs. The summary did not make it clear, and I think it's a very important distinction, especially because the site FAQ states this is generally an American site and everything is usually assumed American unless otherwise specified.
Slow Down, Cowboy! It's been 60 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment.
But no evidence is offered to justify this statement. How do they know that ISPs are doing it to limit illegal sharing? Is it not far more likely that they're doing it to save on bandwidth. In which case, no-one's being treated as a criminal, they're being treated as bandwidth-hogs. An issue worth discussion, but an important distinction, I think.
Network need for consumers vary widely. Some happily browse news sites and that serve just text. Some are bit torrent users. High time ISPs charge consumers by MBytes of data transmitted. They can offer cheapo services for people with low bandwidth needs, may be even as a loss. Those who download bit-torrents and movies will pay for the bandwidth they actually consume. Once the revenue of ISPs depend on actual data transmitted, they too will encourage and help people who transmit/recieve lots of data. It will be a good thing once the ISPs wake up and smell the coffee I mentioned earlier ;-)
Even in India they are able to meter the data transmitted and charge by the Megabytes. So it should not be too difficult for the ISPs to do it. But some things India does are very hard to believe. The mobile phone rates are something like 2 cents per minute with free incoming calls. And the mobile phone companies have a 40% margin! My brother-in-law executes on line trades with a commission of some 15 Rupees, or 35 cents US. How can they do that and stil be profitable?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
ISPs hate video on demand because it fills the pipes we bought, so they finally have to deliver the bandwidth guarantees they sold us.
They've been collecting extra money for years by selling us bandwidth we haven't used. They should use that as investment in more capacity to cover their obligations.
This is just another whining ploy by ISPs to force Network Doublecharge, claiming "Qos" is necessary because increased capacity won't work.
Just like in the 1990s the telcos tried to charge everyone extra for "data lines" and "data modems" because they were finally forced to deliver the local loop signal they sold, and were legally required to deliver for decades, but had cheaped out to make extra profit. And just like they whined that they couldn't deliver lots of DSL, or any other whining to protect their cartels from investing their perpetually record profits into delivering the product they're selling.
They're lying again, even the little ones who just want to be in the club with Verizon and AT&T. They should get kicked in the ass again, just like before. Every time that boot flies at them we finally get some innovation and improvement, even though they don't get their guaranteed exorbidant profits.
--
make install -not war
This $hit pisses me off. I went YEARS with no break in services (ok, except during very heavy rains when ALL of cable went out). So one day I decide to try out Limewire. Things are good for a few months. THEN! I start dropping connection all the time. I call their tech support and they SWEAR they don't traffic shape. "Your cable modem is 5 years old, it's time to buy another one", is what I'm told. Bull$hit. I couldn't go 2 DAYS without a dropout when I had Limewire and/or XBOX360 (playing on-line).
I have since moved my gear and computer, and now, 3 months later, I am back to before where it never drops. The difference? No P2P. There's simply no other way to explain it.
The only way I think I could prove it is if I could packet sniff on the outbound side of the cable modem. The activity light never stops, but I lose connection. Rebooting instantly gets connectivity back to the defauly gateway...the only educated guess I can provide is that they drop your IP off the leased list, and reconnecting renews your IP.
Someday, somewhere, there's going to be a lawsuit demanding that they deliver on what they've promised. At that point in time, we may finally find out what we're actually paying for. All things considered, I hope they sue Comcast first over this.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
sue, on grounds of constitution, freedom of speech and equality. this issue spans that areas.
Read radical news here
I'd just use a service like FindNot or Relakks, and the local ISP can sniff all they want... all they see are PPTP packets.
This is just reality biting ISPs on the ass.
For years, they've been touting high speed connections, trying to upsell Joe Average to 3, 4, 5, 6 mbit service. They know full well that the vast majority of Joe Average's internet usage is viewing web sites, sending emails, and streaming porn ten minutes at a time. In other words, they're selling him 6 mbit service for images and text down, text and clicks up. They know Joe Average is only actually using his pipe for a few hours a day, when he's not at work and not asleep.
Of course, they've succeeded in getting a lot of people to pay more money for more bandwidth that they don't actually use almost ever. Which, in a surprise to no one except the ISPs, means that new services are cropping up that actually use the bandwidth people have been sold.
So now they don't like it. Whoops.
It is to be hoped that enough people - enough Joes Average - want to use the new services like VOIP and "legitimate" P2P that the ISPs will actually face market consequences for overselling bandwidth, throttling upstream speeds, and shaping traffic to favor the stuff that's ISP-approved.
