Verizon, Comcast Say They Are P2P Friendly

An anonymous reader writes "Verizon and Comcast announced they will not 'block or throttle Internet traffic delivered via peer-to-peer networks' — essentially proclaiming that they are now P2P friendly. The decision came as a result of a test conducted with Verizon and Pando Networks, testing the benefits of a P2P/ISP partnership. During the test, the amount of P2P content delivered to Verizon subscribers from inside its network grew from 2 percent to 50 percent. This shows ISPs need to work with P2P companies to improve content delivery and manage traffic. Verizon also announced it will be looking at ways to use P2P technology to deploy new features on FiOS TV." Just the same, read on for one approach to mitigating likely tightening restrictions on P2P network use. Another anonymous reader writes "RIAA/MPAA have recently been targeting torrent aggregators like PirateBay, because the aggregators are the vulnerable components of the BitTorrent protocol. A new open-source project to thwart such attacks was announced on p2p-hackers and released yesterday:

Cubit, a new open-source p2p overlay, enables the Azureus BitTorrent client to look up torrents via approximate keyword search... Cubit completely decentralizes the lookup process through an efficient, light-weight peer-to-peer overlay that can perform approximate matches. It performs searches without relying on any centralized components, and therefore is immune to legal and technical attacks targeting torrent aggregators."

Comments

Re:I'll believe it when...

[frooddude]

If you're on Comcast that speed change could just be the effects of Speedboost. They give a short term bump in throughput for each new transaction.

I rarely get good torrent speeds unless I'm dealing with a highly transacted image. Like a new release of ubuntu.

Re:Even 100% is not good enough...

[CyprusBlue113]

I don't think you quite understand what is being talked about. A truly perfect P2P system would only need 1 copy period to come in to an ISP. Now you will never see much anything close to this, but it can definately be a *much* better situation than it is now.

Re:Right...

[kernelphr34k]

I'm a FIOS customer, and have yet to see any issues with my torrents and disconnects, or any speed or BW issues. It does help to have a 15mb/15mb connection, but still. Curious to see how these companies will handle the P2P load. . .

The article meshes with my experience

[dave562]

I've been a Verizon DSL subscriber since the late 1990s, back when they were still GTE. They have had constantly good service and great uptimes. I started using torrents about a year ago and have never had any problems. I have one running at home right now. On my 1.5/384 line I'm getting about 170k down and 40k up, constantly.

It has been my experience that in some ways DSL is superior to cable. I remember when cable first came out everyone who got it thought it was great. Then their neighbor got it, and their other neighbor got it, and suddenly it became obvious that the entire neighborhood was on one shared pipe and a single bandwidth hog could ruin it for everyone. It doesn't seem like much has changed in the last decade. With DSL you can count on getting the bandwidth that you pay for but the peak available bandwidth isn't as high as cable. On cable you might get some really high peak speeds, but the cable networks haven't been designed to sustain high transfer rates for long periods of time.

Re:The article meshes with my experience

[Shakrai]

At some point, all your DSL connections are aggregated somewhere and that aggregation point becomes the bottleneck.

It seems like every time we have this discussion that someone repeats this half-truth and gets a +5 out of it. Yes, DSL connections are aggregated somewhere. But that's not the whole story.

There's nothing technical stopping a telco from having a 1:1 contention ratio if they deem it in their best interests. Contrast that to cable -- the only way to attain a 1:1 ratio on cable is to segment the network into insanely small slices or devote more channels on the coax plant to HSI services. DOCSIS 2.0 only offers ~42Mbits of downstream -- assuming 5Mbit connections (the standard for Roadrunner around here and actually quite low compared to other areas) it only takes nine people to completely saturate the downstream pipe.

Even without a 1:1 contention ratio it's going to take a lot more than nine customers to peg the backhaul connection from your local DSLAM.

I used to have DSL and I found my connection would degrade noticeably in the late afternoon and evening simply because we had a lot of people in the area connected with lots of kids.

As with anything, YMMV. I've never seen a slowdown in six years of working with Verizon and Frontier (a smaller telco based out of Rochester). I have seen them occur on Roadrunner -- in some neighborhoods around here it's downright painful when the college kids are in town.

