ISPs Say P4P Negates Need for Net Neutrality Regs

Donut hole hole writes "AT&T and Comcast are using recent successful P2P trials to argue to the FCC that there's no need for strong traffic management or net neutrality rules. 'Comcast's statement, filed with the FCC on April 9th, hails an announcement by P2P developer Pando Networks that its experiments with P4P technology on a wide variety of U.S. broadband networks have boosted delivery speeds by up to 235 percent. This news, Comcast vice president Kathryn A. Zachem wrote to the Commission, "provides further proof that policymakers have been right to rely on marketplace forces, rather than government regulation, to govern the evolution of Internet services."' Looks like Comcast only likes P2P technology when it can be used to serve its political and regulatory agenda."

Comments

Where are our rights?

[billy901]

Net neutrality will be like taking away our rights! Everyone uses p4p in some way. Whether you're pirating or actually doing work! It would be stupid to even touch this.

Re:Where are our rights?

[eln]

That's not true at all. I'm still on P3P, and I won't upgrade to that P4P mess for anything.

However, I have heard good things about P3.11P for Workgroups, so I might try that one out.

Re:Where are our rights?

[Anonymous Coward]

don't ever remind me of 3.11

Re:Where are our rights?

[MensaJ]

A real market solution to piracy would be an exchange mechanism in which replication rights are released to the public, and (some subset) of the public compensates copyright owners for the release. Here's one attempt to so: <URL:https://www.PropagateLtd.com/>

Re:Where are our rights?

[Tikkun]

I think that P2P Warp will be far superior to P3.11P for Workgroups as well as NTP4P.

Re:Where are our rights?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but manufactures will be forced to pay the makers of P3.11P for every PxP regardless if its p2p warp or p3.11p.Drastically limiting the market share of p2p warp

Re:Where are our rights?

[Anonymous Coward]

Stop posting using code/monospace, unless you're posting actual code. It's fucking annoying.

P4P?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is that the next version of P2P?

p4p means

[WarJolt]

Don't be fooled. When comcast says p4p they mean Pay 4 Performance. You think they're doing this out of the kindness of their hearts? If they could charge you for this they would.

Re:p4p means

[ajs]

Yeah, P4P is a buzzword for "pennies for packets."

It's this magical idea that they'll find a way to charge more money for providing the same service without having to lose market share due to raising the prices on their customers' statements. Why not charge EVERYONE is their idea... doesn't matter who you are, or where you are on the 'Net... you can pay Comcast for "premium" service.

Not the worst idea ever, just a contender.

Re:p4p means

[TubeSteak]

If they could charge you for this they would. What?

P4P is about adding code into P2P software that will allow the application to prioritize 'local' connections. It's about minimizing the # of hops your packets have to jump across. This generally translates into cost savings for the ISP.

If they wanted to charge for it, they could code it themselves and license the technology out... and nobody would use it, because the ISPs are the main beneficiaries. What do I care if my bittorrent packets are coming from Germany or from my neighbor? Ping times aren't really an issue once the packets start flowing.

Re:p4p means

[Anonymous Coward]

If they could charge you for this they would.

Why? SBC's CEO made it pretty clear: you've got jack shit. Amazon, Google, iTMS... it's the internet companies that have the billions of dollars. The internet companies don't give a shit about you, or what you do, it's how much money they can wring out of Amazon et al by threatening to keep you from being able to reach their website and buy/use their products. Once network neutrality dies, expect a return to the bad old days of AOL, where they "put the internet in your computer" ... as long as the sites pay up for a "keyword" so you the users can reach them.

Re:p4p means

[DaedalusHKX]

People should've been busy building a patchwork off-net, but instead, they're bitching about the best way to involve a third player in everyone's business... a third player, mind you, who will dictate that we have no rights. Recall for a moment that without government, corporations would cease to exist as government protected entities with rights, and would be seen as what they are. Worthless pieces of paper backed by government. Hey, come to think of it, so is paper, government issued money and credit.

Irony everywhere these days.

Anyways, so while you suckers could've been out building the Linux style network for all, you were busy bitching about how the government isn't bailing out the airli... oh, sorry, internet. Well guess what? They will. And then they'll make rules. You give them the right to make rules once, and you've given the keys to the kingdom to them forever. Are you sure that is so wise?

There are so many good ideas out there, onion routing, anonymous news nets, user level encryption that works (mostly works, but the errors are all user based)... and yet we're lacking the ability to communicate? Hell, I think the blame goes to the geeks... "we're still using the old style internet with government and corporate controlled DNS root servers?"

Re:p4p means

[geekoid]

It's a great idea, for them.
The question 'can they pull it off?' the answer depends on whether or not new neutrality is in effect.

Re:p4p means

[Eighty7]

Nah in theory it checks out. Keeping traffic within your network will help costs. Give azureus some network topology information & you won't need to throttle as much. In theory. Carriers have everything to gain from this.

The million dollar question is whether they mean all P2P traffic, or just *AA approved content. They're making a new protocol & it's their data so the ball's in their court. I can easily see them using this as an excuse to go after P2P even more.

Re:p4p means

[doas777]

You're right the purported goal of P4P is to inject logic that will attempt to find local (or close) users for a peering protocol, and that sounds like a good idea, right? I agree. if only i could trust the people doing it.
P4P is a major privacy killer. based on what I see at the P4P workgroup page, P4P is not a protocol or code that will be inject into existing P2P apps, it is a network management technique and toolkit that the ISPs can use to control existing and future P2P traffic, presumably without knowledge or consent from any of the peers. In fact here is one of the project objectives:

Determine, validate, and encourage the adoption of methods for ISPs and P2P software distributors to work together to enable and support consumer service improvements as P2P adoption and resultant traffic evolves while protecting the intellectual property (IP) of participating entities Somehow I just knew IP rights would come up. I'll pay more attention when the pirate bay is in the core group. Until then, I'm not interested, logical as the idea may seem.

Re:p4p means

[Eighty7]

You think it'd be allowed if they didn't at least mention IP rights? This isn't eastern europe, where I hear an ISP can set up a DC++ hub & look the other way. They have a lot of incentive to work with us P2P users & we'd quickly adopt anything that got us higher speeds. I'm inclined to give them the benefit of doubt.

Re:p4p means

[Zerth]

"we're still using the old style internet with government and corporate controlled DNS root servers?"

Speak for yourself! From where I'm at, microsoft.com resolves to a porn tracker and most .gov sites are random ytmnd subdomains. I may be my DNS root mainly because my ISP's DNS is completely flaky, but being able to choose how URLs resolve is rather handy when some company streisands themselves by convincing Randumb J Judge to revoke the domain name of a website they don't like.

Re:p4p means

[UncleTogie]

People should've been busy building a patchwork off-net, but instead, they're bitching about the best way to involve a third player in everyone's business...

You mean a patchwork off-net like FidoNet?

Re:p4p means

[poetmatt]

Of course, by your logic what could possibly go wrong until we see how horrid it is, right?