A few geeks bitching about asynchronous connections and random throughput caps just doesn't make a dent in Charter's bottom line. A bunch of people being told that despite CBS' promises, they can't download Survivor 2718: Mariana Trench because their ISP won't let them may actually bring some pressure.
Overselling is a great profit method right up until people start trying to use what they've bought. Ponzi schemes are always terrific moneymakers until your suckers^W customers try to cash out.
Reality has a conservative bias: it conserves mass, energy, momentum...
It is pathetic the way companies are trying to solve this problem when you see that there is a simple solution using plain old classical economic theories. You pay for what you want and you pay only as much as the value you would get from the transaction and you get what you paid for. The solution is to move away from the much-hyped unlimited bandwidth plans to the the plain reality behind the unlimited bandwidth plans. There is no unlimited plan - you just pay for the bandwidth you use. ISPs should charge based on the bandwidth that is used by the consumer - the content provider as well as the content consumer. They should probably charge in slabs. Customers who want more bandwidth pays for the extra bandwidth. As far as the ISP is concerned the service the ISP is providing is the transportation of contents. The ISP should try to increase revenue by increasing traffic or increase QOS and charging higher for higher QOS. What they are currently trying to do is like UPS and Fedex opening each box they are shipping to see the content before fixing the rate for the tranfer. Pathetic... Indeed...
"Be the change you wish to see in the world" - M. K. Gandhi
The reason they're all pissy is because all this new-fangled P2P technology is forcing them to add more tubes to get their trucks through.
"You promised me that I could take my produce to market on it from my farm. Sure, I had 30 acres back then but now I have 3,000 but you didn't specify reasonable limits because you thought I was going to be reasonable."
Now, instead of your spurious attempt, let's try an analogy that actually bears some resemblance to what we're seeing here.
They promised and you paid for a bandwidth of 3,000,000 chickens per month along their toll road, and when you had thirty acres and were only shipping 30,000 chickens per month that was no problem. Now you have 3,000 acres and actually try to ship the full 3,000,000 chickens per month you were paying for, you find the road is too congested to ship them. Why do you think that's an acceptable situation?
If they weren't going to deliver the bandwidth, they should never have promised it in the first place.
Why is your definition of network neutrality the One that we should all support? I think ISPs should not discriminate based on protocols or content. ISPs can control bandwidth and remain neutral by using rate capping, token buckets, or fair queueing.
If you wish to give them the benefit of the doubt, there's lots of things that could be going wrong without them shaping traffic.
At my company we have have a single aDSL connection that we share through a NAT Linux router. When I started using eMule, everything was OK... until a coworker started using eMule as well, which made the internet connection practically dead for everyone in the office until we shut down the mules. We tried lots of tinkering with the connection settings (lowering the max number of connections, connections per minute, etc.) and eventually found out that many people shared more or less the same problem, but we could never solve it.
The combination of bit torrent + eMule also showed the same symptoms through the same router... but when tried through the same provider with a different setup (direct connection to a Windows 2000 workstation) it ran perfectly. I never found the reason to this problem, but evidence points more towards the NAT router and P2P connection handling than to the ISP.
I also had some problems when connecting to certain sites and certain POP3 servers (timeouts) which I eventually traced to the MTU size configuration, after the most painstaking diagnose you can imagine... modem connected to windows worked fine, windows through NAT Linux router didn't... this is a sort-of common problem with PPPoE connections and bad routers or heavy firewalling, which looks like your internet connection is acting up, but is probably your own fault or that of the server you're contacting.
Morale: There's lots of things that can go wrong with TCP connections, and it's usually very hard to diagnose since you hardly get a look at the full picture. ISPs are not always as incompetent or evil as we assume.
As a Slashdot discussion grows longer, the probability of an analogy involving cars approaches one.
(This is a repost of something I posted a while back that I think is relevant for this discussion)
I once got into an argument with a former ISP admin.
It went along the lines of this:
Him: You can't just download massive amounts of data from bittorrent etc.
Me: Why not? All the ISP's talk about "unlimited" broadband, by that very definition they aren't limiting it.
Him: But they have to pay for that bandwidth.
Me: Yeah? And I pay for them to provide me a service that is unlimited as advertised, if they're complaining now about how people are using more bandwidth than they expected then that's too bad. They advertised it as unlimited (something a LOT of UK ISP's do), and now they're complaining? They've only got themselves to blame.
Long story short, all these ISPs who are whinging only have themselves to blame. They hark on about "SUPER FAST BROADBAND1!!1!! WITH NO LIMITS!!!11!!" and then they discover that people actually use it?
Idiots.
I'm a subscriber to Rogers top-tier residential Internet service, and I recently tried to download "Elephant's Dream" (the open-source 3D blender project) via BitTorrent, only to discover that the arms race between the ISP and Azureus has been won by Rogers.
