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

How funny

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone else find it funny that the article links to a video in it's "rgbFilter podcast"? Could it be that the explosion of streaming video is one of the real causes of network congestion, not a few "copyright infringes"? Never!

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:How funny

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

(or is 5 percent a lot?)

I would say that depends on if it's the five percent I am in.

Re:How funny

[rcw-home]

Queueing Theory says that around 70% utilization is when delays occur.

Delays occur whenever anything is waiting in an output queue instead of being immediately transmitted. This could happen at very low average utilization levels if multiple sources all try to send data across a link simultaneously. The delay time is a function of the number of bytes waiting to be transmitted and the transmit speed.

Retransmission delays occur when the output queue gets full, the router drops additional packets as they come in, and the TCP connection hangs until the retried packets come through (700ms for the first one, much more for subsequent dropped packets). To avoid compounding the problem, output queues on routers are typically sized to something a fair bit less than 700ms.

Re:How funny

[Casandro]

Actually 5 percent is already a _lot_. The network should never be utiliced to more than 50%, even at peak times.

But it's not the fault of the customers, it's the fault of the company. It's their duty to constantly upgrade their network connections. Why else should they charge money.

If it really was about network congestion, they wouldn't block P2P-trafic, but they would give those packets lower priority. That way those packets only get dropped whenever there is an actual congestion.

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.

Re:How funny

[Casandro]

Kristof Obermann, he used to work at Arcor one of the bigger ISPs and phone companies in germany. He now works as a professor.

Besides, it's not like twice as much bandwidth costs twice as much money. Besides there's always redundancy. So in case one line breaks, you'll be at 100% peak utilisation. And then you will have problems as you will loose packets.

If those situations would exist, ISPs would use the TOS fields. Packets belonging would just be dropped more likely in case of a network overload. Nobody notices a missing packet at a download as the server will continue sending packets and the missing one eventually gets retransmitted a few seconds later. Missing packets are a _lot_ more noticable at web-browsing or interactive sessions.

Re:How funny

[Guspaz]

The relevant networks here are all ATM (the ones being throttled, the ones P2P is being used over).

My understanding is that ATM doesn't handle retransmissions. Furthermore, Bell's data shows that network wide, with millions of customers and trillions of ATM cells flying about per month, they only suffer from about 3500-4500 cell loss events per month.

You'd think that if they had even a single congested line, they'd be dropping millions (or even billions) of ATM cells per month.

Re:How funny

[Tack]

Care to explain where you get that info from? Using at most 50% of a resource at any given time is a waste of the other 50%.

I don't know if this is related to the GP's post, but a common reason to cap utilization at 50% (or upgrade the link when you approach 50%) is because of redundancy: given two separate links each carrying half the load and where the links are not used beyond 50%, if one link fails, the other can pick up the remaining load without significant (perhaps slight) service degradation.

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.

[blahplusplus]

It was so obvious, we know ISP's are the worst kinds of businesses, they oversell the bandwidth massively on the customer end and yet their backbones are pretty hardly ever used so they just end up cheating the consumer. It's basically extortion.

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.

[debrain]

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.

FYI, the bandwidth Bell is traffic shaping, which this case arises out of, is (1) not Bell customers (Bell simply provides the last-leg of the DSL connection - the DSLAM, I believe) and (2) not using Bell's backbone internet connection.

The traffic is from, for example, Teksavvy (ISP) customers to the Teksavvy backbone. Bell is just an intermediary.

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.

[g0at]

some say it means the 'Canadian Radio and Television Commission Actually, Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission.

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.

[sedmonds]

Teksavvy gets last mile copper, and DSLAM to peering location at 151 Front St, in Toronto from Bell. If they had peering at each CO and remote, then Bell really would have no justification to impose throttling. Bell is claiming that some network links between the DSLAM and edges of their network are inadequate. What's particularly greasy is that Bell negotiated transit bandwidth agreements with third party ISPs, and then pulled this throttling crap on them. So Teksavvy negotiates a multi-year agreement with Bell for X Gbps transit, so that they can serve their clients during peak hours and be prepared for anticipated growth of their subscriber base. After being locked into transit contracts, Bell starts throttling during peak hours, thus changing the bandwidth that Teksavvy would need during these hours. Further, they don't provide third party providers information about WHICH clients are throttled, putting third parties at a further disadvantage for planning bandwidth needs. The Supreme Court of Canada just cleared the way for the sale of Bell to interests which are financing the sale to the toon of 34 billion dollars of new debt for a company with annual profits of about 4 billion dollars. I'm not at all surprised that Bell is electing to spend a relatively small amount of money on throttling boxes, rather than making any real investment in infrastructure.

