ISPs Experimenting With New P2P Controls

alphadogg points us to a NetworkWorld story about the search by ISPs for new ways to combat the web traffic issues caused by P2P applications. Among the typical suggestions of bandwidth caps and usage-based pricing, telecom panelists at a recent conference also discussed localized "cache servers," which would hold recent (legal) P2P content in order to keep clients from reaching halfway around the world for parts of a file. "ISPs' methods for managing P2P traffic have come under intense scrutiny in recent months after the Associated Press reported last year that Comcast was actively interfering with P2P users' ability to upload files by sending TCP RST packets that informed them that their connection would have to be reset. While speakers rejected that Comcast method, some said it was time to follow the lead of Comcast and begin implementing caps for individual users who are consuming disproportionately high amounts of bandwidth."

Comments

less peering

[PhrostyMcByte]

give increased speeds when you don't leave the network. downloads will complete faster, so less peering will be done.

Re:less peering

[Anonymous Coward]

That happens naturally. Generally there's way more bandwidth available within the network -- the transit points are huge bottlenecks.

Legal content?

[ameline]

> which would hold recent (legal) P2P content ...

Yeah -- THAT will solve P2P congestion. (Morons)

Re:Legal content?

[Opportunist]

No, but it will be a good "proof" for the argument against P2P. Akin to "See? We have caches with all the legal P2P content and yet no decline in P2P traffic. So it's proven that P2P is mainly used for illegal means".

Yes, I know it's no proof. Tell your congressman, not me.

Re:Legal content?

[Dan541]

We have caches with all the legal P2P content and yet no decline in P2P traffic. So it's proven that P2P is mainly used for illegal means".

But how do they know what is and isn't legal content?

Since they don't have common carrier status it is illegal for them to cache all the illegal content I download.

Perhaps it's time for

[fohat]

ISP's to quit offering unlimited service, or stop overselling what they have. What's the point of having a 15 or 20 Megabit downstream, when I can only download 50 Gigabytes of traffic per month? Because i'm sure as hell not going back to renting my porn from the video store...

Re:Perhaps it's time for

[Opportunist]

It's a bit like having a 300hp car but only fuel for a mile.

Yay for car analogies! But this one at least works.

Re:Perhaps it's time for

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, really, do you *need* more than 50 gigs of porn a month? I get buy on only 30 gigs a month, I'm sure you can do the same.

Re:Perhaps it's time for

[Propaganda13]

ISP: We offer "unlimited" internet access.
Customer: Sweet! *starts downloading*
ISP: Oh, we didn't mean you should use it.

They advertise a low price and a high speed, then oversell to get that price then reduce the high speed because of it. Hmm, methinks they need more truth in advertising.

Re:Perhaps it's time for

[Sponge Bath]

A more realistic car analogy:
It's a bit like an average person having a fast car.
They drive it to work, school, shopping, and entertainment.
Most of the time it is unused, but when they are using it the extra speed is useful.

Re:Perhaps it's time for

[John Hasler]

But they have to pay by the gallon for the gasoline they use.

Re:Perhaps it's time for

[Anonymous Coward]

My thoughts exactly. Why am I paying for broadband if it's going to be throttled? I might as well go back to dial-up.

Re:Perhaps it's time for

[jwkfs]

And you can only get that gasoline from certain stores! And that gasoline is produced and controlled by guys in turbans who drive Rolls-Royces! Wait, what?

Re:Perhaps it's time for

[vuffi_raa]

more like, you get 1 gallon free a week and the rest is $50 a gallon and you have to buy it from one store

Re:Perhaps it's time for

[hotdiggitydawg]

The only thing preventing it from being full-blown bait-and-switch fraud is the excuse that they tell you up-front that it's not really unlimited (at the bottom of section 475, paragraph q3 sub-paragraph MLCXVIII clause 1111!!eleventy-one).

I say if it looks like a duck, and sounds like a duck...

Re:Perhaps it's time for

[hairyfeet]

The problem with so called tiered service is how badly they low ball you. Here in my little home town was my choices: 20Gb per month for $35 or 36Gb a month for $33. The absolute biggest I can buy without getting my own T1 is 75Gb for $110. And neither service gives you a tool to monitor bandwidth. Because that way you'll always use less than what they give you because you're afraid of going over the cap and getting hit with $1.50 or $1 a Gb respectively.

IMHO once everyone goes tiered you can kiss a lot of FLOSS goodbye. Who is going to risk 4.7Gb on a new Linux distro DVD that may or may not work with your hardware when you can pick up the latest "Windows Basic crippled edition" for $89 and use your bandwidth for stuff you want like videos? Sadly I believe that the overwhelming greed of the mega corps combined with the corruption of our elected officials and the desire of the big ISPs not to spend any of their massive profits on infrastructure is about to become a "perfect storm" which will kill off most of the Internet as we know it. They'll just starve for bandwidth for everything but their PPV offerings so we all go back to the days of dial up.

Funny,when I first read that "Internet dies in 2012" bit I thought she was nuts but now I am starting to wonder if she isn't right,and possibly might be even guessing too late on the date by a year or two. But as always my 02c,YMMV

Re:Perhaps it's time for

[PReDiToR]

No, it is more like having a 300hp car, using it to go to the shops and back but when you try and go over 70mph the cops ...

Wait, this car analogy is far too good, I can't use it on Slashdot =)

Re:Perhaps it's time for

[MachDelta]

I ran into a problem with an old ISP over this. I was "using too much bandwidth" even though they refused to tell me what exactly "too much" was. I told them their service says "unlimited". Well, turns out their "unlimited" claim supposedly means "unlimited access", as in available 24/7 (and they couldn't even always manage that!), not "unlimited traffic".

So I told them that they could go to hell and that I would be taking my internet and TV services elsewhere. At this point they began groveling at my feet, but it was way too late. :)

Re:Perhaps it's time for

[Maxo-Texas]

The hole in this is the huge microsoft patches and downloads (tho the largest I ever got was double digit megabytes- never gigabytes).

Re:Perhaps it's time for

[xtr3mist]

Exactly.. the ISP should not offer something that they do not provide. Now that we are calling them on it.. they are squirming around trying to find a new method.. when I was a child.. I was taught lessons.. lying was one of them.. looks like the ISP does not want to learn that lesson.. so squirming they go.. we need to cap.. we need to raise costs.. we need.. all of this instead of doing what they originally offered.. unlimited.. I have had companies hold me to their rules.. the shoe should not fit differently when it is on their foot.. they made the rules.. now that they are supposed to follow them.. squirm city.

Re:Perhaps it's time for

[jamesh]

In Australia I think they aren't allowed to make a claim in large print that is contradicted by fine print. So they aren't allowed to say <Large Print>Unlimited*</Large Print> and then <Small Print>* Not really</Small Print>

Re:Perhaps it's time for

[hairyfeet]

Ah,I take it you didn't read the latest on tiered pricing then? That was brought up and the ISPs were quick to point out that all Windows updates will NOT count toward your cap. Which of course sticks another nail in FLOSS,because its updates WILL count,giving just one more reason to run Microsoft. Don't forget big business LOVES Microsoft,as Microsoft will happily let them add all the DRM hooks they want. But that is my 02c,YMMV

Re:Perhaps it's time for

[Haeleth]

But they have to pay by the gallon for the gasoline they use.

But the gas station advertises "unlimited gas!", then refuses to give you more than a gallon a month.

Re:Perhaps it's time for

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it's amusing that everyone's calling them out on their advertising, instead of calling them out as being greedy corporate scumbags that are trying to rip the internet apart and sell it's pieces at high prices while cheating out the competition. You don't all honestly believe advertisements, do you? Shit, I don't even watch them.

ACs experimenting with new FP controls

[Anonymous Coward]

1. cut a hole in a box
2. put an FP in the box

Apply traffic shaping per-user, not per-service

[spazdor]

This is all we need. The problem is not that the providers aren't giving us enough bandwidth (they aren't). The problem is that they care what we spend it on.

Re:Apply traffic shaping per-user, not per-service

[joocemann]

Not really. The answer to the whole problem is for ISPs to provide what they are offering, internet access at xxxx/bps rate for $xxx/month. Once such a term is agreed upon between the provider and buyer, that service needs to be supplied regardless of what 'content' is going on.

ISPs are not the police, and while they may have corporate ties, should not be allowed any specific controls over internet access.

Thats why we have the police, so they can go find criminals and bust them. Thats why corporations have their own websites, so if we want their info/stuff/etc, we go look at it.

We need to make our politicians understand that we do not want our ISPs doing anything other than selling us internet access; that we do not want the ISPs being responsible for what happens on the internet; and that we pay enough damn taxes for our government to enforce laws on their own. We also need to remind them that the internet is an openly established medium of free speech, and thus equality rights should go without question with only restrictions to things that would parallel past restrictions to free speech (such as absurd things like yelling Fire in a theater).

This is no good...

[Vectronic]

Ok so, my ISP (theoretically) wants to keep the data my neighbour has downloaded, incase I want to download it to.