All encrypted traffic is now throttled just because it's encrypted. All non-encrypted traffic is throttled if it smells like P2P of any kind.
If this hasn't happened in your neighbourhood yet -- just wait: it's coming, zone by zone.
Thank goodness for Usenet.
These stories are free but worth money.
Now I hate phone companies as much as the next person, but working for a small WISP -- and we currently are not doing this -- I can say phone companies are not the only ones that do this. A lot of WISPs use bandwidth management software, throttle P2P, and have high "burst rates" that get throttled back on big downloads (and that's fixed wireless, like Canopy, I'm talking about, not your local hotspot).
Yeah, WISPs are still a small percentage of online users, and often the last resort for people too far out for other services, but this is something to consider if you do go with a WISP.
Transporter_ii
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
Can't you do that without rebooting?
/release (renew) on Windows
ipconfig "interface"
Linux has something similar I'm sure, but I don't know the command.
There is a war going on for your mind.
I know my ISP will refund you a percentage of your monthly if your connection is spotty. If you had a ping logger or something trained on Google for a few weeks, you might be able to send them the log and get some of that money back. If you keep that up and complain alot, usually things get fixed. At least my ISP has always done right.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
This stuff should be using plain old http or ftp, with a cache (e.g. Squid) at the ISP. Every one of these multi-gigabyte files should be transferred over their expensive upstream pipe once, and stored on a RAID of the cheapest $YOUR_LEAST_FAVORITE_BRAND hard disks they can get.
"Content companies", stick to the basics. And if you are sending the wrong headers, then you part of the problem. If you do it right, the ISPs will see what's in their best interest and start using the correct tools to handle it, and then your distribution model will work, even work well.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
It will not be long now before these types of services begin to engage in intentional obfuscation or encryption combined with use of common ports such as 80 and 443 to sidestep measures such as packet shaping and bandwidth throttling. In fact many p2p clients include support for this today. Would it be so difficult for those broadband companies to just be honest about what you are actually buying when you pay for service and then deliver what people have paid for? Instead they engage in marketing bunk about "unlimited" data services and when the technical reality doesn't jive with the marketing line they (the telcos) engage in underhanded tactics in an attempt to preserve the illusion for the rest of their customers. The ISPs should not be surprised when the networks resort to obfuscation and encryption to counter the packet shaping and throttling. The ISPs were the first ones to hit below the belt in this fight so they should not be surprised when their opponents respond with an elbow to the throat.
IPCONFIG /RENEW only renews between the computer and the DHCP-Server enabled router. This part of my network is rock-solid. It's the DHCP for the ISP that gets renewed between the Cable Modem and the ISP's DHCP that needs renewing. A long time ago, I knew how to hack into my cable modem, but to be honest, I've forgotten how and the 2 or 3 hours I've spend trying to "re-find" the information has been fruitless.
Sounds to me like you're running a dodgy DNS server on your router; it fills up the memory with DNS cache (which you have a lot of when you P2P) and crashes.
sounds like Cox gave you the shaft :(
1) Your analysis is based on bad assumptions so your result is way off. 2) You're a sick bastard for fucking a horse.
If they like my monthly payment to access as many tubes as I can, it shouldn't matter.
Most users don't need the kind of service which slashdot users expect. If users are prepared to pay more, there are options for them - AAISP is one example. However the vast majority don't want to pay more than around £15-£25 ($30-$50) per month which (given the margins involved - BT take £8 per line and then wholesale bandwidth at what works out at around £.90 per GB IIRC) simply doesn't allow the ISPs to provide a decent amount of bandwidth.
When it comes down to it, they'd rather have 150,000 customers paying £15 and using 500MB per month than 10,000 customers paying £30 and complaining that they get shaped at 30GB.
Your P2P issue behind a linux NAT router sounds like you had a really small state table (might also be called "session limit") set on the linux NAT router. After you max out the state table no new connections can be made.
Thanks for the reply. I really am looking for alternative explanations, but it's hard to believe anything else when the only common denominator is P2P (during bad service).
You mentioned that you found it to be your router. Did rebooting the NAT-enabled router have any effect? If it were some sort of configuration or MTU problem with the router, I'm not sure, but I'd think rebooting the router might do something. In my case, it did nothing. All I had to do was reboot the cable modem. My Belkin wi-fi router has a default HTML page with "WAN Connection Status" up top, and a somewhat good logging function. When I reboot the cable modem, I see no difference in connectivity log between the PC and router. The Cable modem renegotiates and the Router's status returns to a green, "Connected" state for the WAN connection status. There are no other computers that were introduced/removed at the time.