Re:Glad to hear this.

[Ethanol-fueled]

They're like OPEC. They don't even try to hide behind phoney legitimacy anymore, They're basically saying, "We don't have to rape you, but we will, and you're going to bend over and LIKE IT!".

Re:Glad to hear this.

[Anonymous Coward]

They're like OPEC. They don't even try to hide behind phoney legitimacy anymore, They're basically saying, "We don't have to rape you, but we will, and you're going to bend over and LIKE IT!".

False.

Since when has "and LIKE IT!", in relation to the customer, ever entered into any telco (or OPEC) executive's mind?

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.

[bryce1012]

So, in New York City -- the supposed center of the world -- "competition" is 3 carriers? In backwoods America, there's generally one cable and one DSL provider... if you're lucky. That is NOT competiion.

Re:Glad to hear this.

[Korin43]

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

Re:Glad to hear this.

[Walkingshark]

Wow, so I guess if I want to switch ISP then all I have to do is move to NYC? Brilliant!

Re:Glad to hear this.

[mrsteveman1]

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

Re:Glad to hear this.

[Markspark]

in socialist Sweden, we have shitloads of examples of government owned monopolies doing very well, and when they got sold out to the private sector, all of a sudden they start effing people over for profit. The electricity market is a very good example of this.

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.

[Schadrach]

^^This.

Where I live, we have two broadband options, Verizon DSL or Suddenlink Cable. I also live about 20 minutes via highway from the capital city of my state, who has the same two options as everyone else in the valley.

Re:Glad to hear this.

[wye43]

It was so obvious, we know ISP's are the worst kinds of businesses, they oversell the bandwidth massively on the customer end and yet their backbones are pretty hardly ever used so they just end up cheating the consumer. It's basically extortion.

Sorry I have to say this: I feel like puking at the thought that /.ers actually find the above troll statement as informative. This is where public moderation fails in a horrible way: this is a popularity content, not moderation

Regarding the original issue, I worked for a few years as an admin on an ISP and I can tell you torrents have some nasty impact on the routers. Bell just really sucks on presenting the issue. Torrents are basically DOS, and deep down you know it. All ISPs are hating it, and not because of the copyright issue (they don't care about WTF you steal), its because of technical reasons(they care about you smashing their routers/lines).

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?

I knew it!!

[Cathoderoytube]

I knew it! I knew it! You sons of whores Bell! $70 fucking dollars a month!! I'm coming down to your HQ and throwing a cinderblock through your front window!

Re:I knew it!!

[aikodude]

get 'cher fresh hot torches here! can't go to an angry mobbing without fresh hot torches!!!

Re:I knew it!!

[grim4593]

From www.bash.org:

DmncAtrny: I will write on a huge cement block "By accepting this brick through your window, you accept it as is and agree to my disclaimer of all warranties, express or implied, as well as disclaimers of all liability, direct, indirect, consequential or incidental, that may arise from the installation of this brick into your building."
DmncAtrny: And then hurl it through the window of a Sony officer
DmncAtrny: and run like hell

Re:I knew it!!

[Sponge Bath]

There's no justice like angry mob justice.

Re:I knew it!!

[Slacksoft]

If you're going to Canada you'll need to get abreast of the proper Canadian dialect so you're able to voice your frustrations properly. So instead of saying "I'm coming down to your HQ and throwing a cinderblock through your front window!" it would be "I'm going to come down to your HQ eh, and I am going to throw a brick eh, through your window, eh!"

In all seriousness though. I hope this ruling will help in the fight against the plans to start charging for a monthly bandwidth allocation that Time Warner is setting up in response to 'congestion'. If you go over Time Warner's allocation they will begin charging you X dollars per MB over your allotment. I swear I went to high-speed internet (DSL) to get away from pay-as-you-go service. It's like when AOL 2.5 was around where you had to pay per minute, and finally they realized they'd get more business with 20$ a month unlimited minutes. That was the happiest day of my life, or at least it was until we got RoadRunner from Time Warner.

Re:I knew it!!

[kiehlster]

Or how about take the software licensing approach and say something like, "By touching, or directing employees or other persons to touch this brick (the Brick) you release all liability for damages caused by the thrower of the Brick (the angry mob) and will adhere to all demands by the angry mob which include but are not limited to: reducing service expenses by half or the square root of current contract offers -- whichever is greater; hiring qualified support engineers according to the type of support call; removing all network throttling hardware not already destroyed by the angry mob that threw the Brick."
Then affix the disclaimer with text facing in toward the brick and hurdle it through ISP of your choice.
Stand there and laugh at said ISP's lawyers who cannot do anything because the evidence they need to convict you is now wrapped within a release of liability notice.

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 !!!

Re:Nothing new

[Hijacked Public]

1) RTFS
2) RTFA
3) Discover that existence of anything more than tiny pockets of congestion is just a bunch of bullshit, and that not only have you been lied to about P2P being a problem, you've been lied to about the whole goddamned problem
4) PRICELESS

Let's see...

[Monkey_Genius]

1. Advertise unlimited Internet.
2. Throttle customer bandwidth.
3. ?
4. Profit!
Business for the 21st Century 101.

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)

Article is pure shit

[RockMFR]

The blog linked to is pure shit. Here's a link to the actual article:

http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2008/06/25/tech-caip.html

Re:Article is pure shit

[TubeSteak]

The blog linked to is pure shit. Here's a link to the actual article:

A while back, I thought /. instituted (or started enforcing) a 'policy' that linking directly to the news article in the summary was highly preferable over linking to a blog that links to the article.

Am I just imagining that?

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?

[Opportunist]

Nah, it's just a mortal sin. Along with 6 other vices that are today pretty much a "required skills" list for any upper management position.

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:Is "I told you so" appropriate?

[H0D_G]

Of course, decreased usage means less photons moving down the fibre optic line. which means less wear on the fibre, cause of all the wear that photons cause on the line.

totally.

I guess the CSE doesn't have the fast computers

[johninsf]

like the NSA does. Maybe they just need some time to upgrade and then everything will be fine, it's just a temporary measure.

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.

[hostyle]

s/???/Start a new meme/

Re:Harm done.

[OeLeWaPpErKe]

What obviously no-one can ask is "just how bad is 2.6% congestion", never mind 5%

Well, as a network engineer, I can tell you this : it's VERY bad. This number means that some of their core lines were inoperable 1/20th of the time due to p2p.

The target number in any network, in case anyone doesn't know, is 0%. Congestion == line down. It creates unacceptable and unworkeable slowdowns.

And let's not forget that this congestion was created while they were upgrading their lines as fast as they could.

Re:Harm done.

[Guspaz]

You're completely incorrect because you're completely ignoring Bell's criteria for a line being considered congested.

First, their thresholds: They consider anything over the following utilization thresholds to be congested:

DS-3 61%, OC-3 84%, OC-12 and OC-48 90%.

Second, they determine usage and congestion by taking samples every 15 minutes. If five samples return percentages over those limits in a 14 day period, the line is considered to be congested for the entire 14 day period.

Their percentages are actually not all that bad; they're a useful guideline for when it's time to turn on another link. Their methodology for MEASURING the usage, on the other hand, is completely flawed. A two-hour long DDoS attack one afternoon might mark a slew of lines as congested for two entire weeks.

Further bolstering the fact that they've chosen their measurements to make the issue seem worse than it appears is that despite the supposed congestion on a given percentage of their lines, they only have about 4000 ATM cell loss events network-wide each month. This is out of the trillions of ATM cells flying around their network every month, they only drop a percentage so small that my calculator resorts to scientific notation trying to calculate it.