Not to mention the privacy implications, the lack of an opt-out, or the fact that this doesn't work if things aren't hosted in your area, right?

You have to know quite a bit to magically route things local.

Given comcast's track record, why would you ever assume they turned over a new leaf? That's like thinking that Microsoft has a real open-source offering because they made a new announcement to be more open-source friendly. Yet how many years have we heard stuff like that, again?

Re:p4p means

[mrsteveman1]

Their original goal has always been to stop P2P entirely, since they equate P2P with piracy as far as the content industry is concerned, which Comcast et al are a part of.

If anything this is a way to placate the FCC and congress, while appearing to embrace P2P, but only as a distribution method for their own content.

Re:p4p means

[_KiTA_]

Yeah, P4P is a buzzword for "pennies for packets."

It's this magical idea that they'll find a way to charge more money for providing the same service without having to lose market share due to raising the prices on their customers' statements. Why not charge EVERYONE is their idea... doesn't matter who you are, or where you are on the 'Net... you can pay Comcast for "premium" service.

Not the worst idea ever, just a contender. So uh, hold it.

This is buzzwordspeek for "We don't need Net Neutrality, because breaking Net Neutrality means we don't need Net Neutrality?"

Oh my God, I've gone cross-eyed.

Re:p4p means

[_KiTA_]

You have to know quite a bit to magically route things local. "Local" in Comcast terms means "anything inside Comcast's network -- i.e., any Comcast customer talking to another Comcast customer. Intranet bandwidth costs are, presumably, dirt cheap.

Re:p4p means

[Anonymous Coward]

Given comcast's track record, why would you ever assume they turned over a new leaf

Because -unlike microsoft dealing with OSS- there is something in it for them.

Re:p4p means

[poetmatt]

So, you mean versus when you just pay for a backbone at a flat rate, its cheaper if you use that same flat rate in one way versus another?

That is definitely some magic right there.

Remind me again where an OC96/etc line would have a reason to care whether its intra-network or not.

Re:p4p means

[DaedalusHKX]

No, I mean like a less centralized internet. Lots of "unofficial" nets, more active and available than BBS', WIFI has worked wonders in my old neighborhood. If everyone's traffic is completely encrypted, it makes the ability of attackers of all colors to interfere, that much less. Of course should your adversaries or snoopy neighbor type individuals take physical action (EMP, raid, burglary, etc) then your enemies, whomever they may be, have just identified themselves by taking open action... at that point, keeping your private life private, by, say, encrypting your purchases and keeping telemarketers out will take a back burner to whoever is directly attacking your communications. Of course such activity will affect the entire neighborhood, and instead of just pissing off one house by having the upstream ISP fuck just that one customer, since the neighborhood is a self organized unit, they fuck with one, they fuck with all.

Two benefits. Hard to send a "national security letter" whether authentic or fake, to your local wifi or wired "CAN" operating neighbor, who knows YOU far better than any goon or social engineering Kevin Mitnick wannabe. Also a good reason to get to know your neighbors. Also a good reason for ALL traffic to be encrypted. Only the proper recipients have an easy time decrypting. And unless the myth of quantum computing solving all the world's ills comes true, don't expect it to aid anyone in cracking your encrypted list of cigar shops, liquor joints and nudie bars. Unless of course, your wife happens to have arrived from the quantum computing mothership, but then you've got other worries... again, data security is good to keep nosy people out. If bad guys decide they want you badly enough, your computer being lost to your enemies is the least of your worries. Your immediate physical safety would be far more of a concern at that time.

As a result, a civilian net that is not operated by centralized units which may be bullied into submission or otherwise intimidated or subverted is of utmost necessity. Printers and pamphleteers of the old world had the right idea with the first ammendment in the USA, but it fell short because nobody realized that people imported from other countries would often bring their government or leader worship with them... the subversion of the "free press" happened long before any of us were born. The internet is just the latest, and the subversion has taken a lot longer for the mere factor, that much like "leading libertarians", taking over the internet is like "herding cats"... or as an old cowboy said... "if you think you run the show, try ordering someone else's dog around."

Same thing here. The organization of the net is very hierarchical at the provider level, but needs not be. FidoNet is cool, but administrators can still be bullied into submission by the local law enforcement, whether a crime is occurring or whether a user is merely targeted for political assassination by the local "authoritah". As we all know, the world's justice systems don't actually subscribe to the "truth in advertising"... unless, of course, your bank account in Zurich is QUITE large and quite full.

Re:p4p means

[UncleTogie]

FidoNet is cool, but administrators can still be bullied into submission by the local law enforcement, whether a crime is occurring or whether a user is merely targeted for political assassination by the local "authoritah".

But wouldn't the civilian nets you refer to be just as subject to said law enforcement?

Re:p4p means

[prod-you]

Latency

Re:p4p means

[Washii]

...Give azureus some network topology information & you won't need to throttle as much... Ah, you bring up Azureus. It used to have a plug-in installed by default that was supposed to allow ISPs some caches on their own network. Would have been an interesting idea, too.

It got taken out because nobody was using it!

Re:p4p means

[DaedalusHKX]

You're thinking too short term. I'm thinking past SHTF or the point where the government gives its Beretta a blow job.

Faith in the power of the almighty politicians to "save us" from life itself, is running short. After that, if people have learned to be autonomous and not expect handouts stolen from others, life should get much nicer. Of course, I'm banking on people learning to respect property and to live up to their promises.

Heh... yeah, I know, at least I don't believe in the Easter Bunny anymore :)

Re:p4p means

[doas777]

You may have hit on something there. Comcast uses a multi-tier hierarchy in their routing, like any big network.

The goal of a routing pattern like the one they describe however is to keep traffic local to a users distribution tier network (your neighborhood essentially), so that it traverses the hierarchy only as high as it must. that frees up bandwidth on the trunk lines upstream and the backbone connections, which may be kinda expensive.

the problem with this idea however, is that while the providers have spent billions over the last decade extending and enhancing their distribution tier (to get more customers), the local network is the source of most users congestion.

so, if P4P is going to emphasize connections as close to the curb as possible, won't that increase host-to-host transmissions on the already saturated local net?

Re:p4p means

[Jurily]

Aight, now I know what p4p is. Problem is, p2p protocols DO NOT NEED TO KNOW where that other connection is coming from. No, really. They do not. It's up to the ISP to sort those things out. Just read the specs.
It's not just a routing problem, it's a political one. Think about it.

Re:p4p means

[jez9999]

Actually, P4P is just leet speek for 'pap'. As in, this idea is 'pap'. :-)

Re:p4p means

[TapeCutter]

"Recall for a moment that without government, corporations would cease to exist as government protected entities with rights, and would be seen as what they are. Worthless pieces of paper backed by government."

Without government, corporations would revert back to smaller (and more violent) fuedal entities.