For what it's worth, my internal network still worked fine, even when the cable modem took a dive. I was running an FTP server on my PC in the garage and could still get to it from the den's PC. The XBOX360 could still stream MP3s from the den's PC, and they both could get to the network printer. The only thing that would go down would be the WAN interface. Rebooting the router did nothing (sorry for repeating). I guess I could do one more step of troubleshooting by inserting one of my Sun workstations in between the router and cable modem, and adding a second network card to the Sun. Solaris is configured out of the box to configuire itself as a switch if it detects two NICs. I could set up a packet trace and then compare pre-failure traffic with post-traffic failure. Or, simply route directly from the cable modem to the PC with Limewore. However, choice A is more work than I'd care to do right now and I'm not fond of connecting a computer directly to broadband....I'd rather have gimpy service than increase my risk that much :D There was a post on Slashdot about 6 months ago about how the average computer hooked directly to broadband is 0wn3d in an average of 6-10 minutes. Even fully patched, virus scan-enabled and spam/spyware buster protected, I'm skittish.
You get a digital "channel" assigned to your box, then the box tunes that channel, thats how you recieve your VOD. There's a crazy huge lag time ff/rw'ing.
With the digital tuner in my Bravia, I can pick up folks VOD feeds. It sure seems like a cheaper way of doing it.
I don't really see a big issue with an ISP using P2P inside their own 'net, though, if they have the space to do it without interfering with 'da net.
Online video is becoming too big for them to get away with it, whether they want to or not. This time the entertainment lobby will fight our battle for us.
If they can buy copyright extensions, then they will surely buy us a measly "net neutrality" act, as soon as they realize it means "way to sell you the same crap, but with negligible overhead".
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Sounds to me like you're running a dodgy DNS server on your router; it fills up the memory with DNS cache (which you have a lot of when you P2P) and crashes.
Exactly what P2P client bothers to do reverse lookups on IP addresses in it's default configuration?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
The difference? No P2P. There's simply no other way to explain it.
Could be true but there are MANY reasons you could have been having sporadic problems. Think about it this way. How many people in the world are not running P2P apps and still have random shody internet service? What do they blame it on? Well, the same reasons they have could be happening to you. Your local CO or cable head end could be a little flaky, routers in your regoin could be having problems, maybe some routes are great but others are not. Maybe they did some maintenance in your area and there was a bug? Maybe they combined areas and were overloaded? Maybe another area failed and your segments are seeing more traffic then normal? A new power line nearby could be causing problems, blah blah blah. There are hundreds of reasons you could be having sporadic problems and your assumption that it MUST be because of your P2P use is a wild ass guess with very little supporting information. The fact that your provider did not give any specific technical details of why the service was suddednly below par does suck but based on my experience with those first levels of support, they do not know shit and are far removed from the backend engineering work. I don't think many people would be surprised by that. I've had some issues with Comcast in the past. I called to compain and was told there was nothing wrong in my area and I needed a new CM. I walked outside and saw a Comcast bucket in the air working on some lines.
Your cable modem is 5 years old?? My cable modem started being spotty when it was 1.5 years old... a tech came out, and he said that they routinely replace that model of cable modem for other customers when it gets to be 1 year old (I guess they don't make them like they used to...). It turned out the tx/rx power levels were just a little too low, and we found a splitter we could remove, which boosted the power levels up to acceptable levels. But he said that it's getting more routine for cable modems to degrade over time, and need to be replaced.
A number of SOHO routers suffer from exactly this problem, the D-link and Netgears from memory. The only solution is to turn off the DNS cache altogether.
You can not believe me if you like. Colour me bothered.
I recently tried to download "Elephant's Dream" (the open-source 3D blender project) via BitTorrent
This is more like "I finally found something legal on BitTorrent, so now I can complain." Right.
It's easy enough to download Elephant's Dream. There are nine mirror sites. And if you download one of the streaming formats, you don't even have to wait for the download to finish.
It's a beautifully rendered, but otherwise unimpressive short film. It's more of a demo reel for Blender.
It's actually more complicated than that.
ISPs in peering relationships want to get rid of packets. so generally, if you have two ISPs, A and B, and A is sending a lot more traffic to B than B sends to A, A is going to be paying B for the privilege of "getting rid of" packets.
If two ISPs are sending each other around the same amount of traffic, they have an even peering arrangement. Typically no dollars are exchanged in this scenario.
This means that when you, as a broadband customer, upload, your ISP has to "get rid of" the packets you are uploading and send them to other ISPs. If a lot of your ISPs customers generate tons of upstream bandwidth, the other ISPs that yours pairs with will start demanding some money in the peering arrangement, since they receive more traffic from your ISP than they send to it.
