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?"

Comments

Why not charge by the GB delivered?

[davidwr]

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.

Re:Why not charge by the GB delivered?

[jumperboy]

Because, ultimately, the end user has little control over how much bandwidth they use. A Pandora's box was opened when the Internet was targeted as a way to deliver rich multimedia instead of text. Even the links featured on /. are usually a few bytes of content surrounded by many kilobytes of ads, spread over multiple pages. Compared to analog television and telephony, the quality of online video and voice communications is horrendous, but demand is only a tiny fraction of what it's going to be. The ISPs promote multimedia heavily when they sell connectivity, so they're just as culpable as the content providers. Throttling bandwidth at today's poor quality is not going to be a satisfactory solution for consumers. Increasing capacity is the only solution. I have a family of four, and when each of us want to experience the rich content we were promised (like VOIP, online productivity applications, video-on-demand, and streaming music), you're going to call us bandwidth hogs? I don't think so.

Bitch, bitch, moan, moan

[node159]

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.

Re:Bitch, bitch, moan, moan

[gravij]

Yeah, except the contract (which the customer probably didn't bother to read) likely specifies that the customer isn't allowed to host servers on their connection (web, smtp, bittorrent, or otherwise).
I'm not sure if bittorrent should count as a server. It doesn't fit into the traditional client server model at all. And if the only thing that makes it count as a server is the uploading of data then what about things like Skype or a multiplayer game?

ISPs have got themselves into a bad spot by overselling and under cutting and the only way they can deal with it is by making their customers suffer...

Phone companies and electrical companies do it

[davidwr]

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.

Re:Most unpopular comment ever

[Nasarius]

And suddenly things like downloading videos from iTunes become a whole lot less attractive. Torrent-gobbling nerds aren't the only ones using a lot of bandwidth, and that will become more and more true in the near future.