Slashdot Mirror
ISPs & P2P, Getting Along Without Getting Cozy
penguin-geek writes "Researchers at Northwestern University have discovered a way to ease the tension between ISPs and P2P users. As we all know, there's been a growing tension between Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and their customers' P2P file-sharing services, and this has driven service providers to forcefully reduce P2P traffic at the expense of unhappy subscribers and the risk of government investigations. Recently, some ISPs have tried to fix the problem through partnerships with certain P2P applications. The Ono project represents an alternative solution: a software service that allows P2P clients to efficiently identify nearby peers, without requiring any kind of cozy relationship between ISPs and P2P users. Using results collected from over 150,000 users, they have found that their system locates peers along paths that have two orders of magnitude lower latency and 30% lower loss rates than those picked at random by BitTorrent, and that these high-quality paths can lead to significant improvements in transfer rates. In challenged settings where peers are overloaded in terms of available bandwidth, Ono provides a 31% average download-rate improvement; in environments with large available bandwidth, Ono increases download rates by 207% on average (and improves median rates by 883%). Ono is available as a plugin for the Azureus BitTorrent client, an open tracker and an standalone service you can integrate into any P2P system."
Sounds like a setup. FBI is on the way to kick your door down for downloading those mp3s.
Should be made standard into the apps if it does all that it claims.
nice idea...but looks like its piggybacking on Akamai's database for geo/ip mappings. I wonder if Akamai's TOS is friendly to this sort of stuff. In any case, this sort of feature could be built into the BT protocol itself to achieve the same end if necessary.
An old-timer with old-timey ideas.
As such, this will likely get spun as making the process of copyright infringement more efficient. Will that lead to this being blocked or otherwise pushed back against?
Take it to the limit, everybody to the limit, come on, everybody fhqwhgads.
They are looking at the PHYSICAL location of the machines.
... that means NOTHING with regard to hops and latency between us.
As far as I am aware, most bittorrent clients already search for the machines with the fewest hops and lowest latency. Translation: machines on the same NETWORK as them.
Because if I am on Comcast at home and you have DSL through ATT at home and our homes are within 500' of each other
That's been the trouble with these "peer to peer" protocols. The routing algorithms have been horribly inefficient. It's quite possible to have the same data flowing in both directions on the same pipe. Multiple copies, even.
It might be cheaper for the telecom industry (which is big) to buy out the music industry (which is tiny) and just cache the RIAA's entire output on local servers. Just cacheing the top 100 releases or so might cut traffic in half.
(This won't scale to movies, though. Movies are bigger and more expensive to make.)
I'm no expert in this field, but this sounds to me like computers in isolated areas would suddenly get the shaft. Am I missing something?
Can't the torrent clients simply check the TTL value and then prefer closer peers?
Man talk about re-invent the wheel.
One thing that many people do not think about at first (but realize when it's pointed out to them) is that mechanisms which try to identify peers on the same ISP's network are anticompetitive. (That's why only the biggest carriers, like AT&T, support them.) Here's why. The cable and telephone monopolies have so many customers that the odds are there will be someone else on the same provider's network with the requested files. Small ISPs, on the other hand, will rarely if ever have someone with that file and so will still experience a great impact from the cost shifting and congestion caused by P2P. Hence, you can see why the big guys are cautiously embracing schemes like "P4P" as an anticompetitive weapon to block new entrants -- particularly wireless ones.
Setting aside the Net Neutrality implications of this development if it were to enter mass deployment (use this P2P software!), ISPs will loathe to actually install this technology. It would leave them implicitly condoning P2P, the majority of which is used for copyright infringement. Besides, it'd cost them actual money, compared to lobbying and whining at government.
Doing the Right Thing should not be preempted by making a buck.
