Bittorrent To Cause Internet Meltdown

Gimble writes "Richard Bennett has an article at the Register claiming that a recent uTorrent decision to use UDP for file transfers to avoid ISP 'traffic management' restrictions will cause a meltdown of the internet reducing everybody's bandwidth to a quarter of their current value. Other folks have also expressed concern that this may not be the best thing for the internet."

Comments

98%

[Anonymous Coward]

Plz seed

Re:98%

[Kjuib]

If it melts... it should flow better and faster right? A liquid net would better than a solid one.

Re:98%

[ardor]

Nah, it would melt the internet tubes.

Re:98%

[Glothar]

Well, it would fit through the pipes better.

[/required]

Re:98%

[macshome]

I think that's exactly what Skynet wants...

Re:98%

[Zencyde]

Shall I turn out the lights so you can glow?

Re:98%

[toriver]

I vas elected to lead, not to seed!

Re: 98%

[mcpkaaos]

Bald kid: Do not try and manage UDP connections. That's impossible. Instead... only try to realize the truth.
Ted: What truth?
Bald kid: There is no connection.

Finally!

[tikram]

Finally, I'll have a legitimate reason to slack off and not do my job...

On the other hand, how am I going to procastinate without the internet?

fairness

[seanadams.com]

If you're going to transfer files over UDP then you need to build some TCP-like protocol on top of it. The article doesn't say exactly how BT works in this respect, but he's probably right. There's no way that BT's protocol could be as sophisticated as TCP, given its 30+ years of development.

Most people don't appreciate how amazingly well TCP's flow control works in terms of maximizing link utilization in a way that is fair to all network users. We really don't need is an arms race of new, greedier protocols.

However, one thing to realize about P2P is that because there are often dozens of active TCP connections transmitting from one machine, fairness goes pretty much out the window anyway. An alternate protocol could conceivably improve on this by applying flow control to the aggregate throughput for the whole "bundle" of connections, rather than each connection individually. This would improve fairness and also increase efficiency because you wouldn't have a bunch of TCP streams individually trying to grow their windows, causing packet losses.

Re:fairness

[Ed Avis]

If you're going to transfer files over UDP then you need to build some TCP-like protocol on top of it.

Not really. You would need that if you were transferring a file from one computer to another. But Bittorrent scrapes together little bits of file from lots of other computers. If a packet is lost here and there, that bit of file is naturally requested again, probably from a different machine. That's just a consequence of the way Bittorrent works.

However, one thing to realize about P2P is that because there are often dozens of active TCP connections transmitting from one machine, fairness goes pretty much out the window anyway.

There's no reason in principle for this to be the case; obviously, metering of bandwidth should be by subscriber according to money paid, not by some arbitrary and easily manipulated value like number of open TCP connections.

Re:fairness

[Man On Pink Corner]

There's no way that BT's protocol could be as sophisticated as TCP, given its 30+ years of development. Most people don't appreciate how amazingly well TCP's flow control works in terms of maximizing link utilization in a way that is fair to all network users. We really don't need is an arms race of new, greedier protocols.

TCP gets a lot of credit it doesn't deserve. It enforces bad design -- most client/server applications should be either stateless or session-based, rather than connection-oriented. Anything that even vaguely resembles a streaming application shouldn't even consider TCP. Finally, TCP's connection model is almost guaranteed to be suboptimal for any application that does require one.

What are the odds that HTTP, FTP, SMTP, and BitTorrent will all work optimally over TCP? Slim to none, and none is still waiting for Nagle.

Re:fairness

[zappepcs]

That is addressing the problem from an ISP's point of view, or perhaps the "**AA's talking points for ISPs" point of view.

If I pay for 10Mbps download speed, it should not matter to anyone how I use those bits. If you as my ISP cannot handle that traffic, you should NOT have sold it to me in the first place. Every time you throttle or shape my traffic, I want a rebate. It's that simple. I don't think we should have bailed out wall street and I don't think It's my responsibility to support an ISPs bad business model. That is what this problem is all about. Bad business decisions on the part of ISPs. They over sold their networks and now want a bailout. BS!

If you want regulation, how's this: If you sold me 10Mbps download and can't provide it regardless of protocol, you have committed fraud and I'm allowed to sue. I don't want to hear about your problems, just provide what you sold me.

If you sell me a parachute I expect it to work in every state, on any day of the week, and from any kind of airplane, no matter what clothes I'm wearing or not wearing. After you sold it to me, it's simply criminal to then say it only works if you are wearing green, or skydiving on a day of the week that begins with a T.

If you don't want me to use BT, then give me a 50% discount on my bill.

Re:fairness

[HardCase]

And all this time I thought that spam was going to cause the Internet to melt down. Maybe we need new terminology. Instead of "melt down", it should be "Global Internet Change".

Re:fairness

[seanadams.com]

Not really. You would need that if you were transferring a file from one computer to another. But Bittorrent scrapes together little bits of file from lots of other computers. If a packet is lost here and there, that bit of file is naturally requested again, probably from a different machine. That's just a consequence of the way Bittorrent works.

That behavior needs to be driven by some timing and retry logic. Also, hosts need to determine how fast they can fire these UDP packets at each other. Those are the most basic fundamentals of transmitting bulk data over a packet network. You really would be reinventing some subset of TCP.

obviously, metering of bandwidth should be by subscriber according to money paid, not by some arbitrary and easily manipulated value like number of open TCP connections.

It's not just about metering. What about where many users share a connection to the internet, such as at a business or school? Or even in a household? What if there's a bottleneck caused by a malfunction out on the backbone? You can't have good performance in these situations unless users agree on "equally aggressive" protocols.

Re:fairness

[seanadams.com]

If I pay for 10Mbps download speed, it should not matter to anyone how I use those bits. If you as my ISP cannot handle that traffic, you should NOT have sold it to me in the first place

You have totally missed the point of my post! I wasn't even addressing ISP billing policy, I am talking about how to share a link. Maybe YOU have a dedicated 10Mbps link all to yourself, but not everyone is so lucky. Imagine a small business where 50 people are sharing a T1 line. For web browsing, this many users could all get decent performance, even if a handful of people are doing big downloads, provided they are all using TCP. But all it takes is one guy hammering the link at full throttle to ruin it for everyone else. For better or worse, the internet is designed on the assumption that applications play nicely in this regard.

Re:fairness

[Man On Pink Corner]

To say that TCP is optimal at dealing with congestion is to say that individual packets are always a good representation of the data blocks being sent and received at the application level, and that best thing that any application can do when expected data doesn't arrive is to wait on it to be retransmitted, with the network layer queuing up all subsequent intact packets.

