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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.
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.
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
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.
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.
It's voilà, damnit!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz