Bell's Own Data Exposes P2P As a Red Herring

dougplanet writes with news from the Canadian-throttling front: "As ordered by the CRTC, Bell has released (some) of its data on how torrents and P2P in general are affecting its network. Even though there's not much data to go on, it's pretty clear that P2P isn't the crushing concern. Over the two-month period prior to their throttling, they had congestion on a whopping 2.6 and 5.2 per cent of their network links. They don't even explain whether this is a range of sustained congestion, or peaks amongst valleys."

Comments

Glad to hear this.

[suck_burners_rice]

It was quite clear to me all along that this whole throttling issue revolved around the agenda of some nasty people who want to lock the world in to their way of doing things, and had nothing to do with use of bandwidth or any other legitimate issue. I'm glad this is coming out.

Re:Glad to hear this.

[mrsteveman1]

Overselling bandwidth is necessary, its called statistical multiplexing.

Capping transfer per month at ridiculously low levels is not necessary though, they get plenty of money to pay for what people use, and lets face it, this is a quasi-socialist ISP environment, people who barely use their connections are paying for those who use the connection all the time.

Might not be fair, but the ISPs have nothing to complain about, they have been taking peoples money without having to provide much in return to most of them for a long, long time.

Re:Glad to hear this.

[suck_burners_rice]

This is true; in addition, if there actually were a reason that the ISPs were losing money, then they would raise the monthly rate by a few dollars. Most people won't switch ISPs over a few dollars a month since it's such a hassle to do so anyway. However, note that I said *IF* there were such a reason, which there isn't, at least until we start doing everything, including all voice and video communication (think all your cable TV and phones), over the Internet.

Re:Glad to hear this.

[mi]

Most people won't switch ISPs over a few dollars a month

Most people would not switch over "traffic shaping" either — not even most slashdotters.

Ultimately this comes down to whether ISPs are free to control their network, if it annoys customers...

Re:Glad to hear this.

[Opportunist]

Switch? WHERE TO, for crying out loud.

It's not like you have any real choice in the cartel they formed. It's a bit like crime syndicates splitting up the areas, you get the west coast, I take the south...

Re:Glad to hear this.

[billcopc]

I know everyone's debated this topic before, but why wouldn't we (as a nation) buy out Bell and convert it into a federally-mandated non-profit ? It's precisely the kind of long-term asset that benefits society as a whole - a perfect candidate for socialization.

34 billion dollars, in the grand scheme of things, ain't all that much when 34 million citizens stand to benefit. That's $1000 per Canadian, but that 4 billion in annual profit would come back to us, which means the purchase pays for itself in 8-9 years. There's no finance minister that can squeeze that much money that quickly; certainly not the inbred albino monkeys we've had lately.

Re:Glad to hear this.

[Ethanol-fueled]

Clarification: if you work full-time and go to school(on-campus and online classes) not wanting to exhaust yourself spending an extra 3 hours of the day taking mass-transit(though I am very much in favor of augmenting mass-transit).

Yeah, I do believe that some of us LIKE being connected to the internet and putting petroleum-based fuels in our vehicles, much like Winston Smith loves big brother.

Re:Glad to hear this.

[Korin43]

Because government owned monopolies don't tend to work very well.

Re:Glad to hear this.

[mrsteveman1]

Yes, this private one is working perfectly fine isn't it.

Re:Glad to hear this.

[NovaHorizon]

Because a non-profit simply requires that the company has a net gain of $0 at the end of the fiscal year... meaning they can just give out all of their net income to salary bonuses and be considered non-profit.

Also

That's $1000 per Canadian, but that 4 billion in annual profit would come back to us, which means the purchase pays for itself in 8-9 years.

and

why wouldn't we (as a nation) buy out Bell and convert it into a federally-mandated non-profit ?

bit of a contradiction there..

Re:Glad to hear this.

[I Want to be Anonymo]

For many, many years, utilities were generally run by municipalities (some very well, others, not so much), or were very heavily regulated private monopolies.

I suppose my opinion isn't very popular anymore, but I always thought that regulated monopolies normally worked pretty well.

Competition in utilities is generally a farce anyway. It almost always means competition among a bunch of resellers and middle-men who don't really add much value, and boils down to passing money along to the people who actually own the pipes and wires, who are generally still regulated monopolies, but without enough protection to reasonably finance proper maintenance and growth capacity. Everybody lines up with their checkbooks to get in on "The Next Big Thing", but once it's more or less matured, the focus switches to this quarter.

We see how well power deregulation worked in California, and the news has been talking about how much electric rates have gone up in Virginia since deregulation took effect. Have you tried to get a problem fixed on a T1 circuit lately? The smartjack loops, it's your wiring. No, then maybe the local carrier's loop is having a problem. Uhh, maybe it's an issue with our upstream provider...