Re:p4p means

[laird]

"the problem with this idea however, is that while the providers have spent billions over the last decade extending and enhancing their distribution tier (to get more customers), the local network is the source of most users congestion"

Using P2P, by definition the total data volume uploaded and downloaded by all users is the same. P4P doesn't increase the amount that users upload or download, so the "edge" network . P4P shortens the distance between the uploader and the downloader, in order to reduce the delivery cost of the data. And while ISP's have spent a fortune building out their core networks, they're continually building out as they add customers, and as customer usage grows, so it's a large ongoing expense.

Of course, caching can also be a part of the answer, which is why all of the p2p caching companies are in the P4P Working Group.

Re:p4p means

[laird]

P4P is a major privacy killer. based on what I see at the P4P workgroup page, P4P is not a protocol or code that will be inject into existing P2P apps, it is a network management technique and toolkit that the ISPs can use to control existing and future P2P traffic, presumably without knowledge or consent from any of the peers. I'm not sure where you got this - P4P is a mechanism that allows ISP's to provide network map data to existing P2P networks so that the P2P networks can, if they choose, use that information to make smarter peer connections. P4P is entirely optional; if a P2P network doesn't want to implement it, they can keep doing what they are doing now.

Determine, validate, and encourage the adoption of methods for ISPs and P2P software distributors to work together to enable and support consumer service improvements as P2P adoption and resultant traffic evolves while protecting the intellectual property (IP) of participating entities Somehow I just knew IP rights would come up. I'll pay more attention when the pirate bay is in the core group. Until then, I'm not interested, logical as the idea may seem. You're right - this statement is ambiguous, leading to misinterpretation. To clarify, the participating entities in P4P are the ISP's and the P2P networks. Their IP has to do with things like the ISP's network structure and the details of how the P2P network operates or what it's transporting. Thus, the P4P protocol is abstracted so that neither party has to expose more than they are comfortable with.

Re:p4p means

[budgenator]

You have to know quite a bit to magically route things local.
not really, take a look at traceroute,

Traceroute works by increasing the "time-to-live" value of each successive batch of packets sent. The first three packets sent have a time-to-live (TTL) value of one (implying that they are not forwarded by the next router and make only a single hop). The next three packets have a TTL value of 2, and so on. When a packet passes through a host, normally the host decrements the TTL value by one, and forwards the packet to the next host. When a packet with a TTL of one reaches a host, the host discards the packet and sends an ICMP time exceeded (type 11) packet to the sender. The traceroute utility uses these returning packets to produce a list of hosts that the packets have traversed en route to the destination. The three timestamp values returned for each host along the path are the delay (aka latency) values typically in milliseconds (ms) for each packet in the batch. If a packet does not return within the expected timeout window, a star (asterisk) is traditionally printed. Traceroute may not list the real hosts. It indicates that the first host is at one hop, the second host at two hops, etc. IP does not guarantee that all the packets take the same route. Also note that if the host at hop number N does not reply, the hop will be skipped in the output. traceroute

Consider this,

1. the Bittorrent client get connected to the internet and downloads the network utilization report from the ISP, the reciprocal of the utilization sets available upload bandwidth,
2. numerous peers begin to negotiate for a seeded download,
3. each peers IP address is tracerouted,
4. 
   
   1. IP addresses are initialized to 5 hops
   2. IP addresses that are 0 hops get half of the available bandwidth
   3. addresses that are 1 hop get half the remaining plus a small random latency added
   4. addresses that are 2 hops get half the remaining plus a small fixed and a small random latency
   5. 3 hops get half remaining plus a moderate fixed and small random latency
   6. 4 hops get half the remaining plus a large fixed and moderate random latency added
   7. 5 hops get half the remaining plus large fixed and random latencies
      
   
   
5. as peers enter and leave the swarm, they are tracerouted and the bandwidth each level of hops get is reaccessed
6. 
   the network utilization is periodically reaccessed as well
   

I don't know a lot about the internals of bittorrent so there may be a even more elegant way to do this. this technique isn't rocket science so I suspect that the various developers had a serious brain-cramp for not doing something like this from the get-go. I'm not to impressed with Bram Cohen for not specifying this in the base protocols.

Re:p4p means

[DaedalusHKX]

And you learned about that part of "fear psychology 101" in some government school, I wager, reading a government sanctioned book. Interesting that you only had ONE approved source of such "facts" and yet you still buy it.

Question I'll pose is... "and government enforcement of policy is done without violence or the threat thereof?" Lets see you not file or pay taxes if you're "liable" and see how long it is before the jack booted storm troopers kick your door in, after shooting your dog and slamming any helpless invalids face first to the ground... "for the storm trooper's safety, of course".

Heh, its okay, if you ever get shafted and notice, your viewpoint will change. That's the beauty of being screwed over by life... eventually you start to notice why... or you don't and keep getting shafted.

Re:p4p means

[Anonymous Coward]

I never understood why the bit torrent clients don't just check the packets TTL and have a knob in the client to "prefer closer peers".

ISP could then throttle when traffic leaves their networks.

Re:p4p means

[jmcnaught]

I sorta see corporations as part of the governing establishment already, if not part of the government per se. They hold the real power in our society. They control all the wealth, they decide where the jobs go, they decide the products that we can buy. Sure, they're regulated by the government but even that's becoming less and less true. Even the regulations that are in place were hard won over many years.

It's pretty easy to see that governments predominately act in the interests of corporations. The crappy thing is that it's harder and harder for working folks like me to "vote with our dollars" as places like Walmart are often the only place a family can afford the things they need.

As hard as it's going to be, I find myself looking forward to the oncoming economic collapse. Maybe this time enough people will get angry and organized to change things from being complete bullshit.

Re:p4p means

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't help but notice your email and sig. I'll tell you what, when the piratebay is part of the working group, I'll consider your technology. until then, I'm afraid I'm not interested.

Re:p4p means

[doas777]

ok then, lets be crystal clear about this. So your telling me that AT&T, your company's primary participator, and Internet Content Policeman did not require your company to develop a means to determine the content of a given P2P connection?

I find this very hard to believe. I do not want my protocol to notify my ISP everytime i connect to a tracker. Do you see how this is a privacy problem?

Re:p4p means

[Anonymous Coward]

Because ISPs pay each other to exchange data. If they were smart, they'd use P4P to prioritize leeching from within their own network, and throw those rules out the window when seeding - that way, they're uploading to their competitors (for a pretty penny).

Re:p4p means

[Anonymous Coward]

Nah in theory it checks out. Keeping traffic within your network will help costs. Give azureus some network topology information & you won't need to throttle as much. Incorrect. If an ISP's users are sustaining 5Mbit/s apiece, and that is painful to the ISP now, then those users will STILL be sucking up 5Mbit/s apiece with p4p. There is still access network costs to the ISP as well as backhaul within the ISP's network -- even if all that traffic is kept within the ISP's network.

Re:p4p means

[DaedalusHKX]

All you have to do is ask the governing agencies to stop governing... and the only way to do so, is to stop asking them for help. Help your neighbors and your friends, your family and your acquaintances. Get everyone off the welfare or government enforcement teats, and sooner or later the leviathan will have no justification for its existence.