Yet, obviously these caches will have to be legal content, which means filtering out illegal content, which means they will be tracking everything I download, and thus, can force me to 1) pay more for this, 2) notify appropriate authorities, 3) limit my interaction with the rest of the world via the internet.

Although as stated in the article/summary its supposedly "temporary" but this means that ISP will have to start gathering massive amounts of storage, inevtiably making one ISP better at this than another, and hey fuck it, lets just have one ISP... and the internet just becomes Wikipedia.

I honestly can't see any benefit to this, it seems to just end up with steralization whichever way I look at it.

Re:This is no good...

[taniwha]

well all that's potentially happening is that your ISP is joining your torrents but only serving those in particular IP ranges, but really really fast - to me this is an added benefit, I'd probably choose an ISP that carries the latest kernel downloads locally - it's not really any different than a html proxy cache (except that because the torrents are crypto corrected an ISP can't inject ads into them)

Re:This is no good...

[Vectronic]

Yeah I'm aware of that, and I agree completely, the problem is can you actually see an ISP (outside of smaller, barely making a profit, looking for clientele please join us ISPs) doing that so honestly?

That was sort of my point, in the immediate conclusion it seems like a great idea, but it gives far too much power to the ISP, or even more power to the government to control what the ISP can do.

It will make sponsored content (Windows Update, Fox News, etc) the primary purpose of the cache after awhile, it is a business after all.

People without the money to pay ISPs or Governors, or whatever to get their content approved for cache, will be on this lesser accessed, slower WWW, making it a pain to get real information or media, and since people are fundamentally lazy, they will inevitably give in, and just go with "what works, right now!"

Re:This is no good...

[Triv]

I'd probably choose an ISP that carries the latest kernel downloads locally...

hahahahaha. You think the ISPs are going to start caching the Linux kernel? Where's the money in that? Now, if you want the latest Britney Spears video (kickbacks for promotion from the RIAA) or movie trailers (ditto from the MPAA) or game demos, you're set.

You gotta understand, to the content distribution companies, "legal P2P" = "free shit that we'll give you under the hope that you'll spend money later". Linux absolutely isn't on that list.

Re:This is no good...

[taniwha]

I live in NZ - "locally" means "this side of the Pacific" - I pay by the Gb - which goes to pay for that fibre between you and me - since I pay for the Gb wherever the packets come from and my ISP pays for however much of the fibre is used then caching each and every torrent is in their interest

The same thing applies to everyone, but maybe not quite so extremely (replace "fibre" with "peering")

Re:This is no good...

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Yet, obviously these caches will have to be legal content, which means filtering out illegal content, I don't know if you can make that assumption. We have a mechanism in place by which an ISP is essentially given immunity for hosting 'illegal content' - the much maligned DMCA notice. As long as they respond to DMCA notices, they have very little legal liability.

It seems plausible, at least, that an ISP could deploy a 'torrent sniffer' that automatically joined the swarms of any torrents that the ISP's users were in and then started to serve only local users from its cache. It might be possible to become a tracker spoofer such that the ISP could start redirecting all requests for cached content to itself rather than out over the (expensive/bottlneck) of peered connections.

So every once in a while they have to respond to a DMCA notice and kill a cache. Its not the end of the world, eventually someone else will come along and start a new torrent for the same content anyway and the game begins again.

Unfortunately, I think the only reason ISPs are not more interested in something like that which would deliberately follow the letter of the law is that they want to make nice-nice with the MAFIAA so that they can resell MAFIAA content directly to their own subscribers. If ISPs would stick to being INTERNET service providers and stop trying to diversify into being CONTENT providers I think we would already see such automated 'blind-eye' caching mechanisms in place.

Re:This is no good...

[Anonymous Coward]

hahahahaha, mine does:

ftp://download.xs4all.nl/pub/mirror/

Here's a better idea

[Anonymous Coward]

Support multicast. If you build it, they will come and make a multicast P2P program on top of it, relieving your backbone connections of all the redundant connections.

Re:Here's a better idea

[RiotingPacifist]

Hell even without p2p multicasting it would help, the direct competitor to illegal P2P is illegal flash streams, multicasting giving them a boost would seriously reduce P2P.

Re:Here's a better idea

[N7DR]

Support multicast

Cable companies use the DOCSIS specifications: multicast is pretty feeble (I won't argue with you if you say "broken") in the versions of DOCSIS that are currently deployed. However, that changes in DOCSIS 3.0. It is one of the "big three" benefits in DOCSIS 3.0 (the others being channel bonding and IPv6 support). DOCSIS 3.0 will probably start being rolled out by at least some cable companies next year.

Re:Here's a better idea

[Anonymous Coward]

DOCSIS 3 will open the door for a lot more bandwidth potential offerings, it will not change the root the cause though.

Back in the mid-90's when the cable company's and MaBell started rolling out high bandwidth access over and beyond ISDN speeds for residential users, they began a pricing war to get as many people converted. I have always believed this path was chosen for 2 reasons:

1) They needed to convince the average user they needed more then dial-up, most were content with the speeds they got. They could browse, get email all at what they felt was reasonable speeds. Hell fresh on their minds was using a 14.4/28.8 baud modem, this 56k was heaven still.

2) They wanted the market share. Cable companies were 100% convinced (And still are) they offer better then DSL.

The result was one way or another customers rolling out of the dialup market and into the high bandwidth access. This change in access speeds allowed for the internet we see to day, video streaming, web 2.0 sites, P2P etc etc.

Since the marketing by these companies early on was all about getting the customer, they didn't consider the long term impact of offering unlimited to users. As the bandwidth consumption increased, demand for more and more access on the edge devices increased. While the prices of bandwidth have steadily come down, the consumption has increased by a larger factor. The Cable/Ma Bell companies are stuck. They have been using a broken model since day one and they taught there customers what to expect, and they are having trouble delivering on this.

I have always viewed it as:

1 person says a false hood but tells it as truth to another, who tells another and another. If enough people believe in a lie, it becomes truth.

They said we can offer you umlimted access when in truth they cannot. They cannot afford to. They cannot raise the rates, since the competition doesn't, so its a never ending cycle of them trying "tricks" to reduce bandwidth consumption and still make some money off the service.

I only see this problem getting bigger and bigger. We all know the internet's content is getting bigger so DOCSIS3 and like technologies are created to offer even more bandwidth to the customers to meet those needs, but the same basic problem still exists for them. More proxy, more rate shaping more every trick in the book is our futures. They have no choice.

They want control but should not have it.

[Odder]

Here's how media companies will kill the free internet we all know and love:

• Meter everything but a few incumbent favored sites, everything else loses traffic and ad revenue overnight.
• Kick off the users you don't like, alternate sites will wither and die when their owners are harassed this way.
• Block sites you don't like by calling something nasty.

"Legitimate" media caches and disruption of all other P2P traffic only makes step one worse. They will continue to slow the rest to lower than their heavily filtered networks can deliver. The result will look like broadcast media does today, one big corporate billboard, instead of a free press. Part of censorship is shouting louder than others.

Yeah, I've said this before. As long as ISPs have the same story, so will I.

Re:They want control but should not have it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Looks like off topic bullshit to me.

Re:They want control but should not have it.

[negRo_slim]

"Legitimate" media caches and disruption of all other P2P traffic only makes step one worse. It's a tiered internet in disguise, one step at a time. Not only that it's a double edged sword... I download OpenOffice via p2p, but in reality I assume the "legitimate" cache would be so far under utilized they would take the numbers to congress as some measure of "proof" to pass anti-p2p legislation.

Re:They want control but should not have it.

[Cathoderoytube]

A while ago I read an article about how 33.6 modems would go extremely fast if the infrastructure of the internet was more up to date hardware wise. Is there any truth to that? It seems like the ISP's are on one hand limiting bandwidth to limit any sort of competition in the media department they may have, and on the other hand limiting their speeds because they don't have the technology in place to handle people using the internet. At least that's what I've gleaned from the various articles on ISP connection throttling.

Re:They want control but should not have it.

[Keys1337]

Is a while ago more or less than ten years?

Re:They want control but should not have it.

[RiotingPacifist]

shhh will, please get back to sorting out your crappy code at Microsoft.

Re:They want control but should not have it.

[Cathoderoytube]

probably in the neighborhood of 10 years

Re:They want control but should not have it.

[Derosian]

Why can't we have an ISP that advertises the fact that it doesn't interfere with your traffic that it doesn't track the information you transfer or track packet use.

You would think corporate America would have this cropping up, or is this like telephone companies, small start up internet companies can't compete against the big dogs?

Re:They want control but should not have it.

[iwein]

Newsflash: they already have control. The only way you can prevent them from exercising that control based on the content of your transfers is by encrypting them.

Technically the caches are a very good idea. Basically they would put a peer on the network that is very close to you that would hold the stuff that other people close to you have been downloading.

The arguments you put forward deal with the evilness of telco's, but are unrelated to the mentioned cache. They don't get any larger degree of control by putting a cache in place, they just get more bandwidth available (with which they *could* do evil stuff, sure).

Re:They want control but should not have it.

[DarkKnightRadick]

You mean like what is already being discussed?

