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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."
I'll believe it when I see it.
Jeepers, no more bandwidth throttling? Thanks Comcast!
How much extra will you be charging us for that?
Most consumer level service comes with an Acceptable Usage Policy. Mine says that (this is paraphrased) "At the sole discretion of big cable company (not comcast), users may be terminated for abuse or excessive usage".
So, we'll move from throttling to arbitrary caps. Maybe after XXGB your speeds are cut to 1/10th. Or maybe (like my cable company), they can just say "Well, we don't want you as a customer any more".
Explicit caps? We can complain or not subscribe if they're low- I'm for that if somebody is downloading 300GB+ per month, using my node. But the idea of "Well, you downloaded 'too much'" is just as bad as lying about throttling.
He's obviously a spinmeister working for the company.
When people buy a product or service they expect it to work reasonably. It's like saying that a car that doesn't anymore explode into flames is now 'friendly'... The word he so boldly uses don't even appear on the FA. Save your spam for eggs and bacon.
I believe in actions, not words and hope more people would follow suit.
If it were only so simple. At some point, all your DSL connections are aggregated somewhere and that aggregation point becomes the bottleneck.
The WAN technology doesn't make that go away. There could be any number of reasons why you haven't suffered any depredation such as population density, the profile of your neighbors, etc. It could just be that neighborhood hasn't reached saturation yet.
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.
The last mile is just one point of depredation. The in-home connection experience is going to get bad. I would hate to live in a city and use wireless simply because of contention on the airwaves. Hell, when I first got FiOS, I had to convince the tech that the reason for the poor performance was because the Actiontec router they provided and a neighbors were on the same channel, 6, causing contention. I moved mine to channel 11, a non-interfering channel, and wah-lah, performance problem solved.
If you read the article carefully, this is not about allowing unfettered P2P on their networks at all. They are deliberately obfuscating the issue. They leave the door open for blocking, filtering and "shaping" (ie. TCP resetting) any protocols they want. This is kind of like Verizon Wireless proudly announcing "We are radio phone call friendly" when the issue is whether to support GSM or CDMA.
Verizon's senior technologist talks about "working with P2P companies", which is radically different than allowing anyone to write a P2P networking app that does (fill in the blank.) Then goes on to say that work needs to be done on P2P DRM.
All in all, the tone of the article seems to confirm that the fight for network neutrality is far from over.