Re:The article meshes with my experience

[mrchaotica]

I moved mine to channel 11, a non-interfering channel, and wah-lah, performance problem solved.

It's voilà, damnit!

Re:The article meshes with my experience

[Blkdeath]

If it were only so simple. At some point, all your DSL connections are aggregated somewhere and that aggregation point becomes the bottleneck.

Yes, all ISPs have that very same bottleneck and it's typically extremely large. The coaxial cable running through many residential neighborhoods quickly reaches saturation similar to that of an old 10Base2 Thinnet network where if a small handful of computers are using lots of bandwidth at once the collision rate goes up and the available bandwidth to all homes in that segment (typically hundreds, if not thousands) find saturated links and slowed browsing.

However the "bottleneck" at the ISP level - the famous defense of the cable aficionados, is usually extremely large to the point where it would take hundreds or thousands of users saturating their individual links in order to slow the connection appreciably.

When you can remove the smallest bottleneck, that being the last mile, you are able to issue a higher guaranteed level of service to each individual segment of your network (nee, each individual user).

The best comparison of cable versus DSL is water. Bandwidth travels through pipes, as it were, just like water. Now, the source of that water coming into the house is very generous and operates at a pressure level higher than that of any individual fixture. Now, when you have a water line that branches off to the washer, two toilets, the shower, the kitchen sink, dishwasher, and two bathroom sinks you can see how easy it is to saturate the link. Anybody who's ever been in the shower when someone turned on a clothes / dish washer or flushed a toilet knows first hand what I'm talking about.

Now, the new(er) solution to this age old problem is a method of plumbing that sends a single water pipe to each and every fixture in the house. The pipe is straight and dedicated. This means when you're showering and some insensitive bonehead flushes the toilet you'll be safe from scalding.

Now, one could say that the bottleneck exists in the water main, be it 4", 5", 6", 8", whatever (which is a significant order of magnitude more pressure-filled than any home supply), or the large supply pipes that feed the individual mains; somewhere to the order of 12" and higher, or the filtration station that pumps the water into the entire system or even the lake, stream or underground well that feeds the filtration system in the first place. But in all likelyhood the reason you're being burned in the shower or losing water pressure while trying to hose off your car is because somebody else in the house has used up more than their fair share on you.

The long and short of it is this; the last mile is the biggest, most problematic, most expensive bottleneck to cure. It's easy enough to add a new OC line in a data centre but it's a much more prohibitive task to upgrade several thousand individual homes.

I call "Bullshit" on Comcast

[Duncan Blackthorne]

..and here's the proof (as of just a few minutes ago), courtesy of the Glasnost test:

Is BitTorrent traffic on a well-known BitTorrent port (6881) throttled?

* 2 out of 2 BitTorrent transfers were interrupted while uploading (seeding) using forged TCP RST packets. It seems like your ISP hinders you from uploading BitTorrent traffic to our test server.

* The BitTorrent download worked. Our tool was successful in downloading data using the BitTorrent protocol.

* There's no indication that your ISP rate limits your BitTorrent downloads. In our tests a TCP download achieved minimal 713 Kbps while a BitTorrent download achieved maximal 720 Kbps.

Is BitTorrent traffic on a non-standard BitTorrent port (4711) throttled?

* 2 out of 2 BitTorrent transfers were interrupted while uploading (seeding) using forged TCP RST packets. It seems like your ISP hinders you from uploading BitTorrent traffic to our test server.

* The BitTorrent download worked. Our tool was successful in downloading data using the BitTorrent protocol.

* There's no indication that your ISP rate limits your BitTorrent downloads. In our tests a TCP download achieved minimal 661 Kbps while a BitTorrent download achieved maximal 741 Kbps.

Is TCP traffic on a well-known BitTorrent port (6881) throttled?

* There's no indication that your ISP rate limits all downloads at port 6881. In our test, a TCP download on a BitTorrent port achieved at least 713 Kbps while a TCP download on a non-BitTorrent port achieved at least 661 Kbps.

* There's no indication that your ISP rate limits all uploads at port 6881. In our test, a TCP upload on a BitTorrent port achieved at least 1353 Kbps while a TCP upload on a non-BitTorrent port achieved at least 1403 Kbps.