Re:They want control but should not have it.

[ztransform]

Technically the caches are a very good idea.

Yes a cache would be good, but what is the problem? Mostly, it is keeping unnecessary expensive international bandwidth down.

I keep asking for a simple protocol called "local?" or similar. The idea is that you send a "local?" request to a broadcast address which your ISP would capture, and respond yes/no depending on whether the IP queried was local to your ISP.

P2P services could then utilise this protocol in prioritising which sources (clients) to download from. The idea is that you would prioritise downloads from any client on your local network.

Much simpler than having ISPs actually cache data, and no question of legality either.

I guess, too, clients like uTorrent already have a guess at which country the client is from - perhaps more intelligence could be build in to prefer downloads that appear to be from the same country (though this wouldn't be perfect, it would be a good compromise).

Re:They want control but should not have it.

[Keeper Of Keys]

I have mod points, but can't seem to find 'citation needed' on the dropdown.

Re:They want control but should not have it.

[mrogers]

A while ago I read an article about how 33.6 modems would go extremely fast if the infrastructure of the internet was more up to date hardware wise. Is there any truth to that?

No. Modems are limited by the physical characteristics of the telephone system, including filters that prevent the lines from carrying high frequencies (the filters were originally designed to separate voice signals from control signals). If you upgraded all the phone lines you might get 56 kbps, but that's about the limit.

In principle you're right, though - ISPs could improve last-mile capacity by upgrading their infrastructure from copper to fibre, but companies are reluctant to make that kind of long-term investment. (On the other hand, it would arguably have provided quicker and larger returns than bidding for 3G wireless spectrum in Europe.)

Re:They want control but should not have it.

[mrogers]

The idea is that you would prioritise downloads from any client on your local network.

Interesting idea - you could probably get something similar to what you described by measuring the ping time or the number of traceroute hops. I can see a couple of stumbling blocks, though. First, it's not necessarily in the users' interest to prioritise local peers - they might prefer to prioritise fast peers, or peers that don't require them to upload much. Second, current networks aren't designed to make local shortcuts - they're designed to route everything through the local hub so the provider can bill everyone appropriately and keep the intelligent equipment in a secure building. So even if Alice and Bob are neighbours, chances are that every packet from Alice to Bob has to travel quite a long way before it hits a switch that's intelligent enough to route it back towards Bob. ISPs might be able to solve that problem by installing more intelligent switches in every local junction box, but that's exactly the kind of long-term infrastructure investment they're trying to avoid. So we end up in an absurd situation where a packet sent to your next-door neighbour uses more of the ISP's last-mile bandwidth than a packet sent to the other side of the world, because it traverses the same line twice.

Re:They want control but should not have it.

[rocca]

Not enough people willing to pay the true costs of having 5Mbps connections running full out 24x7. The rates we pay now are based on a specific usage pattern. When that pattern changes disproportionately based on a handful of users, there are three options. 1) Raise rates, 2) Implement caps, 3) Implement throttling.

I've got a good solution..

[plasmacutter]

How about they roll out the infrastructure we paid for with our tax dollars, then not apply any "controls".

you know, a proper, neutral internet that fulfills the promises they made again and again to our government officials when they were given grants, local monopolies, etc. etc.

Re:I've got a good solution..

[burnin1965]

And where is the government we paid for? They should be seriously thumping these clowns over the head for even considering "combating internet traffic" which is clearly the type of traffic intended when the 1996 Telecommunication Act was passed and the deregulation started.

Section 706 paragraph (c) line 1 states:

(1) ADVANCED TELECOMMUNICATIONS CAPABILITY- The term
                            `advanced telecommunications capability' is defined, without
                            regard to any transmission media or technology, as high-speed,
                            switched, broadband telecommunications capability that enables
                            users to originate and receive high-quality voice, data,
                            graphics, and video telecommunications using any technology.

The key here being enables users to originate and receive high-quality voice, data, graphics, and video, thats right, originate AND receive. Somebody clue these dolts in to the fact the internet is not TV 2.0.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with the way subscribers are utilizing their ISPs, this is exactly as it was envisioned by the authors of the 1996 Act. Imagine that, government officials having better vision for the future of technological advancement in telecommunications than the people running the companies. I can tell you why, the problem is also the clueless bean counters and MBAs could care less about technology, innovations, etc. and would demand a monthly fee just cause if they could get away with it. These people should be running illegal whore houses and extortion rackets, not technology corporations.

If our government doesn't step in and force these bozos to provide the service they advertise and were given deregulation perks for then we may need to step in and explain that they don't own our back yards through which they run their damned cables, I deserve a tariff since its my land they're hauling all those bits through.

Fine...

[pinguwin]

Ok, what are those caps? What are the exact limits of bandwidth. If I download X bytes, will I have Y speed? Until they answer that, it's all hot air.

alt.binaries

[bassakward]

Isn't this just what alt.binaries was doing for the ISPs? Local caching? And they just got rid of those.

Re:alt.binaries

[Core-Dump]

Thank God not here (Netherlands).
Here it is LEGAL by law to download music or movies for own use, and binaries are just the perfect way of getting them...... as long as it lasts.
But then again, seeding torrents is illigal here, but the dutch MPAA/RIAA isn't able to sue private persons because of the privacy laws here

Re:alt.binaries

[kwark]

You are wrong on the privacy laws.
(in dutch) http://zoeken.rechtspraak.nl/resultpage.aspx?snelzoeken=true&searchtype=ljn&ljn=AY6903&u_ljn=AY6903

Any provider has to give up the customers address info IF there is no doubt that customer is doing something illegal. Like in this case uploading torrents to a dutch torrent site and seeding them

Re:alt.binaries

[Timothy Brownawell]

Isn't this just what alt.binaries was doing for the ISPs? Local caching? And they just got rid of those. Only if they actually had subscribers who collectively downloaded everything in alt.binaries.

Easily Distinguishable

[Anonymous Coward]

"localized "cache servers," which would hold recent (legal) P2P content..."

And we all know what a wonderful job ISP's have done in the past at deciding what content is legal and what's illegal. I wonder what they'll do about encrypted traffic.

Re:Easily Distinguishable

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder what they'll do about encrypted traffic. Not cache it, obviously. Unencrypted traffic will therefore be faster, so people will use less encryption. Was that a trick question?

No thanks

[nurb432]

1 - sort of defeats the purpose
2 - id rather them not know what i'm getting, be it legal or not.

total bandwidth used, not downloaded

[MrKaos]

My ISP very cleverly tells me I can download 12gb per month, which is true. What they don't tell me is anything I upload when I'm peering is also counted to the 12Gb total.

Re:total bandwidth used, not downloaded

[Vectronic]

Curious, how do you know you have downloaded (and/or uploaded) 12GBs?

I mean I doubt you grab the calculator everytime you download a file, or a webpage is finished loading... They could even be inserting corrupt packets, and including that in the 12GB total, or what about ICMP, Ping, DNS's lookups... surely thats included aswell, which is probably in at least the 10's probably the hundreds of MB's after 12GB's...

"no no, see this graph? says there it was 12 GBs"

Ive always gone for the DL/UL limited ISP's cause then as slow as it may (or may not) be, I know that im getting what I can get in a given amount of time... including overhead, and corruption.

Re:total bandwidth used, not downloaded

[hankwang]

I mean I doubt you grab the calculator everytime you download a file, or a webpage is finished loading...

My ISP tells it somewhere on the web interface for my account settings. Moreover, the web interface to your ADSL modem probably also shows it somewhere, at least since the last reboot.

Re:total bandwidth used, not downloaded

[Dan541]

Curious, how do you know you have downloaded (and/or uploaded) 12GBs?

Are you serious? its not exactly rocket science.

Re:total bandwidth used, not downloaded

[plasmacutter]

I mean I doubt you grab the calculator everytime you download a file, or a webpage is finished loading...

My ISP tells it somewhere on the web interface for my account settings. Moreover, the web interface to your ADSL modem probably also shows it somewhere, at least since the last reboot.

ah, and I'd trust my ISP for accurate metering. it is in their best interest to provide you the full service, right?

Re:total bandwidth used, not downloaded

[FriendComputer]

The (only) ISP in my town has been doing this for a long time. $30 a month gets you 1.5Mb/514kb and a 5GB/month download limit, with a $1 charge for each additional GB. They have some "premium" packages that basically come with more bandwidth (I think it's 20/30/40GB) for about another $10 each per tier.

I've actually gone over my bandwidth limit just playing WoW, and I didn't even play that much.

The really sad thing is the town is pretty decent size (100k or so) and less than half an hour from the world headquarters of a major telecom company.

Re:total bandwidth used, not downloaded

[noidentity]

What they don't tell me is anything I upload when I'm peering is also counted to the 12Gb total.

In Soviet America, uploads download YOU! Or something...

Re:total bandwidth used, not downloaded

[xSauronx]

theres only one isp in a town of 100k?

sounds like you need to read up and start the second one ;)

Re:total bandwidth used, not downloaded

[Vectronic]

Yeah, the ISP usually has a meter, but like Plasmacutter said, you trust it based on what?