In short, they've pretty much made up the issue. Their figures when taken at face value don't indicate significant congestion (5% of lines congested? Why not just purchased a handful more lines?), when examined based on their methodology appear to be garbage data, and when compared against actual packetloss caused by congestion, is proven to be completely non-existent. Bell has zero actual network congestion, their own ATM loss data backs that up.

Disclaimer: I'm not a network engineer, and so I might be talking out of my ass. But I think that common sense can play a role here; their methodology makes it trivial to declare a line as congested, and having 4000 instances of ATM cell loss on a network in a month with millions of customers (and trillions of ATM cells sent per month) doesn't seem particularly bad.

Re:Harm done.

[Z00L00K]

Their ultimate goal is to probe the possibility of various means to inflict harm on streamed video from services outside their network.

By destroying P2P traffic they are doing it to some traffic that has a large part of the traffic volume in their networks and see what happens. P2P has probably been chosen as a legitimate target since it has a considerable amount of "illegal" or "gray" data which in turn means that the number of companies that are affected and buying services from the ISP is lower. Which in turn means that the risk of costly legal suits are held at bay.

So the P2P corruption is mostly a test, not the real deal.

The true reason is that they want to keep the customers to themselves and just tell their customers that they will only get good video if they buy it from them and not any independent vendor.

And this means that everybody has to sit and watch the movies and TV channels that the ISP provides and nothing else - with injected commercials and other crap.

Re:Harm done.

[thegameiam]

I am a network engineer. 90% is a really high threshold for calling something congested. Also, 15 minute averages are better than a lot of measurements I've seen, but are far from perfect - lots of "microburst" type activity can cause a noticeable loss in performance over a much shorter period than that.

Bittorrent-type flow patterns do tend to cause microburst issues - it might be that Bell CA needs to implement some more fine-grained measurements to see whether the thresholds are still the right ones for them.

Re:Harm done.

[rgviza]

/QFT. I was thinking the same thing when I read the op.

Congestion on only a few end links can cause a whole interlink to get saturated. I.E. if you have 128 customers on a DSLAM box with 10Mbps to the backbone, and 8 of them saturate their 1.5Mbps link, that's all 128 dealing with shitty network throughput since they connect up to a core link through the same wire. If you multiply that out, the whole backbone gets saturated and everyone gets horrible service.

That's *less* than 5% of people saturating their connections. If they are doing it 24x7 they become a nuisance and the other 123 people can't even look at cnn without experiencing stalled page loads.

P2P _must_ be throttled or no one's QoS can be guaranteed and they'll lose customers. What they should really do, is scale p2p based on demand... IE if someone is saturating their connection as others start sending packets, back off their connection speed as necessary. They shouldn't target p2p traffic specifically, they should apply it to _all_ traffic. Otherwise p2p clients will just start operating on random ports and their rulesets will get out of hand, slowing things down even more.

Trust me, I hate comcast and verizon as much as the next guy, but they gotta do what they gotta do. You can't bend the laws of physics. People that whine about it have sharing issues and are selfish.

They should simply meter it and charge people for what they use beyond 50GB a month or something. "You want to p2p constantly? Fine, we need to upgrade our network to accommodate you, so it's going to cost you."

This would serve fine for people that occasionally need to download a 8GB game they just bought from direct2drive or something, but p2p would get real expensive, real fast, for people that simply log into whatever p2p system and download everything they see.

-Viz

Re:Harm done.

[OeLeWaPpErKe]

okay, it's simple : a datapipe is not a water pipe. It's serial, not parallel.

In a water main every droplet of water has it's own space available, in an OC-48 every bit must be nicely lined up and 1 bit at a time gets sent down the line. (yes I know about the modulation, so it's 64 bits or so, but the principle is the same)

That means that a line that is 90% utilized in a space of 15 minutes is 13.80 minutes utilized and 1.20 minutes not utilized at all : there could be a single 13.80 minute burst and then nothing and the line would be 90% utilized. Generally you're going to see a limited number of bursts per minute.

The bursts are unpredictable, but they get exponentially longer the higher the utilization gets. A 1% used line will in practice only have bursts of milliseconds. In a 90% used line the bursts will (sometimes, obviously) last minutes.

During a burst, basically the pipe is utterly full. Nothing can get in until enough stuff gets out first.