Re:Even 100% is not good enough...

[bconway]

In practice, many (most?) ISPs use transparent HTTP caches, so having 50% of the data stay internal is still no good, as on popular files (eg, a big youtube video), 99% of the traffic stays internal for HTTP. No they don't. Start here.

Confirmed today: Comcast, Verizon (DSL + FiOS), Time Warner, and Speakeasy.

Re:Bell Canada needs to fix their practices as wel

[aclarke]

If you're around Ottawa or feel like going there, there's a "Net Neutrality Rally" on May 27: www.netneutralityrally.ca.

My ISP (Teksavvy) emailed me a couple hours ago saying apparently most of the Teksavvy staff is taking the day off to go to the rally so please only call in with tech support questions if it's really important.

That's pretty cool if you ask me.

- Andrew.

Re:Oh goodie!

[icebike]

Well Comcast is still resetting bittorent for me.

Tested this morning with http://broadband.mpi-sws.mpg.de/transparency/bttest.php

Still multiple resets. Yes, torrents do complete, but much more slowly than on my neighbors ASDL which has half the speed rating of my comcast connection.

So they lie.

Re:Right...

[Anonymous Coward]

>To my knowledge Verizon has never throttled or limited any of their DSL or FiOS offerings.
Prepare to be schooled.

I have 1.5Mbps DSL provisioned through Covad with Earthlink. My top download speed is right around advertised (~200KB/s, 1.5Mbps)
At the time I started my contract in 2001, I had just got done a 1.5 year battle with Verizon because they were charging me for the service on a dsl contract, but it had never worked. When I say "never worked" I mean not a single packet crossed their switch on my connection. They never even got sync with their box in my house. They finally informed me that I can't get DSL that it will never work after I called my lawyer, and tore up the contract, though not really...

I'd be damned if I'd let Earthlink provision through Verizon after that ordeal. Needless to say I'd had SDSL from Covad since 1998, and Covad delivered as promised. I stipulated that if I had to provision through Verizon I don't want it. I had my Covad provisioned connection up and running at full advertised speed in under 1.5 weeks after ordering. I'm a network engineer, trust me, it wasn't my problem with Verizon. They just suck. Covad is on the ball.

My *next door neighbor* in 2003 got Verizon DSL (apparently after Verizon figured out how DSL works) and ordered the 1.5Mbps service. He knocked on my door one day and asked me to check out his setup because it was slow. I look at his connection and ran some speed tests. He was getting ~105KB/s, aka 768kbps. I ran the same test and got the same result I had gotten in 2001, ~200KB/s.

He called Verizon to ask what was going on. They proceed to tell him he's too far from the DSLAM(the same DSLAM my wire comes from by the way) and it's impossible to deliver 1.5Mbps over that length of wire, and he'd just have to deal with it because his contract only guarantees 768kbps. It's amazing how the length of the cable is perfect to cause enough noise for him to get exactly 768kbps, which is the minimum contractual obligation. My neighbor then scaled his connection back to 768Mbps. Predictably they throttled him down to 384kbps.

My mom had just gotten Verizon dsl too, so out of my own interest I went to go check her 1.5Mbps dsl. She's getting exactly 768kbps.

In my case the DSLAM is just about 900 feet from my house. My mother's is 500. I checked their bills, they are, in fact, paying for 1.5Mbps.

If they aren't throttling people down to the minimum required by contract, and screwing people all over the place, I'll hand over my networking creds and find a new line of work...

Never trust them. I was still fighting with them about not paying for DSL that never worked 2 years later.

Verizon are scumbags. NOTHING would surprise me about them screwing people. In 2004, with the help of the better business bureau and an attorney friend of mine working pro bono as a favor for setting up a server for him, they finally dropped the outstanding charges on my account for the DSL. I won't go into how rude and accusatory their reps were but it's best summed up with a quote from one of them: "Listen, I'm not taking this off your bill. We get people like you calling all the time trying to get something for nothing..."

That sums up my experience with Verizon. My only dealings with them to this day are a phone line handled vicariously through Covad. I will never buy another one of their products, ever.

-AC