And yes, most Modems, and also Routers have some sort of tracking... my modem doesn't however (Motorola SB5101), only various statistics about the signal/frequency/channels/Hz/etc...

And my router (D-Link EBR-2310) has WAN and LAN packet count, however does not say anything about the size of the packets.

Granted both are cheap pieces of shit, but so are most for home use...

And your OS can track it to some degree aswell, but what if you restart and forgot to write the last amount down?

But, I was just saying, how do you know that what you have sent and received is only what was necessary? it could easily be fudged intentionally, inadvertently by poor hardware, etc, or by miscalculations on any one of those steps. It's not accurate enough to really base a service on, at least not so strictly 12 GBs Maximum, it's like charging telephone calls per syllable, it would be an approximation because of different languages, accents, etc.

Re:total bandwidth used, not downloaded

[FunkSoulBrother]

Shit man, I hate bandwidth caps too, but do you treat the electric company meterman with such disdain? I just have to trust the dial on the meter, I don't add up all my appliance use for the month.

Also on a computer it is trivial to log your total Upstream/downstream usage for the month.

Re:total bandwidth used, not downloaded

[kailoran]

Yeah, the ISP usually has a meter, but like Plasmacutter said, you trust it based on what?

I'd wager it's based on observing that after downloading a linux ISO and some web surfing the meter showed 700-some MB more the day after. I had usage caps, and was not trusting them implicitly, but, well, they seemed honest enough.

And a few months later the monopolist ISP was forced to drop the caps and offer real unlimited services. Forced by government-induced free market situation (mandatory copper sharing for a set price) and customers flocking to competitors' services en masse. That was over a year ago and the broadband situation here, while still somewhat overpriced and on the slow side (1Mbit being the norm) is quite alright. Seeing how things are playing out in the US, I'm quite astonished bloody Poland managed to get it right.

Re:total bandwidth used, not downloaded

[plasmacutter]

the electric company is subject to strict state regulation as a monopoly.

the telecoms providing the internet are still referred to as "the free market".

one involves oversight and accountability, the other does not : /

when net neutrality laws get passed, this difference should vanish.

Re:total bandwidth used, not downloaded

[clone53421]

I personally think a 5 GB cap is ludicrous in this day and age. Watch 5 or 10 YouTube videos every evening (say 10-20 MB each), hit a few of the streaming news reports in the videos section of your favourite tv station, plus a few hours of streaming audio during the afternoon from a radio station... 5 GB a month isn't enough.

testing, please ignore

[Anonymous Coward]

making sure anonymous posting still works.

and who says p2p control is necessary?

[plasmacutter]

how about we also have http controls, and mms controls, and...

oh wait those are not being continuously vilified by the MAFIAA, who also own the news.

This actually isn't as bad as it looks...

[NoobixCube]

Having a local cache server, while it does spark privacy concerns, is actually probably the best solution they've come up with yet. ISPs won't have to spend a great deal of money on upgrading infrastructure, and users don't get shafted by reset packages. It's something of a compromise between doing it the right way (upgrading everything) and the wrong way (strangling the users).

Re:This actually isn't as bad as it looks...

[Opportunist]

Answer me one question before applauding the idea: How are they going to discriminate between legal and illegal content without looking at what you're downloading?

Re:This actually isn't as bad as it looks...

[NoobixCube]

They can't, and I acknowledged the privacy concern, and I'm not applauding it yet. If they didn't discriminate at all, it would be excellent, but thanks to capitalism, greed and corruption, the **AA have their fingers in too many pies. ISPs already spy on us all the time, so it's not like we're losing anything we haven't already lost. I like my privacy, but I'm under no illusion I actually HAVE any.

Re:This actually isn't as bad as it looks...

[burris]

They don't need to discriminate between "legal and illegal" any more than they do now for HTTP caches, which is not at all.

Re:This actually isn't as bad as it looks...

[John_Sauter]

Answer me one question before applauding the idea: How are they going to discriminate between legal and illegal content without looking at what you're downloading?

They can't. Even if they know for sure what you are downloading, they have no way of knowing whether or not you have the permission of the copyright owner to download it. They are saying "legal" to avoid a pre-emptive attack by the RIAA. When the cache is installed, it will turn out that it doesn't discriminate, and they hope the RIAA won't be able to persuade Congress to declare it illegal.

Re:This actually isn't as bad as it looks...

[Layth]

If they just start hosting a bunch of legal torrents on their cache machines, wouldn't your computer link up to the local machines naturally?

This method obviously isn't as optimized as scanning user traffic for analysis, but it would still make an impact. You could also have contact with the torrent sites and request a list of the most popular legal torrents being downloaded.

Re:This actually isn't as bad as it looks...

[Dan541]

ISPs won't have to spend a great deal of money on upgrading infrastructure, But is that really a good thing?

If they had done that in the first place they wouldn't be in this mess.

Re:This actually isn't as bad as it looks...

[Keeper Of Keys]

Agreed. It would probably be hard for the content "owners" to know whether a particular piece of content had in fact been cached, and even if they could prove it, common carrier status would probably apply to the ISP. I'm naturally cautious about the motivations of corporations, but some people here are being overly paranoid IMO.

usage-based pricing

[Anonymous Coward]

Even better: make the pricing also destination-based and time-of-day-based, and suddenly, P2P software will care about locality and peak hours, solving the traffic issues.

As an ISP, if you bill the user exactly what it costs you, then the user will minimize your costs because he minimizes his! You also end up charging your "problematic" users appropriately (or losing them) so you don't mind them, and you win against the competition because they lose money on people who find their plan cheaper, and they lose the customers who find your plan cheaper.

Instead ISPs use convoluted pricing schemes so they run into all kinds of problems and need this telecom conference to help them.

I say, make the pricing scheme as accurate as possible, and let the market forces solve the problem.

The Next NNTP?

[Bandman]

I don't see a whole lot of difference in legality between this and hosting newsgroup messages. Legit reasons for both.

Re:The Next NNTP?

[bassakward]

Except a lot of ISPs just got rid of a whole lot of newsgroups, including the alt.binaries that peoples used for files (legit and otherwise).

ISPs can cache illegal content

[Wesley Felter]

I don't know why people keep getting hung up on legal vs. illegal content; the law clearly says that ISPs have no copyright liability for their caches:

http://www.bitlaw.com/source/17usc/512.html

Re:ISPs can cache illegal content

[Anonymous Coward]

b-b-but...the DMCA is a BAD EVIL law!! I know so because c0ry d0ctorow told me so!

Re:ISPs can cache illegal content

[TheLink]

But all someone needs to do is scream "They are distributing child porn!" and everyone loses their minds :).

They better deliver what they promise.

[EWAdams]

I'm told I get 10 MBPS. As far as I'm concerned, that means 10 MPBS 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, for as long as I pay my bill. Any effort to throttle that back and I sue for false advertising.

Re:They better deliver what they promise.

[freedom_india]

Please go ahead. We have just bought immunity. MWhaaaaa!!!

Re:They better deliver what they promise.

[ChiRaven]

I'm told I get 10 MBPS. As far as I'm concerned, that means 10 MPBS 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, for as long as I pay my bill. Any effort to throttle that back and I sue for false advertising.

Read it again. It says "UP TO 10 Mbps", doesn't it?

Re:They better deliver what they promise.

[Mr2001]

If they're selling him "up to 10 Mbps", then that means he should get to use "up to 10 Mbps" whenever he likes, via any application or protocol, as long as he's paying his bill.

"Up to 10 Mbps" only means "we don't guarantee there will be 10 Mbps available for you to use", not "you have to limit yourself to under 10 Mbps" or "we will artificially limit you to under 10 Mbps". If there's 10 Mbps or more available, then you get to use the full 10; if there's less, then you get to use whatever bandwidth is available.

Re:They better deliver what they promise.

[ChiRaven]

The problem comes in with things like cable-delivered services, where a number of customers are essentially sharing a "party line". If one customer is using the 10MBPS fully, others don't get much at all. The question is, is the ISP (cable company) justified in cutting back on what each customer can use in order to be certain that the limited bandwidth is distributed "fairly" among all the people that the cable company chooses to put on the same circuit. Or does the cable company really have an obligation to make more bandwidth available by cutting down on the number of subscribers per "line"?

This doesn't happen much with the (slower-speed) telecom DSL service, because each customer has a dedicated pair back to the central office, as long as there is no significant "leakage" of signal within a cable bundle.

Re:They better deliver what they promise.

[Mr2001]

The problem comes in with things like cable-delivered services, where a number of customers are essentially sharing a "party line". If one customer is using the 10MBPS fully, others don't get much at all. Why is that a "problem"? Situations like that are exactly why the connection is described as up to 10 Mbps.

The question is, is the ISP (cable company) justified in cutting back on what each customer can use in order to be certain that the limited bandwidth is distributed "fairly" among all the people that the cable company chooses to put on the same circuit. Yes, as long as they do it honestly and without discriminating against any application or protocol.