Once again, this behavior is guaranteed to be completely wrong for anything but toy command-line applications that fit on a single page in the back of a musty-smelling manual.

Re:fairness

[Adam Hazzlebank]

Not really. You would need that if you were transferring a file from one computer to another. But Bittorrent scrapes together little bits of file from lots of other computers. If a packet is lost here and there, that bit of file is naturally requested again, probably from a different machine. That's just a consequence of the way Bittorrent works.

That behavior needs to be driven by some timing and retry logic. Also, hosts need to determine how fast they can fire these UDP packets at each other. Those are the most basic fundamentals of transmitting bulk data over a packet network. You really would be reinventing some subset of TCP.

I think what he's trying to say is the TCP connection often gets dropped completely, for example the host just goes offline, or is bogus and transmitting false data. Bittorrent needs to account for this anyway by re-requesting packets from the network, so they have implement the retry logic differently that TCP anyway.

Re:fairness

[Opportunist]

Not really, actually.

TCP enforces and faciliates delivery certainty. You may be sure that a packet arrived. It gives you everything to make sure some packet arrives in time, if it's fragmented and arrives in the wrong order it's reassembled and all the other little bits that are quite useful when you're normally transfering data.

This doesn't really apply to Bittorrent and the way it works. Bittorrent by its very nature transfers little parts of files. Parts in a size that can easily avoid fragmentation. Parts where it doesn't really matter whether they arrive at all. If they don't, the requesting machine will simply ask for it again. Maybe now, maybe later, maybe even from another source.

Yes, TCP has its merits and sometimes they are even used sensibly. Don't make me start about all the cases where TCP is used without any reason because neither packet size matters nor certainty of delivery is a criterion, but it's just "easier". But BT can well work on UDP and even generate less overhead and thus actually less traffic than it does today.

Face it. QoS, Netneutrality and traffic shaping or not: People will find a way around it. And when the choice is encryption and wrapping BT packets in even more overhead (because, say, the provider will only allow HTTP-Packets at full speed) or using UDP, it's a no brainer. For both sides.

Re:fairness

[encoderer]

You're right. That's the real problem. ISPs are hacking vertically-- all BT traffic -- when they should be hacking horizontally:

I support a greedy node algorithm. Everyone starts with their burstable line, and the more you utilize, your cap slowly lowers until you reach a guaranteed minimum bandwidth threshold.

At the end of the day, greedy users will be greedy users. And if BT goes offline, they'll migrate to something else. And if I suck 100gb of crap off usenet in a month it's no different than 100gb of BT crap in terms of network stress.

Burstable lines make sense. It's a concept as old as timeshare. But if somebody is constantly "bursting" they need a governor on their line.

Re:fairness

[Opportunist]

Easy. Be able to deal with the bandwidth or stop signing up customers 'til you can.

Re:fairness

[nmg196]

Not really. You would need that if you were transferring a file from one computer to another. But Bittorrent scrapes together little bits of file from lots of other computers. If a packet is lost here and there, that bit of file is naturally requested again, probably from a different machine.

No... you're getting confused between network packets (a kilobyte or two) and bittorrent's blocks (many kilobytes). Each bittorrent chunk is transferred using many network packets. If you're going to transfer those chunks using UDP, you need to sort out the packet order and do all the missing-packet checks and retries etc yourself. So you still DO need to build some kind of TCP-like protocol on top - even just for the error checking.

Re:fairness

[Wrath0fb0b]

If I pay for 10Mbps download speed

No, you don't. A dedicated 10 Mbps link would run thousands of dollars a month (a T1, which is 1.5 each way, is ~$300 in the US) and most consumers can't swing that sort of dedicated line. Instead, you paid for a connection that is 10 Mbps maximum and you knew damn well that you would be sharing it with others in your neighborhood. How else could you rationalize paying only $60/month for faster-than-T1 level service?

Pretending that you don't understand the difference between a dedicated line and a shared line is utterly unconvincing to me.

Re:fairness

[jandrese]

The problem is that TCP self regulates and throttles itself back in the face of network congestion. UDP does not, it just blasts packets out as fast as you can feed it. Without some sort of flow control, you could disproportionally hurt TCP flows (which are trying to be good and throttling themselves back when they hit a bottleneck) by your big ugly UDP stream.

That said, the bottleneck for end users is typically the uplink on their last mile connection, so this probably won't bring the internet down or crash any ISPs, but it will make life worse for people sharing the connection.

Fun fact: The original implementations of TCP did not have flow control (it was on a test network after all). It did not take long for it to become apparent that flow control is a necessary feature. A few network meltdowns made the case quite well.

Re:fairness

[MasterOfMagic]

So, in other words, people complaining about BitTorrent users overutilizing the network should read their contract, see there's no minimum guarantee of service or line speed, and get stuffed instead of trying to bully other people into using the network in ways that would make life more convenient for them?

Re:fairness

[jandrese]

That's a pretty strong statement for something that works quite well in the real world. I'd argue that TCP works quite well for anything doing bulk data transfer given the constraints inherent in the system. TCP has no way of knowing for instance if packet loss is due to congestion or noisy links. It assumes the former because it is on the internet, but that's not always a good assumption (this is big on devices like mobile phones with web browsers). TCP is terrible for time sensitive data (streaming voice/video for instance), but that's why pretty much every streaming application uses UDP or something similar. Streaming applications can get away with that because they self regulate their transmit rate, whereas bulk data wants to fill up any available space in the pipe to get the data transferred as fast as possible. Slow start is a necessary evil in a world where you don't know what the link conditions are from the start and don't want to slam a bottlenecked router with a big opening dump of data.

TCP stream oriented model is also a godsend for application developers. Networking is hard enough without having to build your own application state control systems (which is what would happen if you tried to make TCP stateless) for every single connection. It would be a nightmare.

Those who don't understand TCP are doomed to reimplement it, badly.

Re:fairness

[Opportunist]

Then maybe they should be sold as such.

Look, all I want is to get what I get sold. If a line is sold as a 10mbit line, I will expect it to be a 10mbit line.

If I sell you a garage for 2 bucks a month, you might wonder but you will probably take the deal. Then you come around and notice that someone else is already standing in the space I sold you, and I tell you that you're allowed to use that space to park your car but only when it's free. Would you be happy? I guess not.

People will expect to be able to use what you sell them. And some of them will even use it. They really want to use what they got allegedly sold! How dare they?

