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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."

25 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 street+struttin' · · Score: 3, Funny

      in the last year I've uploaded 1.3 terabytes and downloaded 741 gigabytes. Slacker.
    7. 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.
  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 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?

  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 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. 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.

  6. 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

  7. 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.

  8. 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?
  9. 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.

  10. 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.

  11. 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.