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Verizon, Comcast Say They Are P2P Friendly

Posted by timothy on from the also-that-if-she-buys-kippers-it-will-not-rain dept.

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."

38 of 158 comments (clear)

  1. Right... by wolf12886 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I'll believe it when I see it.

    1. Re:Right... by kernelphr34k · · Score: 3, Informative

      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. . .

    2. Re:Right... by grayshirtninja · · Score: 4, Funny

      Exactly. ISPs are friendly to P2P traffic like alligators are friendly to chickens.

    3. Re:Right... by jeiler · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Oh, believe it. Verizon and Comcast will be very friendly to P2P--just as soon as they can figure out a way to make a buck off the transaction.

      --

      If you haven't been down-modded lately, you aren't trying.

      Sacred cows make the best hamburger.

    4. Re:Right... by Shakrai · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

      --
      I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
      We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
    5. Re:Right... by Shakrai · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

      --
      I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
      We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
    6. Re:Right... by jeiler · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Why is everybody giving Verizon grief?

      Cynicism. When referring to large corporations, cynicism has rarely steered me wrong--though I'm glad to hear your experience with Verizon has been so positive.

      --

      If you haven't been down-modded lately, you aren't trying.

      Sacred cows make the best hamburger.

    7. Re:Right... by street+struttin' · · Score: 3, Funny

      in the last year I've uploaded 1.3 terabytes and downloaded 741 gigabytes. Slacker.
    8. Re:Right... by 0111+1110 · · Score: 2, Funny

      Can someone explain the reason of why it shouldn't be considered a form of stealing? The difference between copyright infringement and stealing is like the difference between taking a photo of someone without their permission and kidnapping them. Or maybe the difference between kidnapping someone and cloning them from a stray hair. In one case the victim is quite aware of the "crime". In the other case it is difficult to even find a "victim" at all.
      --
      Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
    9. Re:Right... by Maxo-Texas · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Well ... about 90% think material over 28 years old should be legal while companies and artists want it to be "forever + 1 day".

      But you are talking about recent stuff.

      Why...
      1) It's over priced.
      2) It's stupidly easy to download.
      3) Most were unable to purchase them anyway (so they know morally that the artists lost nothing from them).
      4) Many were going to skip the commercials (effectively "stealing" the TV shows) anyway.
      5) In many cases, the legit version is harder to use/less user friendly than the pirated copy.
      6) Entertainment executives and big artists are stupidly overpaid ($1 billion for Rowling!?!?) so people have no sense of injury or sympathy for them.
      7) It's so corporate/cold that people feel no connection or empathy with the creators (and humans have always taken advantage of/ killed people not in their "monkey tribe".
      8) It's hard to get it legally (you go to best buy.. you look at the racks, it's out of stock) while it's there on five torrent sites on line. You want to see it in the theatres or on TV but it won't be shown in your area until next year (Battlestar Galactica-- I torrented all of it before it came on SF in the USA).

      --
      She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
    10. Re:Right... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      >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

    11. Re:Right... by Shakrai · · Score: 2, Insightful

      None of those stories that you told suggest that they are deliberately throttling those connections. Verizon provisions your line at the fastest speed that their tools/wire database indicate that your loop will support (unless you pay for a slower tier). If there are problems with the local loop or (more likely) the inside wiring at your house, then the modem won't be able to sync up at this speed and will fall back to slower ones and generally not work very well at all.

      That has nothing to do with throttling p2p connections ala Comcast. It has everything to do with a physical layer problem, either on the outside plant or the inside wiring in your house. Either way it wasn't something that they did to you on purpose.

      They proceed to tell him he's too far from the DSLAM(the same DSLAM my wire comes from by the way)

      Just because he's your next door neighbor doesn't mean that his loop takes the same path back to the CO that yours does. It might -- it might also go in the opposite direction down the street and take a completely different path back. And even if it takes the same path it might be a different wire gage than the one you are on. "Loop length" isn't the literal length of the wire -- it's a measurement based on capacitance. A thicker wire gage in the local loop generally translates into being able to provide DSL services further out.

      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.

      I don't buy that. The 768kbps is a value tier -- that's not the minimum that they promise. If you sign up for the 1.5/384 service and can't get it then you can back out of that contract in the first month. You can do the same if they promise 3.0/768 at time of order and can't deliver it.

      Regardless, I'll grant you that it's a PITA to deal with them to get these types of problems fixed, particularly if you aren't fluent in their lingo. Luckily it seems that you had another option. My choices are between Verizon DSL (which always delivers my promised speed and never goes down) or Roadrunner (which bogs down during peak hours and may start metering traffic soon). There's no CLEC providers of DSL for residential customers around here. No WISPs that are still in business either.