That is, if offering customers "up to 10 Mbps" results in too much bandwidth usage, then they should offer "up to 6 Mbps" or "up to 2 Mbps" instead. They can even use something like Comcast's PowerBoost to raise the cap for quick bursts, so web surfing and email won't be affected.

Or does the cable company really have an obligation to make more bandwidth available by cutting down on the number of subscribers per "line"? Their only obligation is to deliver what they promise.

If the only way to offer "up to 10 Mbps" while ensuring that the service will still be usable is to cut down the number of customers per segment, then that's what they'll have to do. But they don't have to keep offering "up to 10 Mbps" if they don't have the network capacity for it; they could just admit that their network can't handle the level of service they've been promising, and go back to promising something less.

Comcast is a little cry baby

[BountyX]

I hate to applaud AT&T on anything, but they have made a ginuwine commitment to a nuetral network refusing to partake in shaping until forced by legislation or until they find a solution that dosn't hurt their customer base. All it takes for traffic shaping to fail is for one person so not do it...then everyone goes to that one person. At the same time AT&T is rolling out increased infrastructure. I upload consistently at 112 kps almost 24/7 (I backup 10 gig files almost daily to colocated servers). My clients cable provider disconnects their internet if excessive upstream is detected...it seems like this is more of an issue for the cable companies rather than dsl providers becuase DSL providers sell dedicated BW as opposed to portions of shared BW (like cable does).

Re:Comcast is a little cry baby

[Anonymous Coward]

...but they have made a ginuwine commitment to a... Let's play spot the person who listened to late 90's hip hop "stars".

Re:Comcast is a little cry baby

[Anonymous Coward]

I hate to applaud AT&T ...

Rightly so! To use "u-verse" I need to a "TV" package. That means sending money to Disney, Viacom, Fox, and other scum I'd assume not get my money just so I can surf the f-ing net.

Let's see how this works...

[Kazoo the Clown]

1. Cache known legal content to improve download performance.
2. Significantly reduce performance of content with "unknown" legal status.
3. Result: legal content gets preferential treatment so legal downloading performs better.
4. Non-"neutral" treatment completely justified by the war against contraband.
5. Hit content providers for kickbacks, those that don't pay get their content treated as "unknown" legal status.
6. PROFIT!

p2p creates cost shifting

[drDugan]

P2P shifts costs of distribution from central servers and spreads the load out among the downloaders. This is *helpful*, and it is more equitable given that the marginal costs of data copying is near zero - pushing the price of downloaded content lower and lower.

The pricing seems like such a non issue. The elephant in the room is that companies like Comcast are making a killing, taking a ton of money selling services that largely go unused. many service businesses over sell their capacity to ensure high usage rates, but broadband has taken it to an absolute extreme.

The obvious and easy solution is for providers of cable and DSL services to price their offerings according to usage, and when it comes to bandwidth, the accurate solution is 95% billing: you use a ton of bandwidth, the customer gets charged more. They don't really want to do this though - they make a lot more money buying in bulk and selling little access services for much higher rates than the bandwidth used.

One huge upside of changing the pricing system for home Internet to 95% billing is that you don't have to go metering and capping bandwidth to homes. People could get an *extremely* fast connection, but if they utilize it fully 24/7 then they get billed a high rate. This is not that complex a concept to implement technically.

Re:p2p creates cost shifting

[Anonymous Coward]

P2P shifts costs of distribution from central servers and spreads the load out among the downloaders. This is *helpful*, and it is more equitable given that the marginal costs of data copying is near zero - pushing the price of downloaded content lower and lower.

Bits may be free-as-in-beer to you, but the peering arrangements that bring you those bits aren't free-as-in-beer to ISPs. When a Comcast user gobbles down a gigabyte of data from other Comcast users, Comcast doesn't have to pay transit. When that same Comcast user gobbles the data down from an AT&T user, the data flows across AT&T's pipes, and Comcast owes AT&T a few microbucks. Except that this happens in both directions, and bits are typically considered too cheap to meter, so typically "peering" arrangements are set up, wherein two ISPs agree to haul data for each other.

Problem is, if (due to a difference in the demographics of their customer bases) Comcast users tend to haul down, say, twice as much (or ten times as much!) data from AT&T's network as AT&T's users grab from Comcast's users, those peering agreements can, and will, be renegotiated.

So the solution, from the ISP's standpoint, is to keep as much traffic on the "LAN" (i.e., its own network segments) as possible.

And that's why (from the article summary) they want:

localized "cache servers," which would hold recent (legal) P2P content in order to keep clients from reaching halfway around the world for parts of a file.

What I don't understand is why the very same ISPs are shutting down the very technology they're claiming to want to build. "Localized cache servers" have been holding "recent content" and serving it out to local customers on port 119 for decades.

As for the caveat that it be "recent (legal) content", from a copyright infringement standpoint, it's all "legal". ISPs cannot be sued for hosting infringing works so long as they comply with takedown notices. That was the intent (and the language) of the DMCA. MAFIAA gets the right to ask the ISP to delete files from the ISP's server. So long as the ISP does so in a timely fashion, the ISP cannot be sued for infringement.

Re:p2p creates cost shifting

[Brett Glass]

With flat rate pricing, P2P shifts the cost of distribution from the content provider to the ISP... AND multiplies it several hundredfold in the process, because bandwidth at the edges of the network is much more costly than bandwidth at a server farm or NAP. While congestion is also a concern, this cost shifting is the main reason why ISPs throttle or block P2P. Why should an ISP let a content provider like Blizzard, which is already rolling in the dough, set up a server on its network without permission or compensation and take its expensive bandwidth and capacity without paying?

Where the ISP's are Wrong!

[Nom du Keyboard]

You should be allowed to use the bandwidth you paid for as you please. It's not your ISP's business what you decide to do with what they sold you. Whether it's downloading via BT, or watching video on Hulu, no one else should be trying to decide which are Good Bits and which are Bad Bits.

Re:Where the ISP's are Wrong!

[MindlessAutomata]

What if it is sending out DDoS attacks or SPAM?

Re:Where the ISP's are Wrong!

[MindlessAutomata]

Let me clarify: being part of a DDoS attack.

Re:Where the ISP's are Wrong!

[smoker2]

While what you say is true, consider the all you can eat analogy.
If a restaurant offers an all you can eat buffet, then everybody hits one particular dish, it prevents people from getting to the other dishes, and causes congestion on the one dish every body wants.
Surely it is up to the provider to try and organise demand to improve the traffic. Either that or get the users to change their habits (good luck with that).
Too many users using p2p is not the issue, traffic congestion is. Notice how they want to store legal stuff in local caches. They can't really offer the illegal stuff, can they ? What more do you want ?
What would you do to manage the demand to ensure reliability of the network ?

Re:Where the ISP's are Wrong!

[Brett Glass]

Actually, "all you can eat" service is analogous to an "all you can eat" buffet. There are rules: You can't take food out; you can't waste it; you can't give it to someone who hasn't paid. The same is true of "all you can eat" broadband. P2P takes bandwidth from the ISP for the benefit of a third party that has not paid: the content provider. And it wastes it, because P2P is much less efficient than a straight, simple download. An ISP has every right to prohibit this sort of behavior, just as the buffet owner does. If you don't like it -- well, you can go to a place where you pay by the plate. Or by weight. But rules and limits are fundamental to any "all you can eat" service. Otherwise, the buffet owner (or ISP) goes broke.

Re:Where the ISP's are Wrong!

[clone53421]

P2P takes bandwidth from the ISP for the benefit of a third party that has not paid: the content provider.

Huh? Are you saying the ISPs want the downloader and the uploader to pay them? I'm sure they'd like that, but it's totally nonsensical. Everything you download comes from somewhere... what, giving me google.com is of benefit to Google, so they won't do that either? Or maybe they'll stop transferring those irritating ads, since they don't get any royalties and it's costing them bandwidth... (hmm...)

Re:Where the ISP's are Wrong!

[Brett Glass]

If a content provider is using the ISP's network and bandwidth to serve content, it ought to pay for the resources it is using. That's the thing about P2P; the recipient of the content is NOT just downloading. His machine is -- in many cases, unbeknownst to him -- becoming the content provider's server. This costs the ISP a lot more in resources than a simple download would, for two reasons. First of all, the ISP has to backhaul that bandwidth from the backbone, often at a cost of hundreds of dollars per Mbps per month. And after getting it into its point of presence, the ISP must deliver that bandwidth through the "last mile" to the customer. The resources to do this are also expensive and labor intensive to build. Secondly, instead of just the bandwidth that's needed for a single download, P2P sends out dozens -- even hundreds -- of additional copies of the file. So, overall, the cost of sending the file is not only shifted to the ISP but multiplied by a factor of several hundred. Who should cover this cost? It's only fair that the party who benefits should do so. And that party is not the user who did the download -- it's the content provider -- like Vuze or Blizzard -- who distributes content via P2P. Because it is using up the ISP's very costly "edge of the Net" bandwidth, it should pay for that bandwidth.

Re:Where the ISP's are Wrong!