Heh, this is difficult to explain without it becoming confusing, but the gist is... Upstream bandwidth is expensive. Downstream bandwidth is cheap. In essence, those who generate traffic subsidize those who receive it.
This model sucks, but it's why we likely won't see more than a megabit upstream cheaply in the states anytime soon.
Log into your router and do a dhcp release/renew from there. If you can, change the routers MAC address too, and do an dhcp release/renew. With Comcast this pulls a new IP address, not sure if it works on Cox or not.
Odds are to 'hack' (aka, bring up the web console) into your router, you need to directly connect your PC to it, set your PC ip address to 192.168.100.2/255.255.255.0, and open a web browser to http://192.168.100.1./ If that doesn't work try 192.168.10.x.
Your cynicism aside, I thought getting the film via BitTorrent (as the project's site suggested) was worth a shot, and might be faster than a traditional download. Having been away from BitTorrent for a while, I wasn't aware of how far Rogers had progressed in their traffic-shaping technology. I thought downloading a film with the producers' blessing was a reasonable litmus for how well BT was faring these days.
Your idea that I'd have to stretch to find a legal download is ignorant. I live in Canada. I have the right to take digital copies of any media I own for the purposes of personal back-up. As a payer of my cable bill, I am fully entitled to legally take digital copies via whatever technology I care to use -- VCR, DVR, P2P.
You're only aiding the abetting the interests of evil when you try to pickle my comment with a red herring.
These stories are free but worth money.
Can't throttle VPN traffic. People use it to connect to their companies, and companies are pretty much the only entities ISPs can still charge through the nose for "priority service". At least here. Everyone else only pays for the cheapest package and laments endlessly with support (or about support, and staying in the loop for an hour 'til someone picks up...).
Should they start throttling based on target IP, net neutrality is the next issue they face. And if that doesn't work, well, set up a TOR server and watch them go bonkers when trying to block out the TORs.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
A number of SOHO routers suffer from exactly this problem, the D-link and Netgears from memory. The only solution is to turn off the DNS cache altogether.
I've never seen that behavior but I'll take your word for it because I've never bothered to mess around with a SOHO router for anything more then setting it up for clients and forgetting about it. I've always used Linux for NAT for my own purposes.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Broadband in the UK is in a really, really bad position. ADSL is mostly provided by ISPs using BT's network, which is very expensive and performs poorly. Problem is, BT have no incentive to upgrade their systems because they are forced to allow other ISPs to use them, meaning they will be helping their competitors as much as themsevles.
Meanwhile, other ISPs have little incentive to compete, and are simply staying slightly ahead of BT with slightly lower prices. NTL used to be about the best, with 10Mb speeds (yeah, well, this is the UK) and no caps. Then they became Virgin Media, started throttling, and it all went downhill. One step forward, two steps back.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
At this time I'm still experiencing unimpeded Usenet downloads. I use a French server. It's the only damn thing I download where I actually see the full capacity of my over-priced connection.
These stories are free but worth money.
As the article mentions the UK situation I figure it's worth pointing out some facts to balance the whinging of those who claim the problem is nothing more than ISPs overselling bandwidth.
In the UK the provision of ADSL broadband is dependant upon purchasing capacity from BT that effectively costs £250/Mbs per month.
That means a per GB cost to the ISP of about 70p ($1.40) on top of the £8.40 ($16.80) per month tail charge BT impose.
Customers expect to be able to use p2p and other heavy bandwidth services for £20/month or less and have no traffic management systems in place.
The fact of the matter is that ADSL has always been offered as a contended service even though ISPs have tended to try and run things so that this was not always apparent.
Now that more customers are using lots of bandwidth it is simply not possible for that to continue - customer's will have to face the reality of a contended product.
Those who do not want to face this do have a choice - leased lines are still available and offer guaranteed bandwidth. Of course they come at a price that reflects this.
Let me get this straight the carriers are objecting to people, their paying customers using the service they pay for because it gets in the way of how the carriers want to screw people in the future? Wow sucks to be them.
The problem is the infrastructure. An ISP can't possibly invest the cash needed to have bandwidth to grow with for years in the future. I fail to see how this would be possible in a chaotically growing market with more and more computers/other devices.
Fight for your digital freedom, join the EFF *now*: http://www.eff.org/support/
An old essay on "Internet vs Interweb" access, which only seems to get more relevant with time.
cable modem is just a electronic box. There is no real technical reason for them to degrade with time. If they are not properly made, then yeah but that goes with any electronic devoce. Properly made with rated parts it should run forever.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Rogers Cable, which services parts of Canada, has started traffic shaping all encrypted packets to give them lower priority and throughput. Yeah, laughable. I sure am glad I don't subscribe to their shit.
Beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master. -Anonymous
Even if I get throttled I would still have plenty of bandwidth to stream video and very few places seem to effectively be able to throttle. Things like encryption and changing your ports avoids any but the most anal ISP and if that's the case the solution is simple. DUMP THE ISP AND TELL THEM WHY
I DL 500 k/sec through bittorrent all the time and never get throttled. Where are all these supposedly bandwidth shaping ISPs?
I think this article is propaganda designed to make bandwidth throttling look bad and more or less pretend that it's somehow stopping the emergence of this not very amazing p2p streaming movies. When it comes down to it, why use bittorrent anyway. The problem is the US internet infrastructure and dodging the problem with bit torrent is just NEVER going to work because it's not going to scale up like increasing bandwidth will. Maybe that's why congress wants broadband to be 2 mbps because the only realistic solution is to increase residents bandwidth. Taking bandwidth shaping off P2P (where ever this technology is actually used)isn't going to make things any better. Either bandwidth shaping is effective and save bandwidth overall by limiting bandwidth hungry p2p users OR it's not effective and rarely used. In any case not using bandwidth shaping is hardly an option to help increase the bandwidth for streaming movies.
SO, think again, the reason streaming movies are hampered is lack of bandwidth and lack of insightful business models. P2P will happen regardless and will consume X amount of bandwidth and that's the real problem. If there were no P2P networks they wouldn't need to save distribute bandwidth over multiple clients. Bittorrent is justifying it's own existence by using up so much bandwidth that ISP employ bandwidth shaping and then saying it's not fair because it hampers their legit business model.
CMON people thats a fucking scam. You can't pretend bittorrent didn't embrace illegal file sharing and you can't deny that bittorrent alone is responsible for significant lag on the internet. Now blaming the ISPs for shaping bandwidth when they are being forced to be the same technology that's complaining it doesn't have enough bandwidth.
Does anyone else see the irony in that? When it comes down to it. If people use the service the ISP will optimized for the service. There need be no other incentive created for bittorent technology than already exists. If they can sell their services then they will get more bandwidth, but asking for everything upfront WHILE contributing to the largest p2p network is just fucking ignorant. If bittorent wants to misrepresent the reality of the situation they will just harm the integrity of their business model and someone else will make a more profitable multiple client file distribution model. I really don't see bittorent as anything but the latest P2P technology, it's not earth shattering and that means it could easily be replaced, especially the legal business side. It would just take a company with some capital and a theoretical prototype. Once you get the money, build the app and it almost has to do better than bittorrent in legal sales. Trying to be the internets core piracy network AND a legal file sharing network just seems broken somehow. Great for pirates, but thats just not how economics work.
If you force ISPs to treat all packets equally, they will need to shift their business model to make money. This will probably involve getting rid of unlimited bandwidth, and charging per byte of data. That way, people who do a lot of p2p file sharing will pay their fair share since they are using most of the bandwidth. Be careful what you wish for. You may get it.
Cant wait for IPv6 to come along it should then sort out all the isps who don't have enough current bandwidth to support their users to be forced to upgrade all their routers as well as their links. I think this should sort out the isp's that walk the fine line of price / profit / bandwidth and probably bankrupt various isp's in the uk. Though its also worth noting that in the UK most isp sell an uncapped capped service. Its advertised as uncapped but limited in the small print. Knowing this the last time i changed isp i went for something slightly more expensive package which advertised its service as capped at 30GB / 350GB peak / offpeak caps. But hey they have been meeting their end of the deal so far they always have bandwidth available when i need it so they have been meeting their end of the deal for the last 6 months. Being an ex PlusNet user in the UK they used to cap me on non web / mail traffic to around 12kbytes/sec which was on a 6MBit connection. Then their tech support used to deny any traffic shaping was being performed.
As a person who runs a network, somewhere... i won't tell you where. :) ... we don't like p2p apps. It's not because they use 40-70% of the bandwidth, that's not the problem. The problem is that apps like skype, or gnutella, or (endless list) have supernodes, nodes that notice we have a fat network and elevate themselves to become servers for the rest of the p2p network.
:) But stop giving away all my bandwidth to some dork in somalia, because I'm the one who has to explain why the business applications are running slow. And the people with the money don't seem to think "just buy more" is a good idea when our budget is tight.
Someone earlier used an analogy: 'Let us say I run a restaraunt and have been selling "all you can drink" coffee but I had been providing only thimble size cups.' Good start. Our problem isn't that you bring your own cup. Our problem is that you're sitting near an open window, and ordering a dozen coffees at once. Large ones. And handing them out to everyone walking along.