      I've had several fights with Verizon that I already outlined to get services setup properly. But I'll stand by my claim that once you do manage to get it all configured and working that it's pretty much rock-solid. In four years I haven't seen my residential DSL account go down once. It was even still running during the floods last year when my whole town (including the CO) had no power for five days. I hooked my modem up to a UPS and surfed with my laptop -- worked the whole time. Time Warner couldn't say that -- their internet and phone customers were SOL the entire time.

      --
      I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
      We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
  2. Even 100% is not good enough... by nweaver · · Score: 3, Insightful

    ISP conflict will remain, it will just become more subtle and more neutral.

    You see, 50% is not good enough from the ISPs viewpoint: That still requires just as many bits crossing the ISP's boundry as if the content provider used UNCACHED HTTP.

    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.

    Even PERFECT P2P requires at least one outbound copy for each inbound copy, so a PERFECT P2P system will require 2x the traffic crossing the border when compared with HTTP thats cached.

    --
    Test your net with Netalyzr
    1. Re:Even 100% is not good enough... by CyprusBlue113 · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

      --
      a handful of selfish greedy people are no match for millions of selfish, greedy people -u4ya
    2. Re:Even 100% is not good enough... by Workaphobia · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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.

      --
      Evidently, the key to understanding recursion is to begin by understanding recursion. The rest is easy.
    3. Re:Even 100% is not good enough... by bconway · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.
      --
      Interested in open source engine management for your Subaru?
  3. Oh goodie! by snarfies · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Jeepers, no more bandwidth throttling? Thanks Comcast!

    How much extra will you be charging us for that?

    1. Re:Oh goodie! by icebike · · Score: 2, Informative

      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.

      --
      Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
  4. I'll believe it when... by Taibhsear · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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...

    1. Re:I'll believe it when... by frooddude · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

    2. Re:I'll believe it when... by Culture20 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      They give a short term bump in throughput for each new transaction. A long term downgrade in throughput beyond the first transaction you say?
    3. Re:I'll believe it when... by DCstewieG · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

  5. Cubit by bendodge · · Score: 2

    What would really be great is if Cubit would eliminate all the nasty tracker ads. They are very annoying for people like me who are just after software, not porn.

    And looking at the current batch of lawsuits, I'd say now is the time to start supporting Cubit in all the major clients (I'm thinking particularly of KTorrent...) So please work on it if you have the skills, and bug people who do if you don't (that would be me).

    --
    The government can't save you.
  6. Throttling - Caps by Coopjust · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  7. The article meshes with my experience by dave562 · · Score: 4, Informative
    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.

    1. Re:The article meshes with my experience by hal9000(jr) · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:The article meshes with my experience by Shakrai · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

      --
      I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
      We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
    3. Re:The article meshes with my experience by mrchaotica · · Score: 5, Informative

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

      It's voilà, damnit!

      --

      "[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz

    4. Re:The article meshes with my experience by Blkdeath · · Score: 2, Informative

      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.

      --
      BD Phone Home!

      Shameless plug. Like you weren't expecting it.

  8. Fuck the 'friendly' submitter by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  9. riiight by pak9rabid · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Verizon, Comcast Say They Are P2P Friendly Kind of like how Microsoft says that they are F/OSS friendly?
  10. Hmmm... by wpiman · · Score: 2, Interesting
    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.

  11. I call "Bullshit" on Comcast by Duncan+Blackthorne · · Score: 4, Informative
    ..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.

  12. P2P friendly. Specific protocols not? by HumanEmulator · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  13. It doesn't matter by PPH · · Score: 3, Insightful


    In the final analysis, protecting aggregators won't matter unless we get genuine 'net neutrality. The ISPs will switch to a 'whitelist' of content providers. In other words, if you want your content delivered, you will pay, become a 'partner', host ISP banner ads or whatever. All others will grovel with the lowest QoS. This sidesteps accusations of throttling 'undesirable' services. Everyone gets throttled and will have to pay to get out of jail.


    I don't think the big ISPs have anything special against P2P services (that they don't have against anyone else). They just want to extract money out of them. With big players like Google, Yahoo, and MSN, that's easy to do. There's advertising revenue that can be quantified and the ISPs can skim off of. P2P just happens to be a big enough consumer of bandwidth that the ISPs would like them to pay to play as well.

    --
    Have gnu, will travel.
  14. Re:Bell Canada needs to fix their practices as wel by aclarke · · Score: 2, Informative

    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.

    --

    www.clarke.ca
  15. This just in... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    Fox, Wolf Say They Are Rabbit Friendly

  16. And Bill Gates announced Windows is going FOSS by unity100 · · Score: 2, Funny

    And steve balmer aint gonna throw any more chairs.

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    Read radical news here