I'd like to see some of the mainstream "educated" folks willing to give up the bread and circuses, for even a month of their lives. Yeah right.

Re:p4p means

[laird]

"ok then, lets be crystal clear about this. So your telling me that AT&T, your company's primary participator, and Internet Content Policeman [nytimes.com] did not require your company to develop a means to determine the content of a given P2P connection?"

AT&T has not required Pando to do anything in return for their participation in the working group. Neither has any other ISP.

To clarify who did what in the test, Pando worked with Yale, Verizon and Telefonica to perform the first field test. AT&T is in the P4P Working Group, and contributed valuable data for earlier simulations, but didn't participate in the first field test.

P4P is a mechanism that allows ISP's to provide information to P2P networks to allow them to improve performance and efficiency. P2P companies aren't required to use that information. P4P does not expose ISP internal network structure to P2P's, and does not expose P2P network details to ISP's.

"I do not want my protocol to notify my ISP everytime i connect to a tracker."

P4P doesn't do this.

Re:p4p means

[laird]

"I can't help but notice your email and sig. I'll tell you what, when the piratebay is part of the working group, I'll consider your technology. until then, I'm afraid I'm not interested."

Yes, I'm the CTO of Pando Networks. Who are you?

To clarify another point, P4P isn't my technology, it's an open standard being worked by by over 50 organizations, including the major P2P companies, many ISP's, universities, and individuals.

In terms of whether your favorite web site supports P4P, well, P4P is an open standard that anyone interested is free to implement. BitTorrent is in the P4P Working Group, and has been since its initial formation. As to whether a specific web site chooses to support P4P, well, that's up to them.

Re:p4p means

[Anonymous Coward]

From Pando's web page:

Unlike most P2P platforms, Pando is not an open, fully decentralized P2P network. Pando is a managed, hybrid P2P content delivery platform designed to maintain central control of your content distribution at all times. All networking communications are routed via Pando's trackers and web services, giving you complete control of where and when your media is delivered. Consumers only supply bandwidth and storage to content that they have proactivaly consumed. Their machines are never used for anything else and only sparingly when needed.

Nuff said.

Re:p4p means

[laird]

Sorry, I thought that we were talking about P4P, not Pando.

Pando's network is a managed p2p network. This gives us the economic advantages of p2p delivery, but with the control and quality of service of a centrally managed system. That being said, Pando doesn't notify your ISP when you connect to a our trackers.

This all has nothing to do with P4P. P4P doesn't notify your ISP, or anyone else, every time you connect to a tracker.

Re:p4p means

[manwithmanyquestions]

It seems like a generally good thing that Comcast and the other major ISPs are embracing P2P. But I agree - it would be naive to think the sudden turnabout is only to make consumers happy. The ISPs know that the explosion of online video is a threat to their core business models - pre-packaged pay-tiers, subscription service, and collecting ad revenues. Comcast is in trouble If people aren't watching their cable channels or using VOD service because they can access the content on Joost, Hulu or Comedy central.com online a la carte, and/or for free. So, I think the BitTorrent move has to - at least, in part - with addressing the rise of web-based video and consumers' growing appetite for VOD. In the case of cable companies, adaptation might be especially critical since bandwidth constraints in the last mile can lead to significant degradation of service. To the extent that Cablecos can work with P4P working group members in developing a "network aware" peer-to-peer system with a standardized protocol that - as has been claimed by Verizon and others - will lead to up to a 90 percent bandwidth savings and facilitate the transmission real-time high-def IPTV as well as VOD - it will be an value proposition for the Cablecos who can stay relevant and stagger deployment of DOCSIS3 as well the transition to an IP based system.

Really?

[TubeSteak]

Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work.
(*) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once

That ISPs have found some technological work around does nothing to change the fact that they'd rather screw around with the network than build more infrastructure.

Fundamentally, either Net Neutrality is a good idea or it isn't.
The specific circumstances are only tangently relevant.

Re:Really?

[thegrassyknowl]

That ISPs have found some technological work around does nothing to change the fact that they'd rather screw around with the network than build more infrastructure.

I sometimes hate living where I do because we get small data allocations each month compared to "unlimited" and we pay a premium for that level of access.

Yet, my ISP is profitable and they continue to roll out new infrastructure. They're one of the foundation customers for a massive pipe into Japan(?) that's being built. They have a huge national network and peer with all of the major telcos and providers so speeds are always good.

Having a limited download allowance each month (pay for more data, use it how you want basically) allows them to subsidise the network build. The tiered data allowance plans also mean that if I don't use very much I can choose a cheaper plan and not be subsidising the high end users rather than everyone being on "unlimited" plans.

Pay for play is good - as long as once you pay you can use your allocation on whatever you see fit with not throttling or shaping of sites, providers or protocols. Use up all your allocation? No problem either put up with slower Internet, get cut off or pay for more.

OH!!!

[deathtopaulw]

It all makes sense now
here's my impression of comcast:

"We hate p2p! GRARRRR"
*government glares at them*
"Wait... we love p2p look we even use it ourselves!"
*pat on the head* (tax breaks and a blind eye to some future shiftiness)

Can the Gov't regulate?

[g-san]

Can an industry that redefines itself every 18 months be regulated by a government organization that takes 60+ months to pass legislation regulating said industry?

Re:Can the Gov't regulate?

[Rinisari]

Amen. That's all I have to say. That, and it's any regulation of the Internet would be unconstitutional.

Re:Can the Gov't regulate?

[Anonymous Coward]

Can an industry that redefines itself every 18 months be regulated by a government organization that takes 60+ months to pass legislation regulating said industry? Yes.

Re:Can the Gov't regulate?

[geekoid]

Yes, and it doesn't redefine itself every 18 months. Don't confuse new buzzwords and marketing for marginally faster speeds as 'redefining the industry'

Re:Can the Gov't regulate?

[Jurily]

Which constitution? The internet is worldwide, you know.

Re:Can the Gov't regulate?

[WiglyWorm]

In fact, I would go so far as to say that that is exactly the problem!

Were the broadband internet industry truely an industry that redefined itself regularly, then they would find creative solutions for the issues that "plague" them.

People are using too much bandwidth, so the first thing the ISPs do? Start covertly breaking connections between P2P users to eliminate bandwidth usage while yelling and screaming that consumers shouldn't be allowed to use the internet for what consumers want to use it for, and that we should be bound to only approved services. Were it up to the ISPs we'd be viewing the web of 1992 to this day.

Make sure the net stays neutral, and they will be forced to inovate, giving us better services for our money. As it is, the internet is basically Arpanet with fatter pipes.

Re:Can the Gov't regulate?

[doas777]

Interesting. I'm somewhat torn on this one.

I really don't trust utilities providers. I've seen enough to know that my state's utility regulatory commission does a good job balancing the needs of the providers with the needs of the public.

I really don't want regulation of the internet, but when I think about it, it's the content of the internet that I want unregulated, not the means by which corporate titans mangle my clickstream.

In the long run, I see NN as the only way to keep the telco's and the mafiaa from destroying the internet I love, and sucking money out of my pocket in the process.