Re:fairness

[zappepcs]

Wow, you got close to what I think is the solution. Every ISP can provide two virtual networks to each user. Where the edge of the ISP network sits; that point where end users are attached, it is possible to use routing to run BT traffic down one pipe and all else down another pipe. In this respect, BT traffic would not melt down the network or hog the connections of others in the neighborhood. If there is only 2.5GB/s available for BT et al, then only BT et al users suffer when it is full.

OMG, network design 101. hmmmm if I were an ISP, I'd set that up and explain that is how the new service works. The new P2P network is limited in bandwidth and your neighbors are the ones to blame if it is clogged. Yes, this even applies to businesses, co-op networks, ISPs, the lot. It minimizes infrastructure upgrades, and provides service as perceived by the end user, not as shaped by central routing equipment. You might think of it as an HOV lane, to use a car analogy.

Secondly, if networks were not oversold so much and under-designed so often, this would not be a problem. I really don't care how you slice it, this is a problem because of poor decision making by service providers. They wanted everyone's business (still do) but are not designing their networks to handle the traffic. When they build new roads these days, the build them so that extra lanes can be added in the future when needed. Why isn't that happening on ISP infrastructure?

Re:fairness

[anothy]

it's true that the protocol stack would need to have some method of regulating retransmission, but i think the GP's point is that it's already there, in the BT applications. sure, it's not at the layer we tend to think it belongs, but when you're dealing with untrusted sources (as anonymous seeders inherently are), you've got to do that work anyway.
also, even if you ended up recreating a "subset" of TCP, that could still be fine. TCP is huge compared to UDP, and if you use UDP as a base for adding what you need, you can still come up with something much simpler than TCP; see, for example, RUDP. TCP's benefit is its ubiquity, but if you have the combination of a constrained enough environment and wide enough client distribution, that's less of a big deal. BT and uTorrent likely satisfy those requirements.

Re:fairness

[Aladrin]

Not true, actually. BitTorrent doesn't ask for data in packet-sized blocks. If a single packet is missing from the block, it doesn't (currently) have a way to ask for just that packet. You'd basically be re-implemented TCP to do that.

Re:fairness

[Man On Pink Corner]

TCP does work well, and certainly the axiom about those who don't understand TCP being condemned to reimplement it badly is a valid one. However, it is the wrong tool for many modern applications. If you're writing networking code and you find yourself fighting TCP's behavior, it's not necessarily your fault.

The developers of BitTorrent have long since passed the level of play where they're better off using TCP/IP because "well, because that's what you're supposed to use." My objection was to the naive canonization of TCP as an all-purpose protocol that's somehow magically superior to any protocol that the application can implement on its own behalf.

"Because it's the most router-friendly protocol" is also no excuse. Applications that aren't a good fit for TCP often abuse the protocol, e.g. by disabling Nagling and tinkering with other parameters in an effort to make it work more like, well, UDP.

Those developers didn't reimplement TCP badly, but they might as well have, as their efforts are likely to have the same effect.

Re:fairness

[Belial6]

That is just not true. Telephone companies where very clear that you should go with them because you don't have to share a line. That was the benefit they claimed that DSL had over cable internet access.

Re:fairness

[Artifex]

Without some sort of flow control, you could disproportionally hurt TCP flows (which are trying to be good and throttling themselves back when they hit a bottleneck) by your big ugly UDP stream.

Except that one of the cool things about UDP is that it doesn't have to get through, so your router can drop all it needs to if it starts saturating your bandwidth. UDP has no guarantee of reliability at all.

I think going to UDP would be cool for another reason: there's not all the setup and teardown for connection. If 200 people each request the same block from me in a minute, do I really want to have to go through something like 'hi can I talk to you, what port should I use, hey here it comes, do you have it, ok, I'm done talking to you go away', or should I just shovel it out? If packets get dropped en route or mangled, do they not each already have enough hashing provided by the .torrent that should indicate they're bad, and to re-request?

Re:fairness

[AK Marc]

If I sell you a garage for 2 bucks a month, you might wonder but you will probably take the deal. Then you come around and notice that someone else is already standing in the space I sold you, and I tell you that you're allowed to use that space to park your car but only when it's free. Would you be happy? I guess not.

All utilities use statistical averaging. It's not possible to allow for all users to be using 100% of what is available at the same time. Well, perhaps if the infrastruture of all utilities were completely redone it might be possible. For even 1000 people in close proximity to coordinate use of electricity, they could cause massive damage to the system from nothing other than just using what they had paid for.

Phones everywhere in the US were useless on 9/11/2001. Where I worked, they had 2 T-1s for a little over 100 people. The T-1s were full. That's the first time that has ever happened. To have over 50% of people picking up the phone at the same time is unheard of. Sure, we could have bought a dedicated line for each person, but that's not what companies do. I live in Alaska. You have less than a 50% chance of getting a long distance line on Mother's Day. That's right, the entire state is busy. The cell phone systems crash around every large event I've ever been to. The Las Vegas Convention Center is the closest I've been to a large place that worked. It would pop up my voicemails quickly when the person was sent straight to voicemail. For other places that are much more seasonal or random in their use (like state fair grounds) I've seen horrible dial rates. Phone lines all over the US (and the world) were jammed when 9/11 happened, and people were unable to make calls because the utility wasn't able to provide. If there was something that caused similar unusual spikes in demand in any utility, it would crash. No utility designs for 100% utilization by everyone 100% of the time.

The only way to get what you demand is to design all utilities to do that, and no one does. The only functional difference with Internet and the other utilities is that Internet is designed with more sharing. It's like when you buy a phone line, and you get a party line. Sure, you have a phone line, but you can't use it if your neighbor is on it. You had access for emergencies 100% of the time, and otherwise had to share nicely with others.

Re:fairness

[Ed Avis]

Except that one of the cool things about UDP is that it doesn't have to get through, so your router can drop all it needs to if it starts saturating your bandwidth. UDP has no guarantee of reliability at all.

You could make the opposite argument: the cool thing about TCP is it automatically retries and resends any dropped packets, so your router can drop all TCP traffic if it needs to.

Re:fairness

[cbiltcliffe]

It's not just about metering. What about where many users share a connection to the internet, such as at a business or school?

Then the business or school should have usage policies. If they don't, it's not up to their ISP to regulate things for them.

Or even in a household?

Follow Russell Peters' advice. "White people. You need to beat your kids."

What if there's a bottleneck caused by a malfunction out on the backbone?

Then fix the damned backbone! Surely it takes less time to replace a screwed up router than to develop all these bandwidth restriction methods that only get circumvented anyway.