[clone53421]

Last time I checked, ISPs were in the business of offering download and upload service, so all they're really doing is complaining about people "over"-using a service that they're supposedly offering. (Not that I'd be surprised... why does "when we said unlimited, we didn't mean unlimited" sound so familiar?) So what if the content being uploaded is Blizzard's? It's really none of the ISP's business whether I'm seeding a torrent from some third party or uploading my newest video for YouTube.

Furthermore, I don't see how a node can be uploading:downloading at rates of 10-100:1. First, that's only possible if other nodes are severely leeching; the optimum would be 1:1, because that's the average rate (every byte uploaded by someone is downloaded by someone else, 1:1). Second, it's just plain silly: nobody's going to wait 10 hours to download a file that should take only an hour. Besides, it'd really take even longer than that since a node's upstream pipe is allocated a lot less bandwidth than its downstream pipe.

Now, if they put a cap on the upload capacity, then they'd have a valid complaint here, but I've never heard of such a thing. Actually, that would be a very logical step, IMHO... a 5 GB download cap is absurd, but a 5 GB upload cap would be significantly less restrictive since most people don't upload much. If that's exceeded, they could throttle the upstream; you could still get HTTP content (since the HTTP requests aren't very large) but P2P uploading capabilities would be severely hampered. It'd benefit the ISPs on both sides, too; if the P2P uploaders' upstream pipe is throttled, the data transferred to the downloaders won't use as much bandwidth on their end either.

Comcast: Not that bad

[Anonymous Coward]

I have Comcast, and I've never experienced any traffic shaping or throttling.

Their policy, now that it's no longer P2P specific, seems sane.

Two conditions have to be met for them to throttle your traffic:

1) You have to be one of their heavy heavy users. By heavy, I mean torrenting 24/7.
2) The network has to be congested at that moment.

If granny next door can't check her email because you're downloading/uploading pron all day every day, they reserve the right to throttle back your connection until the congestion clears. Seems fairly reasonable.

Also, it's far, FAR better than than the capped, $1 per GB plan that Time Warner Cable is piloting.

Re:Comcast: Not that bad

[compro01]

I have Comcast, and I've never experienced any traffic shaping or throttling. A question : Do you have other options for your broadband?

I have yet to hear of comcast throttling anywhere that the users have other viable options for their internet service.

Re:Comcast: Not that bad

[Banzai042]

I'm not positive, but I'm pretty sure that Comcast is throttling my connection when bittorrent is running, and I'm in a suburb of Denver where various DSL options are available. It's not nearly as bad as it was a year or two ago, back then if I had a torrent going for more than 30 min the entire house slowed to low double digit kbps speeds. Now if I have a torrent going for more than an hour or so things seem to slow down (max upload of 30KBps, max download of 100KBps) but if I start up the same torrent after a night of no activity those numbers will be closer to 100/300, even though there are less peers connected.

Re:Comcast: Not that bad

[Taibhsear]

I have comcast. I have experienced both throttling and traffic shaping and continue to even after declaring themselves "bittorrent friendly." I pay for a 6down/768up line. My torrents constantly get throttled to a total of 40kbs. (I've never gotten higher than maybe 70kbs upload before on torrents) I have to personally throttle it below 20 kbs if I want to be able to access webpages. I connected to a "friendly neighborhood wireless router" that was running the exact same comcast line and the upload jumped to the highest values I've ever gotten 500kbs. It consistently stayed above 100kbs. (and that was with a connectivity/signal strength of about 3%) Yet my hard line only gets 40. Something very fishy is going on.

And just because granny can't check her mail doesn't mean I can't use my internet. I paid for my connection and I'm damn well going to use it. If her connection sucks she needs to call the company and complain. They can explain to her why they didn't upgrade the backbone enough for her to use her internet. (ie. lining their pockets instead) They don't deserve the right to deny me what I paid for because someone else doesn't utilize it to the full extent. They told me I could take my full share, I intend to do so.

What the user expects

[WarJolt]

If Comcast advertises 6Mbps I expect 6Mbps or an equal share of the remaining available bandwidth I can receive at any moment.

They have the pipe and customers are bidding on that share of pipe. Inevitably that pipe is going to get clogged just like our California freeways during rush hour. If I'm paying $60 a month I expect my own freaking lane.

I believe communication companies need incentive to upgrade their bandwidth. If they want people to pay for more bandwidth they should have to expand their network infrastructure and not limit the amount other users can download.

Just make it equal share for everyone up to the bandwidth cap they advertise. If a user who is paying $40 a month is getting the same bandwidth as the person paying $60 a month then there is no incentive for the customer to pay the $60. If the ISP wants people to pay $60 a month then they could go ahead and upgrade their networks to support more bandwidth. Just deliver what you advertise. Is that so much to ask?

Re:What the user expects

[laird]

"If I'm paying $60 a month I expect my own freaking lane."

You shouldn't have this expectation, because that's not what you're paying for. If you want a committed 1.5 Mbps (a T1) that costs (for example) $360/month. This gives you guaranteed 1.5 Mbps with a 99.99% SLA. That bandwidth is reserved for your exclusive use, and you can pump data through it 24/7.

What you're paying $30/month for is cheap, shared bandwidth with no guarantees. The reason that it costs so much less is that your ISP isn't reserving capacity in their network exclusively to you, but is running you on a shared infrastructure for your neighborhood, town, state, etc., built out to support normal usage patterns (meaning that users occasionally need their full bandwidth,. but not constantly) So you might get 1.5 Mbps, but you might not, if your ISP has a lot of other traffic right now.

So it's true that money solves the capacity problem. If the ISPs spend 10x on their infrastructure in order to prove everyone with committed bandwidth to the internet, then there would be no congestion problems. But then you'd pay 10x more for internet service. For most people that is a very bad deal.

Re:What the user expects

[WarJolt]

I think you're missing my point. I'm not asking for guaranteed bandwidth. I'm asking for an equal share of the bandwidth that is shared, regardless of my monthly cost.

The Fraud of the Cable Companies

[Nom du Keyboard]

The fraud of the cable companies -- and I'm talking about you, Comcast -- is that you say these people are clogging up our cables so that no one else can use them as we've promised everyone can. Yet money completely solves this problem. Pay for a more expensive business account and suddenly, with no other changes at all to your local cable loop, you get higher bandwidth and caps and somehow are no longer killing their system.

Tell me Comcast: Just how did your cable suddenly get better once you start charging me 2X to 5X as much as before?

They're just a bunch of fsking liars!

Re:The Fraud of the Cable Companies

[Opportunist]

Well, they obviously hire an Adeptus Mechanicus to bless the cables and appease the machine god, duh.

And if you think that's silly, offer a better explanation.

Re:The Fraud of the Cable Companies

[Wildclaw]

Of course it doesn't get better. The problem they are having isn't with expensive bandwidth, because face it bandwidth isn't that expensive compared to what they are charging for it.

What they are having trouble with is clogged up last mile bandwidth because of an aging infrastructure where people share the last mile. As they can only support so much usage on each shared part, and the average usage by ordinary average users is rising, their only option is to either create a real last mile network (yeah right) or create barriers by introducing caps and extreme prices if you want to go over that barrier.

Or in market terms. last mile cable have a very limited supply which is beginning to be really noticable as usage increases. Compare this with dsl/fiber where supply can be more easily increased when demand increases and you can see why the cable companies should be very afraid.

Re:The Fraud of the Cable Companies

[Anonymous Coward]

So your basic complaint here is that you paid more and got better service?

Re:They better deliver what they promise.DID YOU M

[Nom du Keyboard]

I'm told I get 10 MBPS.

Wow would I like to be on a system like that!!!

Or did you possibly mean: 10 M b PS?

Ad Supported Bittorrent

[Anonymous Coward]

This just gave me an idea. Why not have the next generation of P2P protocol have ad space in the client. The catch is, the ads are pushed from other P2P clients. The receiver would then display ads from the top 3 seeders (measured by bitrate or bytes sent, or whatever makes sense). Then all of a sudden, we have incentive for these ISPs to seed.

Re:Ad Supported Bittorrent

[Dan541]

Incentive?

Today I sold something on eBay without scamming the buyer.

Where is my reward whats my incentive to NOT commit fraud?

If I don't get anything more than the fair and agreed price I'm going to take the buyers money and not bother delivering the product. That'll show them.

~Dan

Unlimited should mean unlimited

[Pentium100]

If my ISP promises me 4mbps download and unlimited traffic that should mean that I can download up to about 1TB per month (450KB/s 24hours a day for 30 days). If they want to limit me to, say, 100GB/month then this amount should be indicated somewhere in the agreement and should not be advertised as "unlimited".

If the network is congested I expect an equal share of the available bandwidth. Actually, I should get a share of the available bandwidth that is proportionate to my max bandwidth. For example, in a congested network I should get four times as much bandwidth as the person paying for 1mbps connection.

ISPs can do whatever they want (for example throttle P2P) just say so in the advertisement or at least when someone asks about it.

I am happy because my ISP appears not to limit my traffic (although I usually download only 100-200GB/month peaking at about 500GB/month)

P.S. why do I have to insert br tags to make a new line?