We don't mind providing the bandwidth to our legitimate users, that's why we're here. We have a problem paying for bandwidth to provide services for people who aren't our constituents or customers. We're especially troubled by that because we suddenly become the focus of all those 4 letter groups that we love to hate here, who come knocking on our doors because they seem to think we're "enabling" copyright theft or "serving" it. And our lawyers, like every other lawyer in the world, don't like these discussions because they don't KNOW that what we're doing will be a slam dunk in court and then they get cranky with us.
So we don't mind the concept of p2p. I assume you're doing things legally because you're all moral people, right?
Just so you know, cox is doing traffic shaping via Sandvine equipment at each regional data center(RDC). They've been doing it since rolling out the multiple tiers. This includes traffic dropped for ALL P2P traffic as well as potentially some other bandwidth intensive applications they view unfavorably.
DUMP THE ISP AND TELL THEM WHY
here is the main problem. far too often this is not an option.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
I can mention I've been looking around for ssh tunnel services and shell account providers. And not surprising that I am able to find global privacy services that are claiming to allow high bandwidth encrypted tunneling services with allowance for P2P and Usenet levels of traffic. It may be like a 2nd ISP bill on top of the original connection, but it helps to ensure that you're not the sucker in case the MAFIAA gets a hold of your IP, and some of them let you pick and choose the continent which your proxy resides... I'll drop a couple links I bookmarked recently when COTSE had their outage (thank you assholes at Verizon)...
COTSE
TriLightZone
List of Shell providers
Secure-Tunnel
Electronic Privacy Info Center Tools list
Spyware Warrior Resources Links
Anyways there's tons of stuff out there if you look, people can just put up SSH servers running on port 80 and encrypt everything and then what are the ISPs gonna do? Degrade all encrypted traffic like that Canadian ISP did? Ah the battles continue...
I wasn't aware of any options other than Rogers and Shaw cable. I guess there's still hope for Internet users in Canada. Execulink, you say?
404555974007725459910684486621289147856453481154 in hex is "You sank my Battleship?"
[GPG key in journal]
NO, traffic shaping is not net neutral. Any shaping contradicts the dumb pipe model. Instead of paying millions for routers that look at packets to deterine whether to pass on or not would be better for the ISPs and networks just to upgrade the pipe sizes and send on any packets received.
Net neutrality means that all traffic is treated equally no matter what the origon or destination. If I pay for xxKbps down and yyKbps up, I should be able to use it for any traffic I want and the provider shouldn't limit it at all. Just becuase you want to VOIP shouldn't affect my usage pattern at all. If your ISP and all the connections in between are truly net neutral, your traffic will get through as will mine. The problem only crops up when someone doesn't provide what they should, enough bandwidth to carry all traffic unblocked. The problem comes up when one carriier that has n xx/yy customers but only N XX/YY connections to the net where sum(xx[1,n]) > sum(XX[1,N]) and sum(yy{1,n]) > sum(YY[1,N]). In short, that the total bandwidth sold is more than the total bandwidth paid for.
Now if the providers want to do things to reduce network traffic for P2P users, they could set up a P2P node inside their internal network attaching anly to those customers. That would act as a distributer of any packets received from outside to all their customers wanting it. For a big provider like AT&T or Sprint, that likely would cut down external P2P traffic by a bunch. They do the same with web traffic. No one complains because the customers are getting what they paid for. And the network is still net neutral. Customers doing P2P want to use the internal node as the download speeds are maximum. The network provider is happy because it cuts down the external bandwidth required likely far more than the cost of the internal node so payback is quick. Its win/win.
Voice networking really wants something other than a TCP/IP network. That it works is because most TCP/IP networks as implemented have the kind of artifacts usable by VOIP to allow interactive conversations. The artifacts are that the route taken by any given packet from a given source and destination is the nearly the same as the previous and subsequent packets. And that any given packet will be received nearly error free, error rates below 10^-3, less than 1 bad bit per thousand. Most networks are below 10^-6. So bad VOIP isn't because the network is bad, its because the use isn't what the network was designed for. VOIP wants to turn the TCP/IP network into a bastardized VCSN, virtual circuit switched network. A free POTS in other words. Now if you want to pay a premium for it, perhaps you should just route VOIP traffic to a real VCSN and bypass the ISP. Perhaps instead of a regular ISP, you get one that will divert your VOIP traffic to their VCSN. Then you get your nearly error free fixed low transmission times. Likely though, you won't save much over just using POTS which likely defeats the original purpose.