Re:fairness

[Man On Pink Corner]

So, phrasing this as something other than a flame, you would suggest that HTTP, FTP, etc. use UDP and then let each client application implement its own rate limiting

Because my application is better at knowing how to adapt to a given amount of bandwidth than TCP/IP is.

retransmission policy

Because non-trivial applications often have better ways to deal with packet loss than TCP's acknowledgement/retransmission mechanism. ...and packet reordering?

It often makes more sense to let your application deal with this. BitTorrent's a great example, as are most action games that do client-side prediction. Likewise, the way streaming applications have to work in the presence of TCP's reordering is by grinding to a halt waiting for the retransmission. Gee, thanks, TCP. Instead of a 16-millisecond glitch, I get a 2000-millisecond dropout.

Or did you have some other exotic transport layer in mind to replace TCP

No; I believe that dictating those details to application developers is counterproductive. As long as the implementation is competent, datagram transport with application-specific reliable delivery is almost always a win for everybody concerned -- clients, servers, routers. And if the implementation is incompetent, TCP can only do so much to help.

Re:fairness

[jandrese]

That misses the point. UDP senders don't know when they're flooding the connection, so they just keep doing it. A TCP stream would back off to try to be fair, but your UDP stream is just going to keep on blasting at full speed.

Think of it this way, you have a congested router that has 1mbps of available bandwidth. Normally you have 5 TCP streams sharing it at 200kbps each. Everybody is happy. Now you replace one of the TCP streams with your UDP sender which is configured to transmit at 800kbps. It will continue to pound the router with 800kbps worth of traffic while the TCP streams all throttle back to 50kbps. Now you're not playing fair, and there's nothing the other TCP guys can do about it because they're all trying to play fair still.

Re:fairness

[Artifex]

Except that one of the cool things about UDP is that it doesn't have to get through, so your router can drop all it needs to if it starts saturating your bandwidth. UDP has no guarantee of reliability at all.

You could make the opposite argument: the cool thing about TCP is it automatically retries and resends any dropped packets, so your router can drop all TCP traffic if it needs to.

In the scenario where multiple hosts have the data I want, I'd rather the software decide, not the router or my PC's stack. Like you said elsewhere, it can just grab from another host. So I'd rather have the protocol with the lower overhead for my pipes/router/stack. If torrent software supports requesting the same block from multiple sources at the same time, this is even more important, because my stack will keep trying to get a good version of a mangled packet even if I really don't need it any more because someone else sent the block, whereas with UDP, the software knows it has it and won't bother.

Re:fairness

[ShatteredArm]

Clearly whoever invented TCP did not properly understand game theory.

Re:fairness

[yabos]

TCP flow control scales back when it doesn't receive the ACK from the destination. They could easily do this over UDP by implementing their own ACK with a return UDP packet.

Re:fairness

[blhack]

If 200 people each request the same block from me in a minute, do I really want to have to go through something like 'hi can I talk to you, what port should I use, hey here it comes, do you have it, ok, I'm done talking to you go away',

You NEED to do that for the same reason that you need to wait in line at the check stand when getting groceries. There NEEDS to be flow control, otherwise, with everybody just trying to bum-rush the checkout, nobody will be able to get anything done.

Yes, this might work out okay if one person decides that they are sick of waiting and shove a few ladies out of the way. When pushing and shoving become the norm, it stops.

This is NOT a good idea.
Honestly, pirates, I get it; you're idealistic. Unfortunately, you're not thinking about the long term affects of doing this. Demonstrating that pirates (or people distributing linux ISOs or whatever...the media, and the ISPs see EVERYBODY that uses BT as a pirate) are willing to just shit all over the tubes in order to get what they makes a pretty good case for allowing the ISPs to start putting roadblocks in the way. It brings in legislation, more control, less freedom.

Seriously, guys, short-term win, long-term epic failure if this goes-large scale.

Re:fairness

[IamTheRealMike]

The internet isn't a circuit-switched network - when you buy a 10Mbit/sec connection even assuming it's dedicated (which nobody at home can afford), you don't buy a dedicated 10Mbit/sec circuit to every possible website. You buy 10Mbit/sec to your nearest switching center, and from then on out your packets might traverse all kinds of links, some more congested than others.

The rules of TCP ensure all the computers on the network work together to ensure that if one link bottlenecks they all back off a bit and everybody can still get through at reduced speed, instead of seeing massive packet loss, which just hoses everyone. UDP doesn't have that, and it works OK as long as UDP doesn't make up the bulk of data flows on any given link which has always been the case. The uTorrent change might break this system, and that's what the author is concerned about.

BTW, I'd note that the author of TFA is a contributor to the WiFi and Ethernet specs, so I'd think he knows what he's talking about.

Re:fairness

[Bill_the_Engineer]

Telephone companies where very clear that you should go with them because you don't have to share a line.

Marketing half-truth. True you don't share the connection with the ISP with any other customer (thank goodness, the connection is crappy enough), however once it is in the PBX you share the available bandwidth with others in your neighborhood.

So the only difference between cable and telephone (besides the transmission medium) is the point where sharing occurs (cable trunk vs. PBX).

Re:fairness

[Belial6]

You know this, and I know this, but the OP claimed that the other person "knew damn well" that they were using a shared line. The telephone companies sold DSL as a dedicated line, and thus the argument of "dedicated lines cost way more" and "you knew damn well that it was a shared line" hold no water.

Re:fairness

[jonaskoelker]

But BT can well work on UDP and even generate less overhead and thus actually less traffic than it does today.

Only if it adds its own layer of TCPness on top.

Here's the deal. You have one gigabyte of data to download. It's been split into one megabyte chunks, and you know the sha1 hash of every 1-meg chunk.

You go ask a peer for a 1-meg chunk. You get 1024 little 1k-chunks in return. There are 1024! permutations of them. Please put them in the right order.

You could, you know, number them. If you want men outside the middle to not be able to spoof a connection from you, you need to start numbering from a random place, and tell the other endpoint from where you start your numbering.

Presumably, you want to make outgoing connections to several peers at the same time. Hmm... I know, let's number each of the connections, and send the number to the receiving end.

Boy, this sounds a lot like port and sequence numbers...

If you do a 20-byte hash (say, sha1) of every 1k block, you end up with a 1-to-50 reduction. For a 1G torrent, the .torrent file is 20 meg. Presumably you could use a somewhat smaller hash function for each packet and then use a bigger hash for a chunk of packets...

I'm not saying it can't be done. But I don't see what compelling features UDP offers that you can't get almost as effectively with TCP. Care to enlighten me?

Re:fairness

[jandrese]

If ISPs started setting the QoS bits to favor voice traffic and send Bittorrent into the lowest priority queue, I guarantee that it won't take long for a BitTorrent client to start disguising itself as voice traffic.

Setting and honoring QoS bits won't help IMHO. The biggest problem is that they're not honored on the internet at large, so they'll basically only work for your organization, and won't work at all at keeping your users from clogging the last mile uplinks unless you make every single home router smart enough to set and honor the bits on their own. DSL and Fiber should be ok (although it would likely require upgrade of a LOT of COs), but Cable and Wireless are hosed since they're shared at the last mile.

Also, people seem to think that having Bittorrent work at the packet level is somehow a bad thing, which seems crazy to me since that's how the internet works. It would be a bad idea to plop an 8k UDP packet on the wire (or whatever your BT block size is) and expect it to make it through the network intact (IP fragmentation is going to murder your data transfer if you're congested anywhere, since losing any fragment will cause the stack to drop your whole packet on the floor).

I'm also not sold on implementing your own flow control in BT over UDP (it's not as easy as it looks) just because you don't want to incur the queuing penalty to reorder packets (which on the internet is not typically a problem anyway!). People may not like the 3-way handshake, but it's extremely useful for preventing you from spewing data a host that no longer exists. Frankly, TCP is pretty good at bulk data transfer and that's exactly what BT is doing (granted, the data is chunked up, but you're still sending it in bulk to and from many hosts).

It's such a shame Multicast doesn't work on the internet. This is one area where it could really do some good.

Re:fairness

[Alarash]

If ISPs started setting the QoS bits to favor voice traffic and send Bittorrent into the lowest priority queue, I guarantee that it won't take long for a BitTorrent client to start disguising itself as voice traffic.

Fair point. But Deep Packet Inspection-enabled devices can identify protocols disguising themselves as other protocols. Stateful analysis of that kind of traffic (10Gbps+) is possible, but the performance hit could be pretty big. Not huge though, and it's definitively something doable if you spend enough money on network devices to scale up the performances. I'm starting to see 10G line rate probes that can detect Layer 7 attacks, I'm sure they can determine as quickly, if not quicker, a forged protocol.

Whatever the technical problem is, somebody at Cisco, Juniper, F5, Foundy, and others already found the solution. It's just a matter of paying for the technology, and ISPs don't want to spend one dime too many, obviously, because they need to maximize the profitability for you know whom.

This is a good thing

[Gotung]

In the end this will be a good thing for the internet.

Forcing ISPs to treat all traffic the same, because they can't tell what is what, will be good for net neutrality.

You should get the bandwidth you pay for, regardless of what actually travels over it.

Re:This is a good thing

[michaelhood]

Except that probably isn't what will happen.

Let's use Comcast as an example.

Their target customer "surfs the web", and checks their email.

Their high-maintenance customers, who complain about latency issues, throughput, etc. are the ones who use UDP in any significant volume.

UDP is used for online gaming, VoIP, etc. They will just start to deprioritize UDP, which is bad. 99% of customers won't notice the difference, but we will.

Re:This is a good thing

[kvezach]

The real next step: file transfers over HTTP. Or go right out and tunnel IP over HTTP!

Re:This is a good thing

[Tony Hoyle]

Most games are UDP based because TCP introduces latency. All the Doom/Quake/Unreal type games are UDP, as latency is important in those sorts of games.

PS3 uses UDP. XBox360 uses UDP.

Even WoW uses UDP for in-game voice chat.

As far as the future goes, there are already ISPs that offer video services and it's only a short step to them *only* allowing video downloads off their servers. I expect the likes of Amazon and Netflix will be doing deals to ensure they get a piece of that pie.

Re:This is a good thing

[javilon]

Everyone here seems to work under the assumption that heavy bittorrent users would be worse off in a world with download caps or metered bandwidth. I don't think so. It would force companies to compete to give good service with clear contracts where they actually tell you what they are really selling. This is bound to increase, not decrease, the availability of real bandwidth per dollar for most users, included us computer geeks.

File Service Protocol

[FriendlyLurker]

"They" said the same thing about once popular File Service Protocol (http://fsp.sourceforge.net/) way back when the net was young, pre-Napster, and before any massive internet infrastructure investment was made...

Re:File Service Protocol

[electrosoccertux]

They also said the same thing when UDP streaming internet video became a hit-- their servers couldn't keep up.
They just had to upgrade.

Hopefully the same thing will happen now.

Re:File Service Protocol

[MBGMorden]

I think this whole thing is just hinging on them upgrading the darned infrastructure. The ISP's have sat fat and lazy for too long just selling you a "faster pipe" as the last mile of cable got faster. All that while though the baseline infrastructure has been receiving upgrades as a snail's pace, while at the same time more and more users are jumping onto the net in droves.

They pocketed far too much money that should have been allocated to network upgrades to actually support increasing TRUE capacity - not just a theoretical burst speed that you might maybe be able to get for 3 or 4 minutes back home.

It's like that lazy employee who has 3 months to do 1 week's worth of work. He puts it all off until he has 2 days left, and then starts to moan about how he doesn't have enough time to do all this work. Well, at this point, he's right. It's his own fault though. My boss has a nice poster in her office that I think applies here: "Lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part."

Re:File Service Protocol

[IamTheRealMike]

The problem is that P2P traffic is notorious for expanding to fill whatever capacity is thrown at it, which is why it now takes up such a giant amount of backbone capacity. So your "lazy ISPs should upgrade the darn infrastructure" argument isn't that convincing, I expect them to do so and then I expect BitTorrent users to fill those links immediately with more crap that they download and then never watch/install/use.

Re:A little extreme there, don't you think?

[FredFredrickson]

The problem is, that it could be ligitimate. Are you the judge and jury? Don't let something set a precedent that could affect our legal freedoms as well.

Re:Well Duh

[stonecypher]

That ISPs will start shutting BitTorrent users down, including legitimate ones, when they realize that BitTorrent users have forced them into a 95/5 choice. It isn't appropriate for legitimate bittorrent users to be driving other TCP off the network, let alone the vast bulk of what BitTorrent is really used for. You're not backed into a corner, getting stabbed in the face, or being locked in the bedroom; you just want to bully other people out of their bandwidth so you get more. It's about to explode in your face. There's no need or reason for this switch to UDP. This will, however, create a serious reason for ISPs to want rid of BitTorrent.

