Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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. --
'The tyrant will always find pretext for his tyranny.' - Aesop's Fables
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
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...
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.
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.
I have reasonably fast 6MPS downstream, but my upstream is throttled to a small fraction of that by my ISP.
That's a technical decision by the broadband industry. They set aside more frequencies for downstream because presumably most people don't need to do big uploads. On cable networks the upstream also needs to be a lower frequency to make it back to the head-end (the upstream channel is typically below cable channel 2) and this also tends to limit the bandwidth available.
What I don't understand is why nobody has bothered to release a "dynamic" DSL product. DSL works by taking whatever frequencies are usable (how high you can go depends on the length of the loop) and breaking them down into channels. Some of those are set aside for upstream, some (the bulk, in the case of ADSL) for downstream. Why not have a dynamic solution that re-allocates the channels for up or downstream depending on what you are doing at the moment (uploading or download)? I don't think this would work on a shared cable network but I see no reason why it couldn't be done for DSL.
but because of the nature of my job, I do often have to transfer large, uncompressed video files
Make your job provide you with a business-grade connection with higher upstream.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
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.
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?