People like to talk about all the innovation since the Bell System break up. What did we get? Cell phones? Bell invented them. Cheap long distance? Long distance is now technically trivial, but I'm still paying for it. It is technically trivial because of all the hard work Bell Labs put into cutting its cost. The Internet? Data circuits were out there for a long time, and the ARPA net was going along pretty well for its intended purpose until the www "Killer App" came along, at which point, ISDN would have been great - except it died because of interoperability problems and clueless pricing. (See Scott Adams for commentary on ISDN.) A regulated monopoly may still have had clueless pricing, but at least the interop problems would be non-existent.

Enough ranting. Who's with me?

Nothing new

[Anonymous Coward]

1) ISP's oversell network
2) network gets congested
3) P2P is a lot (politically) easier to target than streaming video, because they have support from the media industry, so abuse P2P as needed to solve congestion problem
4) PROFIT !!!

So then.. what is this about?

[Anonymous Coward]

If this isn't a "You bittorrenters are maxing out our bandwidth"... what is the real reason they're expending the time and effort to do this?

Is "I told you so" appropriate?

[zappepcs]

I've said it before, saying it now. There is NO reason to believe anyone in business who cannot show WHY they need legal help, or rights to invade your privacy to protect their business. There has never been proof by the **AA that file sharing is harming their businesses. There has never been proof by any ISP that P2P is harming their businesses. Without proof, what they wish to do is nothing less than criminal.

http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=592247&cid=23904147
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=588163&cid=23844923

Sure, they can say, oh it's our network and that's what we are going to do with it, however, in the interests of the national GDP/economy we have to consider ISP infrastructure as vital to the economy now, both of the US and the world. Any shenanigans on how it is run are of vital business interest to business concerns other than the ISPs themselves.

P2P is simply being used as the pike that gets network monitoring in the door. No, I have no actual proof of that, but if it were the danger that it is said to be, there would be plenty of evidence. Some of that evidence would be people complaining on the Internet about how slow their ISP is.

Now, add to that the fact that these same ISPs have a vested financial interest in using more of your bandwidth than you want them to in order to provide the triple-play and quadruple-play service packages that stock holders are counting on for revenue.

There are the two reasons for finding something to blame/fear in order to ease the pain of making the changes to the network at consumer's costs. Sure, some think that right, but they squandered the money/tax incentives etc. they have already been given and still do not provide anything much better than they used to.

They have a technological problem and need someone/something to blame. For better or worse, they chose P2P because it's already scapegoated by the **AA. I don't think this plan is going to work out so well.

Just my opinion

Re:Is "I told you so" appropriate?

[jlindy]

Nothing malicious - just greed.

I always thought greed was malicious. Just my 2 cents :)

Re:Is "I told you so" appropriate?

[zappepcs]

Can you explain how decreased usage decreases costs?

I pay for 10Mbit/s. The equipment needed to provide that service does not turn off when I'm not using it. The infrastructure required to support that service has to still be there, in service, awaiting my desires to use it. How does that reduce costs?

You seem to want to justify the practice of overselling your capacity - a business practice that needs to stop. ISPs have been getting away with it for a long time because of the shared nature of Internet resources and networks in general. The recent story where too many people watching sports videos caused some ISPs to think they were being attacked with DDoS is exactly what happens when you oversell your infrastructure. IMO most ISPs have built their networks poorly and cheaply and have to catch up with requirements when they get caught out. When I say poorly and cheaply, read that as centralized and without scaling in mind at the planning stage. Admittedly, virtualization and other new technologies can help improve this, but that is the nature of technology based businesses: you have to upgrade often to stay relevant. It is clear that there is not enough infrastructure to support triple-play and quadruple-play services. An argument that touches on the problems not readily apparent to the North American consumer is here http://innerdaemon.wordpress.com/2007/05/12/while-verizon-fiddles-with-fios-strategy-apple-has-triple-play/

Here is a note about one of the major problems for large ISPs http://gigaom.com/2007/05/07/comcast-smartzone/

Back to the point. The above links and my comments are clearly indicating that ISP do not want you to use LESS bandwidth, they want you to use more but only when connecting to their content services. Blocking and limiting P2P means you will be more likely to use their content services. Triple and quadruple play is a way for them to help ensure that. Read up on net neutrality issues a bit. That little problem is all about ISPs trying to milk their infrastructure for double the money they should get. It will also allow them to make their content cheaper to consume as well as give them a mechanism to sell you special content packages so they get MORE money for what you now enjoy freely for the cost of your connection.

Now, your comment indicates a belief that ISPs are trying to make money by me not using the bandwidth while everything else on the Internet says their stock holders are being told how much content they are going to sell their users. There is a bit of a difference of opinion between you and what seems to be happening in the real world.

Yes, trying to write quickly enough to be useful here means editing and rewrites are often not pragmatic. I'm not sure it was a nonsensical rant, but you are welcome to that opinion.

Re:Is "I told you so" appropriate?