It's an interesting approach - you can also do things like identifying IP addresses by BGP Autonomous System Number, which will tell you what sites are in the same ISP, but you might get better P2P performance by connecting to a peer on another ISP in your same city than a peer who's on your ISP but across the country. (Most ISPs seem to assign ASNs on roughly a continent or country level.) So sometimes you'll get better P2P performance by picking close ping times, but as the article says, pinging lots of potential peers can take a long time.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
What about the Comcast effect? Although a joint venture would seem to help both sides, the bottom line from the network/legal/politician/*AA side is [voice of James Hetfield] P2P BAAAAD! [/voice].
Making P2P more efficient by aligning peer selection with ISP structure makes the ISP side less grouchy about it. This is good. The more precisely you can do that, the more you reduce the impact on the ISP's performance and costs, as well as getting better performance for the P2P system. So they're generally going to like it, though it's obviously a balancing act, because better alignment means you can also find the bottlenecks in your ISP and fill them.
So no, as long as you're not bothering Akamai too much, and as long as this works reasonably well with your ISPs, it's not going to get pushback.
Back when Napster was still around, it did some work with some universities to set up peering student-student rather than student-outsider, because that way most of the bandwidth stayed on the fat cheap university LANs rather than the thinner and rapidly-overloaded links to the Internet. Some of this happened naturally (students would show up as having fast connections, so students would generally upload from other students, but outsiders would also try to upload from students.) Napster could do this fairly easily, because they had a centralized database. Bittorrent and most other P2P systems today are designed to avoid having a centralized database, because it was a target.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
The current torrent clients do not RANDOMLY pick an address. They check latency and hops.
Sure, it's easy to get HUGE IMPROVEMENTS when you choose to compare yourself against something that no one does anyway.
I'll wait to see what their app does when compared to the current methodology of the clients. I'd guess that it would be WORSE than simply measuring the latency and hops. Which is already done and done rather more efficiently than their method of querying 3rd party servers.
AFAIK there are often ISPs in BFE that can give you a decent ttl. It's just a PITA getting them to honor their TOS so your packets don't go MIA.
Operator, give me the number for 911!
I understand why location aware choking is helpful to ISPs - it reduces border traffic and their costs. I can also understand how location aware peer selection on the tracker can help torrents that have too many peers for every peer to be connected to every other peer. So does this client plugin or any other client based location aware selection/choking make any real difference for users? The classic tit-for-tat choking algorithm means you unchoke the peers giving you the fastest download. It doesn't matter if they are close or near, have high latency or not - fast is fast and slow is slow. In the end, throughput is the only thing that matters. Maybe location can be a useful weight for optimistic unchoke, so you can potentially find fast peers sooner, but that seems like a pretty small optimization.
Unfortunately, the paper for Ono isn't available yet.
Cool, now me and my neighbors will have something to talk about when we get notices from RIAA! Talk about bringing the love to a local level
This may be a stupid question, but if ISPs are looking to save on bandwidth, why don't they turn on IPv6? IPv6 multicast solves the problem of efficient 1:N distribution way better than P2P apps.
Have a large file you want to distribute and want to do so using 2mbps of bandwidth? Pump the file in parallel using 1mbps, 512kbps, 256kbps, 128kbps, 64kbps and 32kbps so that people with all kinds of pipes can download it, and pump it in a loop. Add some amount of redundancy to each stream, and you are good to go.
It's even easier for real-time content such as TV and radio, as a dropped packet here and there is no biggie.
What am I missing?
There are two seperate issues between the ISPs and the P2Ps. The details of the two issues tend to get mixed according to the perspective of the person making the argument.
The first issue is the amount of data (the bandwidth issue) that the P2P downloader is using relative to the amount of bandwidth that the other ISP users are consuming. The other issue is the ability of the so-called owners the downloaded information to legally extort money from P2P users.
The P2P users are the best customers of the ISPs. In time, the technology improves to handle the growing needs of the P2P community, and the P2P'ers are willing to pay (within reason) for faster access and greater bandwidth. P2P'ers will pay $30-$50 more a month to the ISPs than the dial-up'ers who are mostly checking e-mail, reading specialized websites, and doing eBay trading. This makes the P2P'ers a significant revenue source to the ISPs.
