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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."
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.
Don't computers in remote locations already get the shaft? If there're no peers within your ttl, then you're sol.
While your argument makes some sense in theory, it doesn't change the fact that this project is apparently reporting some very straightforward numbers which seem to indicate that in practice your point doesn't hold much water. I understand what you're getting at, but a 207% average speed increase is a 207% average speed increase. If you've investigated and gotten different results, please feel free to share. How directly that translates into a savings in bandwidth for the provider, I don't know, but I don't think that's what the GP was getting at.
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?
But since this was about torrents you will indeed upload parts of or the whole work yourself aswell.
Yeah I'm not seeing how this is going to be too useful in most cases. If you have enough seeds that you can afford to pick and choose which ones you download from, you're going to be getting high speeds anyway. If you have low speeds, you're not going to be picky about your seeds.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I haven't read their paper obviously, but those numbers might not mean much in the real world. For instance, latency means nothing when you're downloading a large file. A 30% lower loss rate might matter, but only if your loss rate is already a significant limiting factor.
Availability of peers is likely to be the limiting factor in any real life situation. Using an app that's picky about its peers isn't going to improve that at all.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Distribution could be wildly efficient if the users and the network operators were on the "same team." If they wanted to, they could design a bit-torrent variant where chunks are cached by intermediary servers, so that they can always be delivered quickly from a local node. Further, servers could maintain accurate models of network topology, and clients could then use this data to pick the best path. Chunks from popular files would almost always be available from a nearby server cache or a nearby peer.
The problem is that the network is either indifferent to user activities, or actively trying to prevent user activities (throttling, etc.). The end result is that the protocol is tweaked not for efficiency, but for circumvention (e.g. encryption).
I like the idea presented in the summary, since it is in principle a net benefit to both the users and the network operators. However even if it works, it may not last. For instance, ISPs may use even more aggressive tricks (maybe even exploiting this proposed variant), forcing the protocol to become even more inefficient (e.g. switching to a multi-hop TOR-like protocol).
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
No, but latency might be useful in trying to figure out which peer is closer to you on the network.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
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.
ISPs care about money - buying more upstream costs money, and upgrading peering links or internal distribution networks costs money. They also care about customer perceived performance, and if P2P uses their networks inefficiently, and swamps a neighborhood's upstream in ways that interfere with TCP performance, that's bad. For the most part, this technology will reduce their costs by reducing exterior bandwidth, and that's good, as long as it doesn't do it in ways that the improved P2P performance finds other bottlenecks in their system to step on. The better the P2P paths can match the structure of the ISP, the lower the impact on their network will be.
This approach doesn't actually require the ISP to install anything, or to do anything, or expose them to participating-in-P2P-themselves infringement conflicts; there are other approaches that do, such as putting P2P caching servers in their network. So it's pretty much all gravy for them, especially since they know that some large fraction of the bits they're carrying are P2P. (The Akamai caching servers here aren't being used to cache the P2P - they're web caches used by traditional content providers, and what this tool is doing is using their location to identify some of the structure of the ISP network to do better P2P peer matching.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
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