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Comcast Hinders BitTorrent Traffic
FsG writes "Over the past few weeks, more and more Comcast users have reported that their BitTorrent traffic is severely throttled and they are totally unable to seed. Comcast doesn't seem to discriminate between legitimate and infringing torrent traffic, and most of the BitTorrent encryption techniques in use today aren't helping. If more ISPs adopt their strategy, could this mean the end of BitTorrent?"
Wouldn't it be simpler for the telcos to charge per GB delivered in addition to the size of the pipe?
Give all your customers your fastest residential speed. Set your rate so 90% of your customers don't exceed the "monthly allowance" for your low-end rate plan.
For the other 10%, bill them on a pro-rated basis based on how much they use. If they use 2x the allowance, they pay 2x. If they use 100x, they pay 100x.
To prevent runaway bills, allow customers to set their own "caps" and "throttle-down speeds" that would kick in after the cap was reached. If a customer never wanted to pay more than $20, he could set his "monthly cap" at 80% of what $20 would buy, and set the throttle-down rate low enough that he could never use up the remaining 20% even if he was maxing out his connection.
This seems a lot simpler and fairer than traffic shaping by protocol.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
God dam it so annoys me when the ISP's bitch and moan about the customers actually using the bandwidth they have signed a contract, and paid for to use.
I have no sympathy for ISP that oversell their services and fail to invest profits in infrastructure.
GPLv2: I want my rights, I want my phone call! DRM: What use is a phone call, if you are unable to speak?
No one will like this suggestion, but I think it's a valid one. ISPs should start charging for bandwidth used just like electric, gas, and other utilities. Right now, they have "unlimited" plans. This gives ISPs a great incentive to try and control what you do online. It just doesn't cost the same to serve the user who just browses the web (at maybe 100k a page which happens sporadically as users have to take time to read the page) and the user who decides that they want to use their cable modem as a movie downloading service - or even legitimate uses like downloading a new Linux distro every week. ISPs shouldn't care how you use your connection - they should only care how much bandwidth you use. ISPs shouldn't even care whether your bittorrents are illegal or legitimate. That has no affect on them. The amount of data transfered does. So, for the sake of network neutrality, for the sake of our freedom to use the internet how we want to use it, we need usage fees.
Metered billing is the easy part. In the long run, it's even easier than the cat-and-mouse game of fighting a particular popular protocol.
The other features, like giving the customer control of monthly caps and throttling, will take a bit of work.
One unintended side-effect is the effect on home users who run wireless networks. "Stealing" bandwidth from an inadvertently unsecured or under-secured wireless connection without permission will now be literally stealing, as the poor subscriber will be stuck with the bill. Expect a few prosecutions under theft or fraud statutes if this becomes commonplace.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
But that would mean modifying all your routers -- which is [relatively] difficult for a large network. This solution is just an extra box plugged in at an appropriate point...
It is flawed because the ISP just needs to look at your HTTP usage and see you connect to a tracker. They can even get the port you are listening on from there! Even if you connect to the tracker via HTTPS, they can still see you connecting to a known tracker IP. Once they know you are on a tracker they can start limiting all traffic that looks like it's encrypted with RC4, because apparently this is identifiable.
It is too much because you don't actually need strong encryption to stop traffic limiting. Simply adding some random padding and XORing the protocol with the torrent's infohash would be enough - it is a private key random enough that they couldn't check them all. The RC4 encryption was seriously over-thought, and what did it give us? Nothing, because apparently it is still identifiable as bittorrent (or at least as RC4 encrypted traffic).
The only solution is to replace the current encryption and always connect to trackers via Tor or some other encrypted proxy. And even then it wouldn't be perfect, because it's plausible they could start limiting traffic on listening ports that get a lot of traffic.
Mr. Universe: "They can't stop the signal, Mal. They can never stop the signal."
This draws fairly interesting parallels with Tiscali and TalkTalk complaining about the Beeb's iPlayer here in the UK.
They sold internet connections at lower than cost of the bandwidth, betting on the customers not using anywhere near their bandwidth entitlement. Then the BBC produced iPlayer, which is encouraging people to use up more of their bandwidth and thus causing the ISPs to make a loss. So the ISPs are demanding that the BBC pay them to cover the shortfall.
To cut a long story short: the ISPs underpriced their connections and advertised them as "unlimited", were caught out when people actually tried to use what they had paid for and are now demanding that a third party bail them out of their mess. I certainly hope the BBC tell them to go screw themselves - I'm not going to be happy if part of my licence fee goes to propping up idiot ISPs who can't deliver on their commitments.
http://blog.nexusuk.org