Re:Unlimited should mean unlimited

[Kaell Meynn]

I mostly agree, except for the part about proportional bandwidth during congestion. This only need be provided if it is promised. It is perfectly acceptable to provide everyone the same level during congestion, and only offer increased bandwidth as it is available so long as this is made clear to the customer.

P.S. If you change the comment post mode you won't have to use HTML formatting. It is just the default option. Click 'Options' during a post, change it, click 'Save'.

Re:Unlimited should mean unlimited

[smoker2]

If the network is congested I expect an equal share of the available bandwidth. Actually, I should get a share of the available bandwidth that is proportionate to my max bandwidth. For example, in a congested network I should get four times as much bandwidth as the person paying for 1mbps connection. That's fine inside your ISPs network, what about the rest of the internet. How do you prioritise traffic between ISPs. Sounds like the opposite of net neutrality.
People seem to forget that when the network is congested, they are part of the problem. You don't complain to Ford if your 150 mph car gets stuck on the freeway in a jam.

Re:Unlimited should mean unlimited

[Pentium100]

And how do they do the "this user is always downloading so we will give him less bandwidth on a congested network" ?

If ISPs can do that then they should be able to do "this user pays us less, so he will have less bandwidth on a congested network; that user pays us more, so he will get more bandwidth"

Common Carrier?

[generica1]

Furthermore, don't they have common carrier status, so all of it is legal for them to cache??

Comca$t.....

[IHC Navistar]

"While speakers rejected that Comcast method, some said it was time to follow the lead of Comcast and begin implementing caps for individual users who are consuming disproportionately high amounts of bandwidth."

-GOD FUCKING FORBID we use the bandwidth we purchased.

Good - another cache application.

[amn108]

Sounds like a good idea. Cache is a very good concept, that has proved itself across and in different systems.

Basically in an environment where size matters less than speed, cache brings benefits.

i.e. IMO, cache servers would do Internet good as a whole, provided they are:

1. Enviromentally competitive - draw little power, so they do not contribute to a whole lot of watts Internet contributes to already. I am talking about inexpensive systems with lots of cheap hard drive space. A lot of cache server systems to 'speed up' Internet means a lot of power draw, so obviously a factor.

2. Legal P2P content? Oh, lets play police again shall we? 90% of p2p traffic is illegal, so how caching 10% of the part that is legal is a solution? Besides, is encrypted traffic illegal? Speaking in Apache terms, is it an 'allow-deny' or a 'deny-allow' rule?

Perhaps use routers with a hard drive. That way it is a polymorph system, that acts as a good old TCP/IP router, but may retrieve content from cache, if the connection allows it. Replacing old routers with such upgraded systems can be done over time.

A cheap harddrive is what, a 5W? It only needs to be faster than cache-miss data retrieval equivalent, right?

Re:Good - another cache application.

[Mix Master Nixon]

Sounds like a good idea. Cache is a very good concept, that has proved itself across and in different systems.

Cache rules everything around me.

The pipe out of the DSLAM

[tepples]

it seems like this is more of an issue for the cable companies rather than dsl providers becuase DSL providers sell dedicated BW as opposed to portions of shared BW (like cable does). The pipe out of the DSLAM is just as shared as the channel in a DOCSIS cable network.

Re:The pipe out of the DSLAM

[Your Pal Dave]

The pipe out of the DSLAM is just as shared as the channel in a DOCSIS cable network. At least around here (Denver, CO), Qwest is running fiber to the DSLAM (FTTN). They are currently selling 20 Mbps, which is far faster than anything Comcast is offering. Comcast still persists on showing those stupid turtle commercials, however.

At $100 per month it's a little rich for my blood, so I'm sticking with Comcast until they Really piss me off.

Use a hoe

[tepples]

...but they have made a ginuwine commitment to a... Let's play spot the person who listened to late 90's hip hop "stars". That would just be ludacris.

The U.S. government caps these kickbacks

[tepples]

5. Hit content providers for kickbacks, those that don't pay get their content treated as "unknown" legal status. I can register the United States copyright in my work for $35, giving me a certificate of presumed legal status. So if ISPs demand any kickback greater than $50 from me yet advertise their residential service as source-neutral, I might take them to small claims court for false advertising.

Van Jacobson's "New Way To Look At Networking"

[Anonymous Coward]

The summary makes it sound like these guys are implementing the ideas covered in Van Jacobson's 2006 Google Tech Talk called "A New Way To Look At Networking" (Google Video).

I think this was covered somewhere on Slashdot previously, but I can't immediately find the article after a bit of searching.

So...

[Anonymous Coward]

Downloading music for free is destroying the music industry, yet downloading child pornography for free is helping the child pornography industry...?

What? Doublethink? Naw....

Some content doesn't WANT to be cached!

[davidwr]

If I'm serving up ad-supported content I don't want my content cached unless I can count the viewers so I can bill my advertisers.

If I'm serving up restricted-access content I definitely don't want it cached unless it can be done in a secure way.

If I'm serving up content subject to change I don't want it cached unless I can guarentee some level of up-to-dateness.

Having said that...

It's in the interest of "big content" to cooperate with "big pipe" to improve the customer experience. Happy customers are more likely to come back for additional products, which means more ca-ching! for everyone.

Poor wording

[thomas.galvin]

The first line of this article could easily be reworded "alphadogg points us to a NetworkWorld story about the search by ISPs for new ways to stop rendering the service for which their customers pay."

dumbest fucking idea ever.

[DragonTHC]

caching so called "legal p2p content" regionally is supposed to alleviate the web traffic crunch?

How about not throttling my HTTP streams you douchebag comcast?

I'm downloading my revision3 shows and some porn at the same time and all of a sudden, I can't load google?

try caching web content regionally. Oh wait, that's a stupid idea also.

their plan here is to say, ok you can legally download all of this content from local p2p servers. Anyone not using our servers is downloading illegally.
At that point, it's no longer p2p. And, when you start altering p2p streams, who is then liable for downloading anything? I didn't download anything, they changed the stream in route.

The plan to avoid it

[Anonymous Coward]

The truth is, content blocking (which is what this really is, none of that 'filtering' crap) is yet another hurdle to overcome. Things like encrypted BitTorrent and Distributed Hash Tables (DHT, or decentralized bittorrent) are only the first step.

Without a legal or free-market solution (since most ISPs are geographical monopolies or duopolies), a technological solution must be developed. The truth is, these content blocking appliances are pervasive in the ISPs network, and can pretty much masquerade as the intended endpoints for most traffic. The most effective solution, it seems, is to blind these appliances.

It makes the most sense for these boxes to take a multi-pronged approach:

1. Protocol Recognition (combatted by encrypted bittorrent)
2. Tracker snooping (a hole AFAIK)
3. Traffic/connection heuristics

If a P2P application is moved to a 'plane' above the usual network protocols and conventions, with encryption every step of the way, P2P communications will appear as noise or an unrecognized protocol, or not even as a single application at all.

Imagine this: A .torrent file that contains a URL to an authentication server. The authentication server is an https server, with the certificate published right along with the .torrent on thepiratebay.org or a similar site. After verifying the certificate, the BitTorrent client (Azureus, uTorrent whatever) contacts the authentication server, which presents a Turing Test (CAPTCHA). After the user selects all the kittens in the picture, the authentication server returns the tracker URL and the public key used for communication. The tracker then behaves like a normal BitTorrent tracker.

This way of joining the swarm completely prevents packet sniffing by using encryption every step of the way, and also stops the content blocking appliance from masquerading as a BitTorrent client by using a CAPTCHA. Without knowing the members of the P2P swarm, the appliance cannot block the connections made to and from those hosts.

As soon as the client becomes a part of the swarm, it must also take steps to avoid heuristics-based detection. It must not listen for connections on a single port. In fact, every server (I'm talking about TCP clients and servers now), must only accept a small number of connections, and new server ports must be opened to accept new clients. After a short time, those connections must be severed, and new ones opened, effectively migrating the data streams to completely new client and server ports, giving the appearance of multiple different TCP/IP applications being used at different times. The traffic might even be hidden in a known protocol, such as HTTP, to avoid the appliances that throttle all unrecognized protocols. (BitTorrent over HTTP, now that's funny).

So far, with this kind of detection avoidance, the only flaw is a spike in the user's bandwidth usage, which may not really be a big deal.

The beauty of this plan is that it requires little modification to current BitTorrent clients and trackers, as opposed to what's involved in a completely new protocol.

Re:The plan to avoid it

[Anonymous Coward]

You should stick to quarterbacking from your armchair and leaving the protocol design to people who know what they are doing.

Why don't they just put valve on your pipe?

[dj42]

I recommend they add a valve to everyone's internet pipe. If they become troublesome, you simply close their valve down a little bit to stop the flow of the internet through the pipes.

Re:Why don't they just put valve on your pipe?

[Brett Glass]

I recommend that they add a trap to the plumbing, too, so that the odor of Internet sewage doesn't come back up the pipe to annoy other users. ;-)

And how are ISPs immune from market demands?