BitTorrent is going to find out, very soon, that it shouldn't try to be a bully; it's making other customers vote with their wallets, and if you force the point, there are actually a ton of ways to stop this cold (which unfortunately hurt the rest of us too, like caps). Unfortunately, BitTorrent fascinated mods are about to call me a troll or say I'm promoting flamebait, when I'm doing neither, because I'm telling them something they don't want to hear, but whatever.

This isn't the right way for BitTorrent to move forward, even when you only look at it as a collection of people using a protocol for legitimate purposes. You're just being greedy.

Re:Ummm

[Adriax]

Call in Mr Stevens, he's unemployed and looking for work.

don't see it myself

[myxiplx]

Well, since The Register don't seem to want to print my comment*, I'll repeat it here:

"I think this is a bit of scaremongering that's missing one vital point:

When an ISP throttles UDP packets because somebody is using excessive bandwidth, they'll be dropping packets *from that source*.

So while .torrent moving to UDP is going to affect VOiP and games, the effects of that will be *restricted to the person using excessive bandwidth* via bittorrent. There's no reason it would affect anybody else, and I doubt ISP's are going to be dumb enough to block packets at random.

Unfortunately that kind of blows the articles entire premise out of the water."

Myx

* Posted at 12:40pm, ten minutes after the article appeared, at a point where there were no other comments on the article. 3 hours later there are 37 comments, but no sign of mine. Now it may be that they've just been overwhelmed with comments, but I'm a suspicious soul at times...

Re:don't see it myself

[melikamp]

Your post might have been dropped, probably due to the excessive amount of posting from your end.

Total bullshit

[Idaho]

UDP does not guarantee delivery. If ISP's want to, they can simply start dropping UDP packets once the total amount exceeds a certain threshold. This should be almost trivial to implement.

Sure, just blindly dropping all types of UDP packets will also degrade VoIP services etc, but certainly this does not need to impact "the entire speed of the internet".

Since VoIP and other "normal" uses of UDP do not need terribly high bandwidth, the problem can be easily solved by imposing a maximum UDP throughput per IP and simply dropping any UDP packets past that limit. That way, VoIP will still work just fine but other services "abusing" UDP will just be effectively capped by the unguaranteed delivery.

I'd love to see lawsuits about this as well, as UDP does not guarantee delivery so you would hardly have a basis to complain when ISP's drop such packets, especially as long as they deliver *most*, but not necessarily all such packets.

Re:Total bullshit

[CarpetShark]

UDP does not guarantee delivery, but you can still run a packet loss test and take your ISP to court for selling a service of unmerchantable quality if it's that unreliable.

Re:A little extreme there, don't you think?

[serviscope_minor]

Using your stupid analogy, this would be more like threatening to raze the entire city to the ground because no one intervened to stopped the wife from being locked in the bedroom.

So she should sacrifice her entire life for people who clearly don't care? Why not let them all burn? Are you sure you wouldn't do the same if you were in her position? What if it was worse then being locked in the bedroom?

Ok, moving on from a rather stretched analogy...

Anyone who is caught using uTorrent with this setting gets their broadband internet access contract torn up.

Interesting anecdote. A few years ago, my NTL contract specifically mentioned how traffic over TCP/IP had to be legal, etc. For some reason UDP, ICMP, etc was not mentioned. Odd. I'm no longer with them, and they no longer exist anymore, so I can't check to see if its changed.

Don't even pretend that most bit torrent traffic is legitimate and legal. For every Linux DVD image distributed by bittorrent, there is probably dozens of times that much data in blatantly bootlegged content being distributed.

I don't care. I have *never* pirated anything over bittorrent, even thought I've used it a number of times.

Re:A little extreme there, don't you think?

[MBGMorden]

It could be, or it could not be. To me, that's not even an issue that should involve the ISP. I pay them for bandwidth, not to be my nanny. It's akin to a car dealer that keeps checking into to make sure I'm not running drugs in the car I bought from them. Right or wrong, legal or illegal, I paid for the car/bandwidth, so butt the hell out or I'm going to either find another seller who doesn't bother me about what I'm doing, or just ignore your and route around your interference.

I want an ISP that sells me a pipe. That's it. What I send down it is of no concern, and if I pay for 5Mbps or whatever other arbitrary number, then I can't possibly "steal" bandwidth from other users because by definition I'm already limited to the amount that you sold me. If you can't provide it then don't sell it, because some users will use what you sell them. If you took the current ISP business model to any other industry you'd be laughed out of town, yet they get away with it. Can you imagine signing up for a "3 DVD's at a time" plan from Netflix and then when you actually check out 3 at a time they start bitching up a storm because "You're hoarding the DVD's!!! None of the other customers will be able to rent any of them!!!". Of course not. Because like most industry's they understand that if you sell a capacity you better damn well be able to meet it.

Adobe Flash

[MouseR]

Is more in cause of the frickin' meltdown of the internet with about half the content of web sites being Flash-based animated and (GAH!) audio adds.

Flash video is also irreparably defective.

Disclaimer: did I mention I hate Flash?

Re:Greed

[Anonymous Coward]

The music industry is hardly a golden goose. I'll accept golden turd but not goose.

Everyone wants a piece of the pie...

[papasui]

...but nobody wants to pay for it. It's been said many, many, many, times before but the average user doesn't have any concept how much bandwidth costs for the circuit to a carrier alone, much less the hardware required to light it. I work with carrier-level Cisco gear, a single linecard alone is in the 50k price range. A single router I work with has 8 of those. It takes at least 2 of those routers to handle a few small to medium size towns, (30k subscribers). That's just the price to give you a connection back to the local building, of course I'm omitting the cost of the wiring to your home, the equipment required to power it, etc, etc. We haven't even discussed how much the transport out to the internet begins to cost. I think a lot of ISP's are beginning to see that it's probably a failing business model, and because of that they are making some-what drastic changes to try and make it sucessful. Things like bittorrent, youtube, etc are what make the web truely great, but at the same time they very well could be the downfall in the current state of the internet. You of course could always get your own internet circuit but even a T1 will be at least $300 per month + construction costs and appropriate gear to utilize it.

Re:Everyone wants a piece of the pie...

[RingDev]

16 linecards at 50k each, for 800,000. Lets call it a cool mill in asset costs.

30k subscribers paying $20 each a month. $600,000 a month. $7.2 mill a year.

Yeah, I can see how the initial sticker value of a 2 router closet is going to a road to ruin for most ISPs.

I don't think ISPs are cash cows by any means, once you consider opperating expenses and labor. But a $1 million dollar switch station can be easily amorted out over a 5 year loan when the ROI on that million is quite solid.

-Rick

Re:Everyone wants a piece of the pie...