Re:Can the Gov't regulate?

[DragonWriter]

Can an industry that redefines itself every 18 months be regulated by a government organization that takes 60+ months to pass legislation regulating said industry?

The government organization that does regulation doesn't pass legislation at all.

And, except perhaps from a PR standpoint, there is no industry that "redefines itself every 18 months".

Re:Can the Gov't regulate?

[crispin_bollocks]

Could be worse, a standards body coould be working on it! I remember years of trade rag articles aboout how ISDN was coming. Anybody old enough to remember the S-100 bus? Seems to me that became an IEEE standard several years after it faded into legacy.

Re:Can the Gov't regulate?

[budgenator]

Dude I built computer with RCA 1802 CPU and 255 bytes of Static RAM and still haven't got that sucker running!

In other news...

[rastoboy29]

Since we didn't have a hurricane last week, obviously Global Warming is not a problem.

Re:In other news...

[jez9999]

Careful. Many US senators have been fooled by that very argument.

They never say what they mean.

[sr8outtalotech]

I think the brain trust at Comcast realized that they could turn torrent users to their advantage. I suspect sometime in the future they'll push a P4P client that has content delivery network written all over it. You can see the beginnings of this with Bittorrent 6.0+.

Still Waiting

[introspekt.i]

I'm still waiting on P6P. Ain't upgrading 'til it comes out.

NOTHING to do with Peer to Peer

[EdIII]

P2P, P4P, A2M, blah blah blah FUCKING blah.

This has nothing to do with any file sharing technology. Nothing. They want the government, and those BASTARD consumers, to believe that "marketplace forces, rather than government regulation" prevailed and solved the problem.

Well the REAL problem was ISP's selling unlimited bandwidth contracts. Right there is the heart of the issue, one they don't want to talk about. They advertise impressive speeds (throughput) and unlimited "internet" which is basically no limitation on the amount of data you could transfer in a given month.

If that is true, which legally they should be held to AT LEAST the unlimited transfers, then P2P is irrelevant isn't it? Sure it has its problems, but none of that is the consumer's fault. They are using their "unlimited" connections in a "unlimited" way.

So now they cannot deliver on those "impressive" speeds since they were overselling their real capacity in the first place.

To put it another way.... It would be like an Airline company saying you could fly as far as you want up to 3 times a month for $99 dollars a month. They screw up getting greedy and all of the sudden they can't actually deliver 3 times a month since all the flights are constantly full.

No, don't buy this fairy tale from Comcast. The consumers are all entitled, BY CONTRACT no less, to do what they are doing.

If P4P ends up vastly increasing the efficiency of the consumer communications going across their network, then that is GREAT for anyone that owns a part of Comcast. More profit margin returning.

It DOES not mean it should be an end to Net Neutrality or government regulation of their sneaky little asses....

Re:NOTHING to do with Peer to Peer

[nlawalker]

No kidding. I feel like this scenario of the ISP's backing themselves into a corner with "unlimited" contracts is similar to the sub-prime debt crises that put the United States in the middle of a debt whirlwind. They throw these contracts/loans out there thinking "we can capitalize on this resource (homes/internet) that everyone thinks they basically have a right to nowadays by providing favorable looking terms to even the lowest schmuck."

The difference, though, is that the mortgage creditors got in over their head in bad loans because of people that didn't know what they were doing (jumping into an ARM that they wouldn't be able to handle later). The ISPs got in over their head by people that *knew* what they were doing (internet users making the most of their unlimited connections). Now that more and more people can do the same thing with easily accessible tools, the ISPs are up shit creek.

Re:NOTHING to do with Peer to Peer

[Anonymous Coward]

> If P4P ends up vastly increasing the efficiency of the consumer communications going across their network, then that is GREAT for anyone that owns a part of Comcast. More profit margin returning.

Also great for light users and heavy users that are willing to pay for the speed. For example, with my mother the performance of her low-end Comcast connection would be improved by discouraging the high usage people in her area. Comcast may even drop the rates because they no longer have to support high users with their cheaper plans. For me, I'm impatient and willing to pay more for a faster connection. By charging me more Comcast has an incentive to improve their network to keep customers like me since we pay more. With the current system my mother pays too much and I pay too little. By charging for usage, you have something closer to a free market than the current system.

Of course the people that lose are the ones that want more bandwidth than they're willing to pay for.

Re:NOTHING to do with Peer to Peer

[Naturalis Philosopho]

"Comcast may even drop the rates..." Oh, my god, I haven't laughed so hard in years!

Re:NOTHING to do with Peer to Peer

[EdIII]

You are talking about the benefits of P4P which are good, but I think you are naive if you think they will drop the rates. Well, maybe naive is a bit too harsh, certainly a wishful thinker or hopeless optimist. Right now the ISP's are making MORE money with their payment "arrangements" with the customer and then bitching about it, then they would be if they did it the right way.

As for, "the people that lose are the ones that want more bandwidth than they're willing to pay for", those are the FREELOADERS. They want it all and don't want to pay for it. Right now the contracts allow them to do this, and the ISP's just underestimated how many cheap greedy bastards are out there. Most people are willing to pay to get a premium when it is important to them. So I don't like these people either, but whether or not I like them does not make them wrong about the interpretation of "unlimited" in their contracts.

One more thing about the freeloaders... the majority of us are not angry that they actually use the unlimited, we are more angry that they are paying the same price we are, getting more, and then we get less. It's like a Chinese all-you-can-eat buffet. 9 of us walk in and spend 10$. "Free Willy" walks in and spend 10$ as well. 9 of us have to fight a snarling hunger-driven-insane whale to get just a "little" Kung Pao and Lo Mein. Free Willy leaves after destroying the buffet and the rest of us have to wait a WHOLE FOUR HOURS for the cooks to catch up and give us our fair portion of the trays. We want to be mad at Free Willy, but the restaurant is also responsible for not making the food quickly enough and greasing up the doors to get Free Willy through it in the first place.

As for the plans, I have the best idea possible as well as the FAIREST. It is also one that I currently enjoy as colocation customer.

First, you pay a basic connection fee. This includes the costs of the hookup, the physical infrastructure, taxes, etc. This should be the same for all subscribers regardless of connection type. So something like 15$ per month JUST to get connected.

Second, you choose your "Speed". This is the throughput of your connection. The ISP should guarantee the BOTTOM of this range. So the starting package should be something like 1Mb/s burstable to 5Mb/s. A premium might be 5 Mb/s burstable to 20Mb/s. The ISP should only have to guarantee the bottom numbers in the range. Congestion will affect this of course, but if they are not total fucking greedy idiots about their network they will KNOW just what is the MOST they can offer with 99.9% uptime and reliability and what would be possible with say only 90% reliability and then offer that as a range.