"Significant revenue source", in case you didn't know, is the most important three word phrase in the English language. "You're Under Arrest" is the second-most significant phrase in English. And, of course, the more 'sig rev source' that you have, the less you have to concern yourself with hearing "You're U A!" But, nevertheless, it can still happen. Especially in the current times of great change such as the present when one former source of sig revenue (the music industry) is evaporating and others like the P2P community are rising.
Generally the law follows the money. The golden rule states that he who hath the gold maketh the rule. But, in the real world, money and law tend to be 90 degrees out of phase. Situations arise where a disappearing revenue source has, for a certain period of time, the ability to envoke the legal system to extort money from people in greater proportion than its social usefullness would have it deserve. The music industry, and its extortion arm - the RIAA, is in that position. This industry is entering its 'zombie' phase, in that it is already dead but doesn't seem to know it. Death for a business is a different concept than it is in biology. Zombie businesses are basically unsustainable in the long run because their economic model has been broken, but their structures are still functioning. Basically the RIAA is just the music industry running around like a chicken with its head cut off. It can't last, but you don't want to be in its way before it just falls over.
Since the RIAA uses the ISPs to identify the P2P'ers that it has selected for random extortion, the P2P'ers don't trust the ISPs to come up with a working technical solution to the bandwidth problem. So we have the current situation that is bad for everyone. Personally I work around this by not downloading industry product: I get it in disc format from the local library and copy it from the disc onto my home PC. Then I return the disc to the library for the next person to use.
The music industry insists that this is illegal in their parallel universe. And, there was a time when it appeared that the RIAA was going to take on the US Library Association. But the librarians have been dealing with assholes like this for 300 years and have their arguments in order. It always come down to this point: yes, library users copy the most popular music recordings. Which does cut sales to a minor degree. But the 50,000 libraries buy (at full retail cost) one copy each of thousands of titles that wouldn't be selling 50,000 copies if the libraries weren't buying it. Basically, the library makes available music for people to copy. But the libraries pay off the music industry to ignore it. Everybody is happy.
The P2P'ers need to adopt this model for distribution. They should find out who they are in their local areas, like a university, and then trade physical copies of the materials that they are interested in. Like having ALL the recent music of particular genre or favorite films on a single USB 500Gi
How about the ISPs stop worrying about what I'm doing with the bandwidth they've sold me and worry about maintaining their infrastructure...
Thank you, It's a challenge to get the geeks to consider you bizarre. I try and try again, but often get overlooked. It helps to prepare. I have a degree in economics and I write firmware.
I challenge you to write stuff on Slashdot that is more bizarre than anything that I can write. It's hard at first, but, like all things worth doing, it gets easier with practice. A touch of advice? Get a speech-to-text program and a microphone. That way you won't be limited by your typing skills. Ranting makes better comments.
As with other p2p networks, the idea of using local or "near" peers is a good idea for lightening the load on a link, espically when comparing the total possible data that can be sent over a link VS using as many local peers as possible.
ie: having peers only on the other side of a link slows it down VS having several local faster peers.
the issue is that if the file is new, this approach results in a group of people on one side of a link getting the file faster, but the rest of the world's lot of peers (ie:other end of ISP/Country link) do not have any data being sent to them for them to share (or once the group is done, they are all trying to send via the same link so limiting how fast the file spreads at the start).
later in a swarms life this approach is usful in keeping the links lightly used (long distant hauls anyway), but it will take longer to get to this stage VS the current setup.
As to the topic of the Ono system, I did use if for a while but either due to being in a country that does not have a local reference server (or appears to going by the settings for the plugin), if anything it made my d/l slower.
Going by what the plug in was doing (that version anyway), it was pinging the servers to check responce time, but to have accurate ping times I would need to share at less than 80% of my upload, which means for this plugin to work, you need spare bandwidth or in effect, less data is being uploaded for others to use. No point uploading less data to a swarm just so you can be sending it to only local peers.