Get a decent ISP that doesn't throttle: mine's http://www.madasafish.com/?ref=4226792
If you use that link I'll get some money and you'll get a discount!
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Most people opt for shaped and shared bandwidth because it is a lot cheaper. The ISP's are not "bad" for doing this, they are not lying either, read their service agreements. You guys are complaining then will say "who reads those details" - well that's your fault. If you think there is a business model in selling unshaped, 1:1 (i.e.trunking) bandwidth, then go start a company to do it. You may find that almost everyone, including yourselves, decide you will live with sharing bandwidth cuz its much cheaper.
This said, it would be nice for ISP's to offer unshaped, committed bandwidth- however building the infrastructure to support it everywhere is probably more expensive than the customers will pay.
A lot of whining going on here at slashdot... nice to gripe and complain, but run the numbers before you criticize. Many ISP's are small companies, the owners are not raking in huge dollars, nor are they out to "cheat" you. Call them and tell them you want to pay 10x for unfiltered bandwidth, (what it would cost with a 10:1 oversubscription)... maybe they will sell it to you?
When in the Course of packet events, it becomes necessary for one group of packets to dissolve the ISP bands which have connected them with another, and to assume, among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal router to which the Laws of Internets and of Internets' God entitle them, a decent respect to the Destinations of packets requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all packets are created equal, that they are endowed, by their User, with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are TTL, Bandwidth, and the pursuit of Destination.
That to secure these rights, ISPs are instituted among Packets, deriving their just powers from the consent of the endpoints, That whenever any Form of ISP becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the Users to alter or abolish it, and to institute new ISP, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Bandwidth and Destination.
Bleh.
Bunch of n00bs.
I run my own ISP, and we simply delete the packets my customers, *and* other ISPs send our way.
GET OF MY LAWN!
They could simply add a P2P node in their internal network. It would sought after by customers because it uploads far faster than it downloads. Any block sent to it by an internal customer is rewarded by other pieces uploaded by others. Once its storage space is full, it deletes the oldest one with fewest downloads in the past xx days. This way popular P2P files are mostly served to internal users getting rid of most of the P2P traffic. Its win for the customers (faster downloads) and a win for the ISP (less external traffic). No changes are required to a dumb pipe network yet the ISP saves a lot of external BW. The node can be a cheap older PC with lots of disk attached. A 2GHz Celeron or Sempron has more than enough compute power to handle full duplex gigabit ethernet with a few TB RAID array. It shouldn't cost more than a $1000 per TB overall.
Electronics (specifically, the electrolytic capacitors which inundate consumer electronics) don't last forever. Eventually, they dry up a bit. This causes their characteristics to change, and never in a good way.
Eventually, they'll fail completely. Depending on the nature of the failure, and the design of the circuit, they may or may not destroy other components at the same time.
Could take months, years, or many decades. The changes to capacitance and ESR will be most likely to affect analog circuitry first, and probably in somewhat subtle ways (like, say, the RF front end of a cable modem degrading slowly over time, showing poor signal levels and/or connectivity issues but while generally still working OK).
[I often butt heads with the repair techs where I work. They insist that there is nothing more damaging to electronics than to leave them powered on all the time and walk around turning things off, while I proclaim that there's no point in even having network-accessible electronics if they are always switched off every time you want to use them. *sigh*]
Kid-proof tablet..
That's a good point. I still think P2P is the wrong way to do it, but ISPs running a nearby node so that the packets stay local, seems like a good way to cope with P2P traffic.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
ISPs don't hate Internet video because it uses up too much bandwidth (that they're overselling). They hate Internet video because it competes with their own video services. Think about it:
Comcast charges you $45/month for Internet and $60/month for digital cable television service. If you can get your TV over the Internet that means you won't need to pay that $60/month to them anymore. Right now there's very few online TV services but that is changing very quickly. They saw this coming so their "big plan" to counter the online video revolution is to provide IPTV services of their own and to ensure that IPTV services over the Internet are relegated to the slow lane (just a tad too slow to do HDTV):
Also consider for a moment Comcast's DOCSIS 3.0 plans:
* ~10% of the bandwidth will be dedicated to general Internet access ("customers will be psyched to get 12 megabits download!").
* ~90% of the bandwidth will be dedicated (exclusively) to Comcast's IPTV and VoIP services.
How's that for Net Neutrality? Comcast gets exclusive access to their own Internet super-speed pipe right to your house while any Internet-based competitors get stuck in the slow lane.
Verizon's FIOS service is also sold in a similar configuration (with dedicated bandwidth for their video service) and AT&T has similar plans with their own IPTV services.
-Riskable
"Those who choose proprietary software will pay for their decision!"