Third, you choose your total transfer package. Before we start on that :

**None of this fucking unlimited shit anymore. "Unlimited" was something the marketing department came up with and then the IT department created plans to perform "ETHNIC CLEANSING" of said marketing department for doing it. No IT guy on the planet EVER wants to offer anything unlimited or 100% guaranteed. It might be because we all know what that word actually means, and not the marketing dictionary which contain words like "Unicorn" and "Leprechaun".**

Some of the plans I have come across make the "mistake" of doing it in Mb/s. Colocation accounts are usually owned by people that have the technical knowledge to convert between Megabytes/s and Megabits/s, so they can do this in a way that makes sense to us. For the average person it is easier to explain it in Gigabytes per month, or in KB/s which is what all web browsers, uTorrent, etc. display their speeds as. This basically means that if you took all the traffic in a given month and "poured" it into a "bucket" the "water line" would be in KB/s. So if at the end of the month you transferred 345.8 Gigabytes that would equate out to an average of 133 KB/S. That would probably represent the average of the P2P nightmare customers that are out there.

So plans could start out a

Re:NOTHING to do with Peer to Peer

[ncohafmuta]

oh please, noone who has read their Comcast TOS recently believes they have unlimited service. and any internet savvy user has realized for some time now that the number of ISPs that actually offer literal 'unlimited' service in regards to bandwidth is few and far in between. every ISP over-susbscribes its bandwidth, and advertises services in their main print that they can't live up to, hence the fine print. it's like those coupons for dept. stores that say in big letters, '15% off everything in the store', and then go on to say in fine print, 'except brand x, brand y, brand z, etc..' not that it all pisses me off any less.

Re:NOTHING to do with Peer to Peer

[fireheadca]

I've heard this 'unlimited' arguement before on a 10-hour
dial-up plan.

To some 'Unlimited' means unlimited access 24/7 - not unlimited download/upload.

---
Free the internet

Re:NOTHING to do with Peer to Peer

[EdIII]

"To some 'Unlimited' means unlimited access 24/7 - not unlimited download/upload."

Thank You.

I had never heard that before from anybody, and it only proves my point that much more effectively. "Unlimited" can be interpreted in many different ways and is a vague term. However, when it is used in BOLD and as a major sales point, and not some fine print, the average citizen can only go by the definition in the dictionary:

unlimited
adj.
1. Having no restrictions or controls: an unlimited travel ticket.
2. Having or seeming to have no boundaries; infinite: an unlimited horizon.
3. Without qualification or exception; absolute: unlimited self-confidence.

Now since it is left up to the customer, I would say that "unlimited" then applies to the ENTIRETY of the services being provided. So you can access it 24/7 AND have no limits on Uploads/Downloads.

Until the ISP's define unlimited to be something specific like "24/7" as you suggest, then it is up to the consumer to use their imagination. With "unlimited" I can imagine quite a bit.

Re:NOTHING to do with Peer to Peer

[OldManAndTheC]

Well the REAL problem was ISP's selling unlimited bandwidth contracts. Right there is the heart of the issue, one they don't want to talk about.

Time for the airline analogy. Airlines oversell flights on a regular basis. It makes sense for them to do this, because an unsold seat has no value once the plane takes off, so they have to do whatever they can to fill up as many seats as possible, even if it means inconveniencing passengers. They don't advertise that they overbook, so many victims of overbooking are taken aback when they find out about it.

Bandwidth is similar to airliner seats in that unused capacity is not recoverable. ISP's want to sell all the bandwidth they can, so they oversell, promising users "unlimited" bandwidth, which is impossible to deliver.

A similar thing happens in other businesses. If every cellphone user chose to make a call at the same time, many calls would not go through. Or if every member of your health club showed up at the same time to use the treadmills, some would have to be turned away. (OK that last example was the wrong one to use on Slashdot, but you get the point.)

But compare how an airline handles a overbooking situation with how an ISP handles a bandwidth-hungry P2P user -- the airline will offer incentives (such as free tickets) to passengers to take another flight. If that doesn't work they'll pay cash and put overbooked passengers on another flight. (Imagine an ISP giving a Bittorrent user a "bandwidth usage certificate" to complete a download that was interrupted due to the ISP choosing to throttle user's connection).

By law, airlines must offer compensation to overbooked passengers. This is a sensible policy, since it makes best use of limited resources while not placing the full burden of the inconvenience of the passengers (recognizing that getting bumped is not fun).

ISP's must be made to understand that there are ramifications for overselling. If they are not willing to make reasonable policies on their own, the government should step in and do it for them.

Re:NOTHING to do with Peer to Peer

[smoker2]

I'm sorry, but have you forgotten that you are posting on /. ?
There is no such thing as unlimited downloads unless you have unlimited bandwidth. AFAIK, no-one is selling unlimited bandwidth. Here in the UK most ISPs offer "up to 8Mbps" bandwidth allocations, which is dependent on location relative to the exchange. Natural download limits are related to your available bandwidth.
For example, I have an "up to 8Mbps" connection, but due to my location I'm getting a connection of roughly 6Mbps. That equates to roughly 760KBps, which in turn should allow me to transfer a total of 1.84 TERABYTES of data per month. Is this a reasonable figure for domestic use ? I think not. For one thing, you would need 4 * 500GB hard disks per month to store the data, unless you were deleting everything constantly. Also, I would like to know what you can actually download, that requires that amount of traffic. Even if I'm downloading movies at full dvd9 size, then I would be expecting to download and watch over 208 full length films per month, which amounts to nearly 7 films per day. Unfortunately, I work for a living, and have to sleep occasionally. Not to mention that finding 208 new films to watch every month is impossible.
I think fair use means what it says, and the scenario I described above, does not meet the definition. If you really need to have that much data coming over your phat pipe, then get a commercial solution, but unless you have a large income then you won't be able to afford it.
So how come somebody paying less that $50/month expects to get more throughput than commercial subscribers paying 100 times as much ?
I put it down to greed and ignorance. Ignorance is due to the fact that to the general public, 8Mbps means 8 megabytes per second, so their expectations are off by a factor of 8 to start with. Not to mention the fact that to achieve the absolute maximum, the connection would have to be no more than 1 hop away on the same network. To expect to get full advertised speed when accessing a website hosted on another continent is completely unreasonable, and that's without taking into account other sources of congestion, like *other users* !
The second element is greed. While you may applaud some idiot for trying to enforce the "all you can eat" offer in some random restaurant, would you expect to do the same thing, day in day out ? Do you even respect someone for attempting that ? But somehow, because it's on the internet, it's ok.
Now, having said all that, the ISPs are wrong to state Unlimited downloads, because as I have shown, there is a natural limit imposed by the bandwidth and the conditions. But for the average domestic user, their connection is by and large, unlimited. They are never going to hit 1.8TB in a month, even if they were the only person on their network. I have always taken the term unlimited to mean that the ISP doesn't restrict my downloads, i.e. blocking connections when I hit some secret figure, but to be honest, I've never found that to be the case. BT as my ISP states that it will rate limit p2p at busy times so as not to negatively affect the network, but surely that's a good thing ? Why should some kid torrenting the latest badly shot cam of a shit movie affect my download from linux isos ?
In short, get into the real world where you have to co-exist with the rest of the population, and stop expecting everything as your exclusive right, to the detriment of all around you. If you really expect advertising to tell the truth then go buy the next *best* thing, because I guarantee that it won't be the best at all, but that's advertising for you. An insightful buyer of any product or service will educate themselves about that product or service before signing on the bottom line, and should know what they're getting.
The sad part about all the fuss that is made about the "unlimited" claims, is that no-one has even come close to requiring the amount of transfer that they are claiming. It's all just so much emo wanking over a misperceived loss of service, fue

Are They Regulated or Not?