[Lemmeoutada Collecti]

8 Linecards @ 50,000 ea = $400,000
2 routers @ $400,000 = $800,000
$800,000 / 30,000 = $26.67
12 months * 5 years = 60 months (standard depreciation period for equipment)
26.67 / 60 months = $0.45 per month per customer for the routers

I think that when you start throwing large numbers out there to justify cost to the customer, please remember that these costs are amortized over the entire customer base and over time as well.

Let's say you lease the lines for $50,000 per month for each router:
50,000 * 2 = 100,000
100,000 / 30,000 = 3.33 per month per customer

Let's add in $10,000 per month for power
10,000 / 30,000 = $0.33 per customer per month

Add in $100,000 per month for line maintenance, $100,000 per month for repairs
200,000 / 30,000 = 6.67 per month per customer

And $100,000 per annum for your salary (being generous for sake of demonstration) and say another $200,000 per annum for overhead expenses and support staff
$300,000 / 30,000 = $10
$10 / 12 = $0.83 per customer per month

So for the equipment (amortized), electric, facilities (as overhead), staff, leased pipes, maintenance, etc. we have a total of $11.61

Now a low end line goes for ~$24 per month, while a high bandwidth line ~$60...

Re:Everyone wants a piece of the pie...

[RingDev]

Which is exactly the problem, it is entirely too costly to do. ISPs have been marketing 10Mb service (or 3-5Mb service in my area) with out the ability to actually provide 10Mb as a minimum service level.

By selling based on the upper limit of service and leaving the lower limit undefined, they can prove that they can provide up to the marketed rate (in ideal conditions) but you can not prove that they fail to meet that lower limit.

So people assume that by paying for "(up to) 10Mb Service!" that they should be able to get 10Mb service 99.999999% of the time. When in reality they can get 256Kb service or better 99.999999% of the time.

Once you drop those 30k users down to 256Kb connections, you're only looking at 7,860,000Mbps instead of 300,000,000,000Mbps. Push it up to 10,000,000Mbps and you have the 256Kb minimum with enough head room for people to hit 10Mb upper limit under ideal circumstances. And a single OC-192 will carry it all.

Sure, if they want to provide a true 10Mb connection with near 100% uptime and bandwidth availability, they're going to need a stack of OC-192. But they don't. It's the old "As little as possible, as much as necessary" line. And the Marketing department hasn't kept in line with the Engineering department, so the issue will inevitably wind up in the Legal department.

-Rick

Won't create any changes

[Thorizdin]

ISP's have been managing UDP traffic for years now, this won't change anything. Any of the deep packet inspection boxes (Packeteer, Allot, Sandvine, Ellacoya, etc) can identify the traffic whether it is UDP or TCP as can open source tools like Ntop. Encrypting the traffic can of course disguise what's in the packets, but the overhead hurts transfer speed. In addition, several of the new generation of traffic shapers don't even care what layer 4 protocol you're using, things like Netequalizer just looks at the two IP end points of a given conversation and treats it as a flow regardless.

Re:Ummm

[LandDolphin]

He's just relaxing and waiting for Bush to Pardon him.

Re:Well Duh

[MasterOfMagic]

Sounds like the ISPs should have used the tax incentives we gave them to increase network capacity and reach to, you know, increase network capacity and reach. If they had done that years ago to keep pace with the growth of their network traffic, they wouldn't be in this situation.

But no, of course, it has to be the person who uses their connection's fault.

I pay for a pipe. My ISP should take no interest in the source or destination or type of service connections in this pipe. Anything else is just allowing the system to be used abusively.

It isn't appropriate for legitimate bittorrent users to be driving other TCP off the network.

The only way the BitTorrent use can drive other users off to the network is if the ISP's network is misconfigured or is being overutilized due to too much overselling (you have to have some overselling, not everyone is on 24/7). ISPs that have their shit together will have their network designed to handle expected and future traffic growth such that all of their customers can use what they paid for.

you just want to bully other people out of their bandwidth so you get more

They paid for their bandwidth and I paid for mine. I have a cap on my connection speed; they do as well. The only difference is that their YouTube videos load instantly and my BitTorrent transfer is knee-capped. Who is the bully here?

This isn't the right way for BitTorrent to move forward

What is the right way to move forward? Accept that there are two levels of Internet traffic: "clean, good, wholesome non BitTorrent traffic" and "dirty, evil, corrupting BitTorrent traffic"?

Upgrade the core and its routers

[suraj.sun]

from http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r21500602- :

Re: Is this a good thing for the net?

Yawn, here comes the typical argument... bandwidth is bandwidth, either way you look at it. All p2p does is open several simultaneous connections, splitting the user's bandwidth. Unless you horribly misconfigured your client to open up, say, 1000 ports.

It's not as if the user is using any more bandwidth than if they were conducting a regular http download. P2P actually is better for a network, as (given enough peers) it completes downloads significantly faster than normal centralized server methods, thus getting heavy users off the network noticeably faster (obviously, unless the user is dumb enough to allocate their entire upstream bandwidth to seeding).

As to bypassing the "TCP congestion control" you speak of, do you think Bell's solution is ANY better? The throttling of particular packets by itself violates the principles of TCP. Not only that, it also throttles/cripples MANY legitimate applications, such as secure VPN's or other encrypted connections.

Do you REALLY want that as an alternative to this so-called "problem" of p2p? I've said over an over, the ideal solution is to gracefully scale back speed for ANY upload/download if the said user is using their full bandwidth for more than 20 minutes during peak hours. This actually solves the problem, unlike throttling schemes like bell's, which render many legitimate applications useless. Let's face it, even Comcast here in the states has been forced to take a long hard look at their policy on Sandvine. Soon enough, we can only hope Bell will as well...

Do I even support the above solution? By itself, absolutely NOT!! IMHO, the ideal solution is to upgrade the core and its routers. However, that takes time and capital that companies like Bell are rather unwilling to spend; they'd rather (ab)use their position in the limited Canadian ISP market to deploy band-aid solutions like throttling p2p.

About time to meter usage??

[foxalopex]

I find it disappointing that ISPs don't meter usage. It would help cut down on spam and viruses for example if users suddenly realized that something was costing them a lot of money and wasting bandwidth. I mean all our other services are metered. As for myself there are months when I download huge amounts of anime and then there are other months where I download next to nothing yet I still pay the same amount. This fact alone means it's more beneficial for me to download like a nutcase and ruin it for everyone else. Granted the only catch is that ISPs would hopefully charge reasonable rates with a certain flat fee to maintain the line. To folks to believe otherwise, I suspect you're not willing to give up your free lunch to the expense of others. The Internet is a limited resource as some ISPs are learning the hard way. Given the choice between metered usage versus throttled / controlled / broken Internet, I'd pay for metered anyday.