[iCEBaLM]

Question: who do you think foots the bill when a content creator decides to use BitTorrent to distribute their bytes?

Answer: it's not the content creator. It's the ISPs (.. it should be the "peer", but broken ISP pricing models make it the ISPs).

It's the users who paid the ISP for the bandwidth they use.

Re:How funny

[dafrazzman]

The statistics say nothing about P2P's role in congestion. All it says is that the networks aren't that congested (or is 5 percent a lot?).

Exactly what role P2P plays in the five percent is an entirely different matter.

Re:I knew it!!

[Sponge Bath]

There's no justice like angry mob justice.

Harm done.

[twitter]

Bell's data shows that unrestricted P2P creates no congestion in better than 95% of their networks. Schemes to "filter" P2P will slow down 100% of their networks. It is obvious that either:

1. They are incompetent. They are going to create a problem to solve one that does not exist. Or
2. They are liars. Their goals and reasons are different from those stated.

My bet is on #2.

Re:Harm done.

[Smidge204]

While I would also tend to vote #2 here, those two options are not mutually exclusive.

=Smidge=

Re:Harm done.

[Anonymous Coward]

You really have no idea what you are talking about, do you?
I would like to see your amazing calculation of a 1 minute dns response time from the sole input of "90% usage".

The agenda: The internet makes cable obsolete

[some damn guy]

It's easy to see why Comcast wants to limit customers. Peer-to-peer sharing is the scapegoat. If people think they can download as much as they want all the time, they might start thinking of their computers like the TV. Oh wait, they're already starting to.

Seriously, the day when you can ditch cable altogether is very very near (okay already here for me). Even without pirating anything. Seriously, the networks know the way the wind is blowing. Everything will start going online- it already is. Sure, the cable companies want to bring you the "on-demand" world, but they want to own it. But they're losing control and they're scared and they are starting to do stupid stuff... "WHAT? you watched Netflix ALL NIGHT?? ARRGGHHhh..."

They are realizing they have two businesses- content delivery and connectivity. Now they have to compete with the likes of Apple, Google, and Netflix for the former (among others). Recording industry 2.0. Their business model is a genereation away from being obsolete (well half is). The other half is just fine, and they really should have split the company along those lines, but probably can't for regulatory reasons, at least without further damaging the TV business.

The best course of action is clearly to blame the pirates and bury their heads in the sand.

Re:Let's see...

[Serenissima]

Unfortunately, there's no "???" in this equation.

1. Advertise unlimited Internet (ie: get lots of paying customers)
2. Throttle customer bandwidth (ie: don't use all that money to upgrade systems and screw customers)
3. Profit! (ie: Actual Profit)

Re:If Bell actually cared.

[Dunbal]

Only those who set up the hardware and laid the cable know how much there really is over there .

      Yes, and those who laid the cable and "set up the hardware" are laughing when the telco's claim that they're running out of bandwidth on their networks. There is no shortage of cable. There is only greed on the part of telcos who want to bleed the public dry. Especially AT&T, who have ALWAYS favored a metered approach to "internet" since before the internet was even around, as I remember reading in Forbes articles in the early 90's.

Re:The agenda: The internet makes cable obsolete

[drinkypoo]

I guess the question is, what does it actually cost to get cable internet into your house? Can they actually provide it profitably? The telcos couldn't put copper into your house profitably without help originally, and they don't seem to be doing amazingly well now either (although AT&T has been ratcheting prices up.)

Re:load of BS

[Opportunist]

Hold it! The internet was designed to route around congested and/or damaged/interrupted areas. It's anything but that anymore.

The internet is no longer the redundant, resilent network it was. It turned from something with the notion of "working, no matter what it costs" to "cheap, no matter if it's working". In other words, from something the DARPA made to something that has to make profit.

That's why you have "backbones", which by their very definition are an anathema to the idea of a redundant, resilent network (single point of failure). And that's why whole areas go black when one of those precious things breaks down.

Sure, the internet itself and the protocols used do support such a thing. All it takes to route around congested and problematic areas is to add links, "edges" if you want. That would be a solution that allows the internet to exist the way it is, because any kind of congestation can be solved that way. Almost trivially so. But that costs money, so this solution doesn't even get any consideration.

Got your economic systems mixed up?

[PontifexPrimus]

[...]this is a quasi-socialist ISP environment, people who barely use their connections are paying for those who use the connection all the time.

I'm sorry, but I'd say asking for as much money from your customers while delivering as little of your resource as possible is capitalism, not socialism.

Re:How funny

[dotwaffle]

I was always taught that rate-limiting *causes* congestion on networks. A properly configured network uses QoS to determine priorities, and with the modern equivalents of FECN/BECN, you can end up with a fast, useful, uncongested network with the same traffic flows.

Really?

[BlackCobra43]

Hydro-Quebec seems to be working out just fine here in Quebec. We wouldn't mind yet another Quebec crown company owning a monopoly :)