[hardburn]

Just make up your mind about being regulated or not. If you want to take tax payer money, then you're going to be regulated. If you don't want to be regulated, you can't have tax payer money.

Re:Are They Regulated or Not?

[PPH]

If you don't want to be regulated, you can't have tax payer money. Or build your system on taxpayer-owned property.

Comcast nowhere near neutral

[Skapare]

I called Comcast today to find out if they are still non-neutral. I was informed that they still do not support Linux. While Linux and BSD can be made to work on Comcast easily enough today, how do we know that this level of access will continue? They could change things tomorrow and break the ability of Linux and BSD to access the internet.

Re:Comcast nowhere near neutral

[AnotherFangirl]

There are a lot of things that Comcast is not neutral about from what I hear and I don't think these "marketplace forces" are going to help them ever really be neutral.

Re:Comcast nowhere near neutral

[Anonymous Coward]

Not support <> don't like. It just means that if you don't have Windows or MacOS their monkeys have no frigging clue how to troubleshoot anything, and honestly, would you really want their "support" screwing with your *nix machine? I mean yeah worst case they drop cat5 and only provision usb modems, but I'm pretty sure that'd give 'em more headaches than they want to deal with, though some satellite ISPs already do that unless you get premium service...

Re:Comcast nowhere near neutral

[Nullav]

I didn't know it was possible to contract Down Syndrome from someone, on the Internet, no less. Unless they start supplying some crackshit USB-only modems with only Windows drivers or drop TCP/IP (which would also screw over the Windows users), you can safely leave that tinfoil in the fridge. Also, with more reasons than 'I sometimes download Linux ISOs', Comcast would summarily be litigated into oblivion for forcing all of their customers to use a single OS.

Re:Comcast nowhere near neutral

[davolfman]

Crackshit USB modems are probably considered as an attractive option to them.

Re:Comcast nowhere near neutral

[slashtivus]

Most routers do not run windows. They would have to break the internet to stop any TCP/IP compliant device to stop working. I use Kubuntu from time to time and it works fine. They don't officially support it since it is a small market share of tech-savvy people, so that is somewhat understandable. That said I helped my neighbor lady out yesterday and Comcast support had done more to wreck her connection than help (1/2 hour on the phone for her). I had her back up in running in about 5 minutes of fixing all their mistakes. Count yourself lucky that they do not "support" you.

Re:Comcast nowhere near neutral

[teebob21]

I wish I had mod points. That was legitimately the funniest post I've seen on /. in months. +1, my friend; +1.

Re:Comcast nowhere near neutral

[Repossessed]

If Comcast could kill routers on the customers end they'd do it in a heartbeat.

Tit for Tat

[kentrel]

P4P

The only solution.

Minor correction

[geekoid]

"Just make up your mind about being regulated or not. If you want to take tax payer money, then you're going to be regulated. If you don't want to be regulated, you can't have tax payer money."

and anything you built with taxpayer money is open to all.

Re:Minor correction

[Anonymous Coward]

and anything you built with taxpayer money is open to all.

      Yeah, you just try using that one on the guards at the Pentagon as you try to walk in.

P2P is a really bad example for them to use

[Anonymous Coward]

Eh, except that allowing the ISP's, etc to not treat network traffic neutrally results in exactly what Comcast was doing, throttling and throwing other wrenches into P2P traffic. For fuck's sake, P2P is an example of why we, the people, need net neutrality more than ever. I do not want my internet connection to another left subject to corporate whims, and whether that other pays enough or is on a preferred network.

Seconded

[Jane Q. Public]

That is what this is about, and I have been saddened by the fact that even those in on the consumer side have been reluctant to talk about it.

Cable subscribers, forget what it says in the small print. You signed a contract that said "unlimited" in BOLD print. So it should have been unlimited. And if they did not have the money, as they claimed -- even after charging those outrageous rates -- to make them unlimited, they should have stopped advertising the accounts as "unlimited"!!!

This is not genius-level material. They defrauded consumers. Without regulation, they will continue to do the same.

Re:Seconded

[Ian Alexander]

Cable subscribers, forget what it says in the small print. You signed a contract that said "unlimited" in BOLD print. The real bitch of it is that you can't ignore the small print, not if you want to do something about it.

Re:Seconded

[Jane Q. Public]

You can still argue in court that the bold print outranks the small print... and in fact it does, according to every legal principle I have ever heard or read. IANAL, but again: this is not genius-level material.

Muddying clear water is what this is.

[__aailob1448]

Why do people fall for this crap? p4p? No need for regulation? WHAT?

What is needed is to lay down lots of fiber where none exists. PERIOD! How complicated is that? We need more and more throughput and lower and lower latencies. The only goal is for every home to have fiber.

Not Wimax, not powerlines, not 812.n or any other unreliable, slow crap. Those are only temporary bandaids and should only be used as such or to complement fiber. All data that can travel through fiber should do so.

Fucking cocksuckers and their bullshit.

It costs money but it increases global wealth. End of story.

Re:Muddying clear water is what this is.

[Thundersnatch]

I have a shovel you can borrow. Call me when you're done.

Oh, you're not going to do it yourself? Then who is going to install and maintain all that fiber? Surely you don't want the government to do it? The government (local, state, or federal) can't pave fucking roads without massive waste and lots of outright fraud, and you want them to run a high-tech infrastructure?

Maybe we can have convicted hackers and meth dealers build and maintain it as part of their community service.

Re:Muddying clear water is what this is.

[Thundersnatch]

$1500 per household for deployment x 100 million US residences = ~150 BILLION DOLLARS in captial expenditure.

Pre-emtive "insightful" comment from pinko college kid living of Daddy's money: "That's way less than we've spent in Iraq..."

...which only illustrates this: If we ask the governement to build out this network, it will cost about $1 Trillion with all the overage, delays, and waste. I'd rather take over another oil-rich country for that sort of investment.

Re:Muddying clear water is what this is.

[__aailob1448]

That's how Sweden, Japan and South Korea did it. They gave a shovel and a hundred yards of fiber to everybody.

Don't be an idiot. It doesn't matter who does it as long as it's done. Companies, government, as long as joe schmoe gets his cheap fast fiber.

Re:Muddying clear water is what this is.

[jez9999]

I'd rather take over another oil-rich country for that sort of investment.

Erm, why? The iraq war has crucified the US's standing in the world, helped to breed a new generation of anti-US terrorists, and resulted in the deaths of thousands of US troops. What possible reason could you have for wanting this over anything??