Therefore a 90% utilized line is totally unuseable for anyone. It leads to massive slowdowns.

I know this is not what you want to hear, but it's the way it is, simple as that.

To add to the corus

[Anonymous Coward]

I suggested in the last slashdot report that isp's like Bell should be forced to disclose, using standard measurement methods, the specs on their system so I will know what I am buying. There is no magical mysterious tech here on this thing called the internet. Bell and others should be forced to disclose and not be allowed to fleece their customers with smoke and mirrors. Just like when buying stereo equipment, the law does not allow those companies to misrepresent peak and continuous power etc., There is absolutely no difference. I want what I pay for and I should have ways to see if I'm getting it.

Seeing as it appears Bell was giving us a song and dance and I'm sure others have done similar. I will now take this a step further. This would ensure they are giving us what they claim to be selling. I suggest their networks be monitored by a regulatory body directly. I would even suggest a public channel be open so customers may check for themselves. As a start, why not something similar to the Internet Health Report website for example http://www.internethealthreport.com/ but of course tailored to the individual ISP' internal networks. How else are consumers to know if they are being lied to or cheated regarding this product they are being sold. The public are discovering albeit slowly that internet is just another product and service. Plugging the holes stops misrepresentation just like the power available from my stereo amplifier.

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.

load of BS

[roman_mir]

In revealing the details, Bell explained in an accompanying letter that "while these numbers may seem low to the average lay person, they are significant to network traffic engineers such that it is important to consider the number of congested links in the proper context." - of-course, the context being that Bell would like to make more money from various throttling schemes as well as from their new IPTV stores.

If only a single link in the network is congested, end users may still experience slowdowns or dropped connections, the company said, - of-course, especially if you throttle these connections.

because the situation is similar to the road system -- where if one major artery is backed up, all connected roads will also have problems. - of-course they conveniently omit the fact that the Internet is designed to route around damaged/congested areas.

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.

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.

And in other news...

[Moekandu]

An ISP in Japan will also soon be throttling their user's bandwidth.

Yes, they are creating an upload cap of 30GB per day. Not per month, per day .

I for one, welcome our Japanese ISP bandwidth capping overlords! Please?

Re:And in other news...

[Anonymous Coward]

-2, Jealous

Re:And in other news...

[Fred_A]

Yes, they are creating an upload cap of 30GB per day. Not per month, per day .

That's still an awful lot of tentacles...

Re:And in other news...

[k-macjapan]

While the cap may be 30GB, quite a large % of ISP's still shape P2P traffic. You will find that the majority of the large providers do. That being said I generally get fantastic speeds using ftp. 20$ a month for fiber is a great deal here... To bad about the N.A market.

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:Unsustainable congestion...

[bryxal]

After a close examination it does say percent of congested links (out of several thousand) but the critical threshold would probably be around 10%. Taking the highest percent before DPI which is 6.6%, that's still not high and if it's that bad it would not have been that expensive to upgrade those links. not to mention the CRITERIA for getting ito that count of "congested links". here are the utilization limits for congested as per Bell Canada: DS-3 61%, OC-3 84%, OC-12 and OC-48 90%. so, for one of those links to be considered "congested" and added to that low % graph the following has to occur (using DS-3 links as an example). Over a 14 day period, utilization measurements are taken every 15 minutes. (snap shot of usage at that time). the limit of 61% must be exceeded atleast ONCE on 5 seperate days over that 14 day period. what that means is that for the total UP TIME of a link over that 14 days (in minutes) is 20,160 minutes (24hrs x 60min x 14 days). The link must only be above 61% for a TOTAL 75 of those minutes to be considered "congested", or 0.37% of it's available time. Lets also not forget that there could be a sudden spike of usage right at that 15 minute mark and then die down, but i'll assume the entire 15 minute interval is at that level for simplicity, lol.

- http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r20690166-The-Bell-Disclosure

Re:The agenda: The internet makes cable obsolete

[Opportunist]

And they got mighty supporters. Imagine someone being able to create a network without having to shell out millions if not billions just for the infrastructure. In fact, a halfway well off person can start an internet TV network.