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe it's important to note that trying to stop P2P or anything of this nature isn't going to happen and that ISPs need to consider two facts of the situation: some people will use their service above average assumed levels of consumption and the floor of average consumption is rising. The second fact is more of a problem than the former since as technologies improve on computers people expect more bang for their buck, why should it bottleneck at the network? I got more bang for my buck in the last five years in CPU calculations, GPU calculations, HDD space, RAM capacity (and bandwidth), and so on. How the hell does the "ISP industry" suppose it's immune to the same market forces that hardware manufacturers in computers and electronics deal with as an everyday reality?

I'm only asking because it just seems to me that ISPs today are doing their own private form of "government" regulation, where their collectivistic trade group acts as boss over the customer. Now, I understand that improving any infrastructure is a costly venture, but they (the ISPs that are whining the most) need to get a grip and accept that they will have to charge more for the floor consumption which is rising, and stop trying to find scape goats like illegal P2P to make up for their lack of willingness to do as all good businesses (maintain product/service quality). Maybe I'm old fashioned, but the market free or otherwise works both ways.

The answer is to charnge per gig.

[Maxo-Texas]

1) Set a price ($1 a gig, minimum $50 a month).
2) Allow competition from providers in your area.
3) Observe the speed/bandwidth increase since it is being paid for.
4) Then observe the price drop as competition brings it down.

Without competition, you can't have this and will exceed your bandwidth eventually.

It's a business not charity

[Layth]

These issues are complex, but going by the article summary I'm not sure we're all on the same page.

It sounded (to me) like they're looking for ways to maintain internet traffic, but help alleviate some of the costs of that traffic by using caches. Just because you pledge to allow certain levels of users access, it doesn't mean you have to provide them with that functionality in the MOST expensive way possible.

If they want to brain storm on ways to improve the means, I say have at it.
Also I see nothing wrong with having certain users paying a higher fee for using a higher percetange of the system. It doesn't make any sense for somebody that likes to browse html at broadband speeds to be placed in the same category as a differnt person that likes to download 2-3 new dvd-quality movies a day.

Re:It's a business not charity

[vertinox]

It stopped being a "business" as soon as they accepted tax payer money. IMO they are free to do as they please as soon as they give the money back.

The funny thing about telcos and cable companies is they are de facto monopolies that are allowed by the FCC and DoJ. Its about a socialistic as you can get other than the fact these companies are publicly traded.

Re:It's a business not charity

[Layth]

Well if it's tax payer dollars you are concerned about, shouldn't they be doing everything they can to help reduce the cost anyway, and therefore need less of a handout?

Besides, haven't you ever seen a business owner eat dinner at a public restaurant and then laugh about how they'll just write it off on their taxes?

Where you do think that money is coming from?
All businesses get tax payer dollars one way or another.

Wrong Business Model

[Anonymous Coward]

The average NON-P2P user would probably accept a rate structure based on transferred gigabytes. The worst abusers could be reduced (but no need to stop them completely) just by making their fun cost more. MEANWHILE, some of the profits generated by that should be plowed into expanding the infrastructure. Then the rate structure can be reduced a bit, encouraging more people to do P2P (or do more P2P) and pay more for the extra gigs transferred...and the cycle can continue, until the infrastructure is basically more than capable of handling any likely load, and the amount people pay ends up being only a little more than nowadays (not counting inflation).

ORIGINATE *AND* RECEIVE???

[Khyber]

So by that I have the legal right to run a server and I can tell my ISP to fuck off and die?

Ever video conference?

[SpiceWare]

at the 2 minute mark of using iChat for a video conference, my bandwidth from Comcast in Houston gets throttled to less than dial-up speeds, effectively making iChat useless.

After dealing with that for a few months I finally tracked down a preference in iChat to limit bandwidth useage, and if I set it to 100 kbps the throttling doesn't occur, but then 4-way video calls don't work well.

Comcast is the only broadband choice where I live. I have Verizon for my phone service, but they don't offer DSL or FiOS in my neighborhood.

What is this about?

[samantha]

It isn't about bandwidth. The ISPs have no equivalent problem with movies and other large content from Amazon, iTunes, Netflix and TV over internet. These usages are way huger than P2P traffic. But those bandwidth users are sanctioned and about control of what you see, how you see and under what conditions.

It isn't about efficiency. P2P technologies for downloads properly done are much more efficient.

It isn't about pirating. If it was they wouldn't be threatening an entire type of internet technology. You don't threaten and choke a technology because of the way some people use it.

No, it is about one and only one thing. It is about pushing a mass of consumer and few producer model. It is about control. It is about denying freedom and innovation. Today almost all internet accounts are not suitable for true peering. They don't have static IPs. IPV6 is stalled. I don't think it is an accident. The existing elites fear massive full two-way participation by anyone and everyone.

Is wireless mesh the future?

[gilgongo]

If, as seems likely, the ISPs, supported by governments and organitions like the RIAA, strangle the net as we known it - what can we do?

I have a mesh router, and so do a couple of my neighbours. We have them on our roofs. We share our iTunes libraries and other stuff over them. They're fast - very fast. Of course, we're reliant on our ISPs for email and WAN access, but if *enough* people did what we were doing, what could happen? A cultural shift would certainly be needed, but if we could re-create the freedoms we currently enjoy on the ISP-controlled fixed-line internet ... could that be the light at the end of this tunnel?

Nothing new here.

[Anonymous Coward]

Many ISPs in Australia already provide P2P caches for popular content.

Software solution?

[Anonymous Coward]

Make P2P protocols favour closer peers over those further away.

REAL unlimited service

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm quite happy with my unlimited service. After taking one ISP's (almost) top 8MB package and quickly (within days) getting cut off for overuse, I switched to a UK ISP (entanet reseller) that offers a truly unlimited connection at 2MB, albeit for a *little* more than usual. I know they mean it, because their other packages list transfer limits like 320GB per month off peak, and this one simply says n/a under those columns. Just in case, I saved a copy of the package comparison page though.

You CAN still get a decent product, if you don't accept the B.S. products and keep looking.

Re:Perhaps it's time for...RCN

[aurispector]

We recently pleasure of telling both comcast AND verizon to f*ck off as we also have RCN in our area. Not only are they cheaper, but download speeds have are about 3x faster in some cases.

What comcast hasn't admitted is that they apparently throttle ALL downloads: I could only ever get about 750 KB/s when downloading large files, whereas the same files from the same sites (ftp's of linux distro ISO's from university servers) download at roughly 2400 KB/s via RCN. Ping times are basically the same. I always suspected this was happening and it was the first thing tested when we switched.

Another difference is the telephone service: comcast and verizon both use VOIP, verizon even disconnects your POTS wire even if you dont want them to. With RCN we get plain old POTS which is often the only thing working in a blackout.

Screw comcast and their "network management", screw verizon and their overpriced FIOS. RCN kicks their asses. THIS is free market competition in action.

Yeah, that's called P2P.

[Odder]

There's no good and much evil that will come from ISP caches. Technically, P2P is a local cache powered by your neighbors. An "official" node created by your ISP would just be another neighbor but one you should not trust. Basically, they will be deploying a better Media Defender network. The ISPs talking about this stuff are the same ISPs that block ports and have been sending reset packets for P2P. They should trusted to do more of the same.

It would be better to open the public servitude and spectrum to real competition than to grant ISPs more power over us. To turn their own goofey argument around, a network that can be saturated by less than 5% of it's users is completely inadequate. It is obvious that there is big money to be made but those with monopoly grants would rather partner with big publishers.

Market Place will take care of this....

[highthere20]

There is an interesting new "ISP" that provides guarantees network neutrality as a service. The service also has a bittorrent web interface. I've been using both for about week, and personally I really like the service. I'm in the dorms where we can't really play games as we are blocked by a firewall, but the Zercurity service gets around this issue. Anyways you guys should check it out. http://www.zercurity.com/

contract

[roman_mir]

It's time that everyone who is about to get into a contract with an ISP tells them directly upfront: I am going to be a heavy P2P user. You will take this into account right now and will either turn me down as a customer or offer to me some form of service that will support my activity and I want it in writing in my contract that I can actually USE all of my bandwidth and capacity and you will NOT interfere with my usage. I want it in my contract signed by you.

That is what should be done, either they will accept you as a customer on your terms or you shouldn't be their customer.

This is just..

[Madsy]

bullshit. What ISPs need to do, is to stop lying to their customers.
As a lot of people here have allready mentioned, they advertise internet access subscriptions
with guaranteed speeds, unlimited access, guaranteed uptime, and so on.
And then they have the balls to whine when some users actually use the features *as is was advertised*.
I mean, come on. What a bunch of fucking hypocrites.

If your hardware/infrastructure can't handle the bandwidth or the number of connections you advertise,
then don't offer the service. It's like if a car rental company had 100 customers on a day-to-day basis, but only 4 cars to lend out. It's hilarious.

Re:Perhaps it's time for...RCN

[Lodragandraoidh]

What is RCN?

Re:Perhaps it's time for...RCN

[aurispector]

http://www.justfuckinggoogleit.com/