Personally, I am waiting for a plugin that can take several IP ranges and selects a peer based on which group it is in. This way you can tell the client your ISPs local range, your ISPs cheap connections to other ISPs, state connections, country connections and lastly the normal filter of IPs you do not want to connect to. The way I see it is that it is a onion with cheaper and faster connections near the middle given preference. So the same as what all other "improvers" work with but
a) no external interation
b) no on going wasted bandwidth
c) no on going central point that would get enoyed with a large number of peers using it (ie: pinging a set of servers)
Sure the setup is a little more than the average improving client, but if someone is using Axurus and plugins, I would not think it is much more of a step.
As to limit the issue as mentioned before, a setting of limiting the number of connections in each ring would be useful, so that a client in the far rings still are connected to and data sent to them so not limiting the spread of a swarm to a group or singular ISP
d)
The stated problem is that ISPs are upset with the P2P traffic because of its heavy load and want to throttle it. The proposed solution is supposed to increase my download speed. This seems to me to sound like exactly what will make my ISP even more upset.
If the ISPs' claims are correct, what would make them happy would be P2P software that throttles itself to a very low transfer rate. The longer it takes me to download (or upload) a file, the less bandwidth I'm using at any given time, and the happier the ISP is.
So why should an ISP be supportive of this proposed "solution"? Yeah, I'd like it. But I'd expect the ISPs to go after it and throttle it to a crawl. Or do as Comcast has been doing, and just outright kill any connections that look like file transfers.
What am I missing here?
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Early connectors are likely to have high ratios unless they abandon right after getting their full file, and late arrivers are going to be mostly leaching, and to some extent that's ok - but most people will get their files earlier if people are more generous, and also they'll get them earlier if they download from faster-uploading peers, and obviously it's helpful to keep at least one seeder around so that there's always a source of all the parts. Generosity's a Good Thing in this kind of network.
Also, don't confuse ratios for a given torrent with ratios over a series of files - this isn't Napster. If you've been seeding for a week, that's nice to everybody, but you're only getting rewarded or penalized on This One File, and hopefully you've received it by now and aren't waiting for some tracker to hand out the last block which it's keeping in reserve to force the early participants to reach higher upload ratios before they can leave...
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
OK... but the blame lies not on the "big telcos", but reality itself. Network effects exist; better to harness them than kvetch about them. What are the big networks supposed to do, pretend they don't exist and screw their customers in the process?
As you are explicitly mentioning reality: The big networks will do both, harness network effects and screw their customers in the progress.
It's the best way to allocate limited resources. P2P breaks the asymmetrical bandwidth model not because it is any more efficient but rather because it allows the content provider's costs to be shifted from the content provider to the ISP. The original and explicit contract of the Internet, since its inception, has been simple: each side pays for its connection to the backbone. But some content providers don't want to pay their freight. They want to shift the cost of distributing their content to someone else. So, they turn users' computers into servers for their content. This has the additional advantage that since they aren't serving the content themselves, they can avoid being shut down if the content is illegal (which most of it is). Ironically, some of the people who are lobbying to force ISPs to carry P2P are claiming that they are advocates of "network neutrality." But P2P itself is not neutral! It dumps costs on ISPs, magnifying them hundreds or even thousands of times in the process. (For more on why this is so, see my slides at http://www.brettglass.com/FCC/pg0.html and http://www.brettglass.com/FCC/pg1.html.) As such, it violates the fundamental contract of the Internet. And it attempts to seize priority over traffic which is much more important. Should a kid downloading illegal music take priority over a life-critical telemedicine connection? Left unchecked, that's what P2P will do. It just makes sense to rein it in or block it.
College-Pages.com - Online Colleges, Degrees, and Programs
quit cheaping out & upgrade the frackin' pipes already. gawd.