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

I'll believe it when...

[Taibhsear]

My torrent stops registering massive packet forgery and my uploads stop getting throttled to 1/5 the original speed after 5 seconds from initialization. As well as my web-browsing speed, and my gaming speed, and my windows/ubuntu updates speed...

Re:I'll believe it when...

[DCstewieG]

To be honest it's actually a pretty fair way for Comcast to serve the majority of customers. When downloading a normal file off the internet, you get way higher that the 6 mbps you're paying for. For files smaller than 20MB or so, they fly down the line. For the rest, you get knocked back to 6 after 10-15 seconds.

Now ignoring the fact that yes, the state of broadband in the U.S. sucks and 6 mbps being "good" is unfortunate, SpeedBoost is actually a nifty thing.

I had Comcast (Chicago area) and actually didn't notice the problems people talk about while torrenting. I don't know if it's because of tighter competition here or not. I now have WOW and am paying a little less for pretty much the same thing.

Hmmm...

[wpiman]

I have Verizon FIOS, which has an Actiontec router with a puny 1k NAT table. Whenever I played Team Fortress, this would overflow the NAT table when I did a server refresh and the router would be unusable for 4 minutes. This was designed to prevent peer to peer applications from clogging their network. Their network doesn't look for P2P traffic, it just kills it at the endpoint.

Interestingly enough, this Team Fortress issues seems to have resolved itself in the last week and a half. I imagine this is due to a Team Fortress update, as I did not update the firmware in my router-- but this is an extreme coincidence.

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

[Workaphobia]

Even better would be if the user could submit torrents to their ISP's local hub for download at fiber optic speeds, and then simply transfer the result from there once per household. Any bandwidth consumed by this non-last-mile torrenting on the customer's behalf would be attributed to the customer's account and charged accordingly.

Hell you could do the same thing for other non-P2P services that ISPs typically don't like customers using. Turn every account into a hosting agreement with various limitations.

Re:Right...

[Shakrai]

Oh, believe it. Verizon and Comcast will be very friendly to P2P

Why is everybody giving Verizon grief? Comcast I understand, but Verizon? To my knowledge Verizon has never throttled or limited any of their DSL or FiOS offerings. I've seeded torrents 24/7 for months on end and never heard a peep out of them. I run a server (sshd and vpn) for my own personal use -- they've never complained about that either. According to Cacti, in the last year I've uploaded 1.3 terabytes and downloaded 741 gigabytes. Not one word out of Verizon this entire time.

Recall when Verizon fought the efforts to subpoena the identity of one of their customers who was accused of using p2p to pirate music. Recall Verizon's statements saying that they didn't believe in content/copyright filtering and didn't want to "police" the internet.

I don't approve of all of their business practices (there's a special place in hell reserved for Verizon Wireless) but the Verizon Online guys are on our side -- at least for the moment. I don't think they deserve to be lumped into the same category as Comcast.

Re:Right...

[Shakrai]

If you really transferred that much over the course of a year then you wouldn't have had an issue on Comcast either

Except I never would have been able to transfer that much because they have (had?) this nasty habit of conducting man-in-the-middle attacks to reset seeding connections.

For fairness I should probably point out that I likely had similar traffic numbers when I was with Roadrunner and they never complained about it either. I ditched them not because of limits that they had or may have -- I ditched them because I got tired of dealing with pauses and slowdowns when trying to stream live video.

I live in a major college town -- Roadrunner rocks during the school breaks -- once the kids come back you start to notice a real degradation of service during peak hours and even (occasionally) during off-peak ones. It varies depending on which neighborhood you live in but in some of them it's damn near unusable for anything other than basic surfing/gaming during peak hours.

It got better for browsing/gaming once they started traffic shaping/prioritization -- but they don't seem to discriminate between an http transfer for live streaming video and a non-interactive HTTP/FTP download or NNTP transfer. All bulk transfers suffer -- which makes live streaming video a PITA during periods of congestion.