A worldwide TV network, just to make matters worse (for those that oppose it, that is).

Can you see how not only established TV networks but also governments don't really like that idea? It's already bad enough that Al Jazeera spills counterpropaganda against Fox, now imagine anyone being able to do that. Worldwide.

I could well see that some governments don't really like that idea one bit.

Re:So then.. what is this about?

[Opportunist]

The fact that more and more (top level) ISPs are also in some way concerned with TV, broadcasting or content. The last thing you want is to faciliate a competing (internet) TV network.

And the easiest way to do that is to control what your users can do with their bandwidth and what they can't. If you can simply keep them from watching TV online (and I'm not even talking about doing something "illegal" like watching a syndicated show abroad, just something that's more interesting than the reality soaps we get shoveled down our throats on ordinary TV these days), you retain customers for your TV services.

They rob bodies, too

[hyades1]

Having been paid in full to have an ailing father's Bell service switched over, a friend of mine is now having to fight Bell to get some money back. They cashed the cheque immediately, then, after his death used their direct deposit privilege on the old boy's bank account to pay themselves twice.

And they're making the family deal with the problem through the bank rather than refunding or crediting the phone bill of the survivor.

If Bell Canada had a totem, it would be a rabid, starving rat.

Interested Party Responses.

[ChanxOT5]

More interesting than the bell data are the responses from the other concerned parties.

Specifically, the response from Skype is a good read. The response from Cisco is pure crap and doesn't directly address the issue at hand.

Anyways, if you want to see the data yourself, look at the links here.

http://www.crtc.gc.ca/PartVII/eng/2008/8622/c51_200805153.htm

Bell zip file with data:
http://www.crtc.gc.ca/public/partvii/2008/8622/c51_200805153_1/920764.zip
Note that all the Bell responses are in .doc. Go figure.

Skype response:
http://www.crtc.gc.ca/public/partvii/2008/8622/c51_200805153/920240.PDF

Cisco BS:
http://www.crtc.gc.ca/public/partvii/2008/8622/c51_200805153/920258.PDF

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:The agenda: The internet makes cable obsolete

[some damn guy]

That's why YouTube was so highly valued. Anyone can/will be able to have their content distributed anywhere in the world. It's a simple business model, you give us the content but don't necessarily give away ownership, we distribute it for you free, we keep all the ad revenue.

It's brilliant, because your revenue is proportional to how much you distribute the content. Low interest content generates little money, but little cost, and vice versa for the popular stuff.

It still seems like a novelty because the video quality is absolutely hideous, but a few generations from now it will be very good, and decades from now, our eyes will be the limiting factor and quality won't even need to improve further. We're basically there with audio already (too bad so many people still think 128k mp3s sound good).

This is 1.0. In the future, everyone gets their own TV show. If you get really popular (for free), you better believe you'll be able to get a cut of that ad revenue too. Why? Because You Tube is going to have a lot of competition....

Bank needs to repay you.

[freedom_india]

The bank needs to repay you the money they let Bell steal.
If a bank allows money to be withdrawn from an account of a deceased person, then the bank is liable to put the money back WITH interest and penal charges.
Once a person dies, the bank needs to legally freeze the account to prevent any deposits or withdrawals (esp. withdrawals).
Only the estate or the nominee can withdraw (not deposit) ALL the money from the account in one single operation.
Nope, the bank cannot unilaterally close and send you a check for the same. If you are the legal heir, you need to either prove by way of nomination OR successor OR court orders asking the bank to pay you the money.
The check that the bank cashed and the Direct Debit, if both happened AFTER your dad died, are not valid. In a court you WILL prevail, plus the bank has to pay a nasty fine.
But BEll cannot be held liable. You were not in a contractual relationship with Bell.
Order the bank in writing stating facts and giving them 7 days to repay you with interest.
If the bank fails to respond, file a criminal case stating fraud, and simulatenously ask the court to rule in your favor citing your dad's death certificate and date of debit.
The court usually will not want to hear from the bank because if the debit happened AFTER death then any legal arguments are moot.
Get a court order making the bank pay you.
If you want to play real nasty, send the order by ordinary post undistinguishable from other letters (after all banks hide their rate increases in same way) to the bank's registered office (NOT the branch). Those morons at the registered office will have no clue and throw away the letter. (Assuming you have given a deadline to pay you from date of letter do next steps).
Approach the court again whining pitifuly (yes it pays) that the Holy Judge's order was disobeyed (get the same judge) by an unruly bank.