Re:Muddying clear water is what this is.

[Thundersnatch]

That's how Sweden, Japan and South Korea did it. They gave a shovel and a hundred yards of fiber to everybody.

First, that's not how they did it. Do some research on the subject and you'll understand why those schemes could never work in the USA (our population is far less urban, and we actually value individual property rights). Sweden only has 30% broadband penetration, so I cannot figure out why it is held up as some sort of shining example by the Slashdot crowd.

Don't be an idiot. It doesn't matter who does it as long as it's done. Companies, government, as long as joe schmoe gets his cheap fast fiber.

Yes, it really does matter how it's done. If it's not done economically, it will generate crippling debt. And why is cheap, fast fiber such a priority? If you ask most Americans, there are quite a few items higher up on the TODO list. If you want it, you pay for it. Don't be so cavalier with other people's money.

Re:Muddying clear water is what this is.

[shentino]

Which is exactly why companies WONT do it without subsidies.

If I'm a greedy "fucking cocksucker" I unfortunately am not going to give a damn about anyone's profit but my own.

and why shouldn't I? If I go altruistic, I'm going to get fucked royally by my competitors, who would take advantage of my niceness so quickly my head would spin.

anyone who has seen the TV show "friend or foe" will know quite well what I'm talking about.

Self interest is what is wrecking things.

One company that is out for blood forces everyone else to follow suit.

Because cooperation is, by nature, a cooperative effort, and all it takes is one greedy bastard to ruin things for everyone.

I won't feel comfortable being nice unless I could trust everyone else to do so.

But, if everyone was nice...the opportunity to screw them all would be sooo tempting... ...which is exactly why my competitors wouldn't play nice.

I remember this from long ago.

[symbolset]

Satellite phones. When you made a call it was always long distance and always billed both ways. At hideous rates.

Hey, whatever happened to the ubiquitous satellite phone anyway? That didn't seem to come about. It's like they all died out from competition or something.

Waves hand...

[Nick Driver]

Why do people fall for this crap? p4p? No need for regulation? WHAT?

Waves hand...
These aren't the P-number-P's you're looking for. We can go about our business.

What they really mean is....

[Bobzibub]

..that regulation mandating net neutrality will cause the ISPs no harm because of Peee for Peee technology!

400% - someone explain the math to me

[dwater]

Sorry, but it's been too long since my maths classes at school.

I read this,

"According to the study, redoing the P2P into what they call P4P can reduce the number of 'hops' by an average of 400%."

and am confused. Surely reducing a number by 100% brings it to zero. What does reducing a number by 400% mean?

10 becomes -30?

Re:400% - someone explain the math to me

[ZombieRoboNinja]

In layman's terms, it means that your computer has already downloaded 40% of the porn torrent you're going to click on at 2am tonight.

Re:400% - someone explain the math to me

[Anonymous Coward]

Improving by 100% means you've doubled performance (old - new / new). 400% means you've quintupled (5x) the performance.

It's probably simply the effect of lay journalism.

Re:400% - someone explain the math to me

[laird]

"According to the study, redoing the P2P into what they call P4P can reduce the number of 'hops' by an average of 400%."

and am confused. Surely reducing a number by 100% brings it to zero. What does reducing a number by 400% mean?

10 becomes -30? Yeah, I can't say where that number came from. So I'll explain what I do know.

Without P4P the data delivered within the ISP travelled across an average of 5.5 long distance links, and with P4P the data travelled across an average of 0.89 long distance links. The average is so low because a whopping 58% of the data was delivered within the same metro area, and the rest came largely from adjacent metro areas.

The result of this was that for delivering a given volume of data, P4P reduced internal link utilization by 6x (5.5/0.89 is about 6).

Re:400% - someone explain the math to me

[Anonymous Coward]

They used Verizon math?

Re:400% - someone explain the math to me

[dwater]

Yes, I understand increasing by 100%, but reducing by anything more than 100% makes it go negative, as far as I can figure.

Pay for Play

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

In some circles P4P means "Pay for Play" aka hookers.

Seems entirely appropriate that Comcast would claim that the hookers they sent to congress and the FCC are enough to take are of any problems.

FYI

[Anonymous Coward]

http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=487700&cid=22750764

Re:FYI

[dwater]

Yes, this thread is interesting, most notably the post about the word 'reduced' (and 'increased') being either multiplicative or additive.

To me, it depends on the word following 'reduced' - in this case 'by', which is always additive/subtractive.

If they had used 'reduced to' then that would be clear too.

The '%' is always multiplicative.

So, acceptable alternative might be :

1) reduced by 75% of the original value
2) reduced to 25% of the original value
3) reduced to a quarter of the original value

I can't see any way to get 400% into it.

Perhaps the post about it actually being incorrect due to common misconceptions is more applicable. That post does say that the meaning is clear though, which it clearly isn't to everyone...

Doesn't pass the sniff test

[Whuffo]

That's some pretty impressive spin that Comcast and ATT are putting on the issue - but I suspect it won't come close to fooling the feds. They've been selling something they can't deliver - and are now looking for ways to put a quick bandaid on the problem.

It's not working. It should be entertaining to see what kind of BS they come up with next...

Re:Failzor5!

[Anonymous Coward]

Sadly, this comment makes more sense than most. In conclusion, your ideas intrigue me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.

The sky is falling!

[dreamchaser]

I think a chunk of it just hit your head.

Market forces my foot

[John Jamieson]

lies lies lies

Ok, lets pretend that p4p is benign...
Even if that is true, It was not market forces that brought it about.

Comcast could clearly see they were about to be regulated... It was the fear of legislation, not market forces that made them adapt.

if you think Comcast BW is a problem now

[LM741N]

Just wait until all those HDTV channels start showing up on Comcast cable as well. How much information can they put through a length of RG-6 coax? You really need fiber to every house. Or run Heliax hardline to each house at 10Ghz. Then you'd have some BW. But its a bitch hooking hard line to a cable box, haha.

Corporates fear regulation

[freedom_india]

Both AT&T and Comcast know the upcoming government WILL impose Net Neutrality.
So to head off this, they agree to voluntarily submit to equality.
I suggest that IF a corporate says there is no need for regulation and agrees to voluntarily do something, then it MUST be regulated in law with severe penalties.
After all, as corporates themselves claim, if there is way they will do something that is disliked, then what harm is there in having a law that puts penalties if the corporate violates it.

Comcast was an idiot to throttle torrents now.
It should have waited until the next president was in power and then strike.

Re:Corporates fear regulation

[budgenator]

I'd have thought it better to set a precedence under the lame-duck Bush and while everybody is preoccupied with Iraq and OMG-AGW.

NOTHING to do with Physics.

[Anonymous Coward]

"So I don't like these people either, but whether or not I like them does not make them wrong about the interpretation of "unlimited" in their contracts."

The only people with the slashdot interpretation are those who failed physics. You all think you're smarter than everyone else (joe public), but consistently can't understand why a physical network has limitations.