The judge will ask what you want to do next.

This is most important: Now the culpability of the bank is established as defying court orders (your money now plays a second role. Judges don't like to see anyone defying their orders). Request the court grants you permission to seize and auction the bank's nearest branch's assets to get your money back. The judge will accept this.

Go with a sheriff and his posse to the branch, and now you are legally authorised to rob the bank. You can shut down the doors, throw out customers, restrain staff, seize cash from tills, auction PCs on the spot (better yet, arrange a few friends to be there for the auction to get bank's PCs at HUGE discounts). Sell ALL their stuff to get your money back: Remember, your goal is to first bankrupt the branch. Don't seize cash. Seize the hardware, valuable furniture anything that the bank needs to run its branch. Sell it on doorfront with sheriff standing by for a dollar or whatever you like.

The bank will try to move mountains to get the order overturned. So do it quickly, very fast. Get some 100 friends to suddenly appear, bid for the assets, and block the traffic to prevent their lawyers from reaching you to serve you a STOP SALE order they can get from a sympathetic judge.
Good luck

Re:Bank needs to repay you.

[debest]

I have mod points right now. Where is the "+1 Deliciously Evil" mod option?

Re:Bank needs to repay you.

[freedom_india]

I actually did this with my ex-banker. You would have seen a news item about 5 years ago saying someone auctioned assets of a bank because of a court order and how it was stopped by a personal guarantee by the bank president.
Yup. I did manage to sell off about 5 PCs before the bank served me with a court's injunction.
I got my order signed by a Justice of Peace -:)
And eventually i got my money back (the PCs of course were valued at $1.10 each-:))

In comparison...

[SpzToid]

In comparison, the tiny Netherlands with all that cheese and those cows seems to have a lot of consumer ISPs to choose from. Here's a partial list:

Alice Comfort
Argeweb
12move
Abel Telecom
CompuServe
Concepts
DDS
Domestix
EDPnet
Fiberworld
Filternet
GreenOnline
HCC Net
Het Net
InterNLnet
KPN ADSL
Orange
Planet ADSL
Primus
Qfast ICT
Quicknet
Scarlet
Solcon
Speedlinq
SpeedXS
Studenten.net
Supersnel ADSL
Tele2 ADSL
The One Hosting
Tiscali ADSL
TweakDSL
Unet
Vastelastenbond Internet+bellen
xsDSL
XS4ALL tip
ZIEZO.biz

Even bloody Compuserve (yes that one!) will sell you 20down / 1up ADSL for 19.95 euros a month. For another 5 euros a month they'll add PSTN phone termination and a DID. 30 euros monthly for 20 mb down is most typical now. And little traffic shaping if any, to my knowledge.

In fact providers such as XS4all make a political statement against such practices, when they can under legal and contractual agreements, as they do with their statement of privacy too.

For more complete info: http://adsl.startpagina.nl/

Peering is the issue

[Daver297]

While its been a few years since I have been with a ISP.. I would 100% say its not a issue of their core bandwidth, its a issue of their peering Ratios

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 :)

Re:Ars Technia users fail math

[smallfries]

But the Japanese don't live in a world where the files they are sharing scale up with the bandwidth. Just because Comcast bandwidth is 100x lower, doesn't mean that the Japanese are using some sort of super internet where every file has been bulked up by a factor of a 100. It's not teh beefcake-interweb.

These caps are equal to 30Gb a day. Yes, it's a small percentage of their burst speed, but that is because they have huge bandwidth on the edge of the network, and a much smaller ratio between the capacity of the backbone and the capacity of the leaf nodes.

As a comparison, if I lived close enough to my exchange to get perfect ADSL2 I could have a 2.6Mb uplink. If I saturated that link 24 hours a day then I could still only upload 28GB a day. Are you trying to tell me that the deal in Japan is worse because it's a smaller percentage of the peak rate?