Re:A little extreme there, don't you think?

[Chas]

Don't even pretend that most bit torrent traffic is legitimate and legal.

So what? Piracy is a social problem. Blocking BT, which IS being used legitimately, is a wrong-headed attempt to use technology to "solve" a social problem.

And in this case, they're trying to do it on the most flexible network in the world, one that's SUPPOSED to route around problem areas.

Scare Mongering?

[Concern]

This sounds like the basest kind of scare mongering, relying on a basic ignorance of the way networks work.

UDP is not any less filterable than TCP. To even make this argument, the reasoning is so contorted as to be silly. In either case, one uses a router to inspect packets and decide what to do with them. ISPs will simply go as deep through the envelopes as they like; they already do. With that knowledge they will do whatever is allowed by law. At present, almost anything is. If they abuse that power too foolishly, then it will start to be taken away from them.

And in the meantime, whoever they filter will tweak to retaliate, and it will always be a race. As far as I can see, this is just the ISPs (or their proxies) stopping at one random lap and crying how unfair it all is.

Why ignore the real issue here? If you sold a teenager in Topeka unlimited use of a large pipe, but now cannot handle her actual unlimited use of her large pipe, then you just need to start cutting better deals.

It's as simple as that.

If the teenager cannot actually use her fat pipe, 100% of the time, then stop lying about what it is you have sold to her. Either charge more or advertise less. It's as simple as that.

When I as a CEO, and millions of others like me, buy #MB upstream and #MB downstream, and utilize it 100%, 24/7, no one quakes over the calamity of the internet backbone melting down.

All of this discussion over filtering is really a discussion of pricing. And the fact that we are talking about it in the wrong terms is creepy.

Believe me, you do not want a bunch of unaccountable telecom bureaucrats playing god with the backbone. You want a free market making these decisions.

Re:Well Duh

[internerdj]

I don't use bittorrent, but frankly those (most of those) people are paying for unlimited internet access. At least that is how it was marketed. What I do uses is streaming video for alot of the shows I had been watching on TV. If my ISP is selling me unlimited internet and they decide not to deliver, I want a rate cut. If they don't have the capacity to reasonably provide what they sold me, they shouldn't be allowed to legally weasel out of providing it without penalty.

Re:A little extreme there, don't you think?

[Atticka]

"Better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer"

That should sum it up.

Re:Well Duh

[frieko]

That makes sense if you're used to being screwed by your ISP. But the CORRECT response would be to actually supply the amount of bandwidth that they advertise.

Ten years ago people only maxed out their connections 5% of the time. Nobody promised it would be like that forever.

Re:A little extreme there, don't you think?

[blackfrancis75]

that Car Dealer thing is a terrible analogy. With the ISP model, everything you do with the 'bandwidth' you paid for goes through *their* systems first - they're understandably concerned that the drugs you're running across their borders are going to reflect badly on them in the long run.

More on this story...

[JCSoRocks]

BitTorrent is believed to be harboring weapons of mass destruction. These weapons are believed to be capable of destroying all of the internet tubes. The government has no choice but to authorize the ISPs to use lethal force to prevent these terrorists from succeeding.

Re:A little extreme there, don't you think?

[Anonymous Coward]

"that Car Dealer thing is a terrible analogy. With the ISP model, everything you do with the 'bandwidth' you paid for goes through *their* systems first - "

Which is bullshit, consider the post office, I order something online from a retailer, does this give the shipping company or government the right to open my mail and packages because it passes through their facilities? It's bullshit plain and simple. They don't have a right to watch and monitor what you send. It's just another cash grab disguised as "helping the consumer"

You are not listening...

[Anonymous Coward]

His example is that multiple users behind ONE of these DSLAM ports have congestion. Per your example, the congestion is as soon as they reach their 64 kb/s policy.

However, everyone in these bittorrent debates pretends that the DSLAM port is the bottleneck. In a highly interconnected environment like a world full of bittorrent and other users, there are many other places for congestion far from the simple consumer-to-ISP policy enforcement point. TCP congestion control helps with congestion anywhere that multiple flow paths intersect. The Internet does not magically prevent intersections and congestion except at consumer head-ends.

Re:You are not listening...

[MasterOfMagic]

I am saying that, in the case where multiple users have congestion, it is not a problem of user behavior. It is a problem of the ISP not having a wide enough uplink. If the users that are causing the congestion stop using their connection then they are not getting the service that they paid for. The ISP has three options at this point:

1. Do nothing and let stupid shit like this happen
2. Use the revenue from their business to increase network capacity
3. Lower every user's line speed so they can fit more people on the same link

Almost every ISP in the country is selecting the first option and wondering why everybody is pissed at them. Number 2 would probably take away from their stock price (not that it has much further to slide at this point) despite it being the right thing to do, and Number 3, while honest and straightforward, would never fly.

However, everyone in these bittorrent debates pretends that the DSLAM port is the bottleneck. In a highly interconnected environment like a world full of bittorrent and other users, there are many other places for congestion far from the simple consumer-to-ISP policy enforcement point.

I'm not pretending that it doesn't exist. As a matter of fact, as I've said in other posts, this is due to oversold uplink connections and upstream networks not ready for this increase in bandwidth. Bandwidth is being charged for. Somebody is making money. Spend the money on increased network bandwidth at interconnects that are traditional and measurably congested and stop doing stupid shit like cutting off peering because someone looked at you funny.

However, BitTorrent here is a scapegoat - you'd have the same problem with large FTP sites, video archives, or masses and masses of streaming porn. A bottleneck isn't caused by the protocol. The bottleneck is caused by the demand, and demand for a service is independent the protocol it's wrapped in.

Re:A little extreme there, don't you think?

[Oqnet]

I agree but I wouldn't say it's as much like buying a car from a car dealership, it's more like leasing the car for a term. They can set the cap on the milage you can take it and they can put in a governer and charge you more if you damage the car removing the governer or go over your alloted. But your point is that they shouldn't be able to limit how you use it, and I don't think there is anything in the contract saying that they can. They don't have any right to decided what is a proper use of your bandwidth that you are allocated. They can't all of the sudden decide to limit how much to use.

At the end of the month if your over your limit that is set(cap) charge them more. If they are only allowed 50gigs of data and they have more charge them per gig or meg or however you want to spell it out. It's not like they are uncapping their connection and stealing bandwidth from the stream. They are using their bandwidth that was given to them to the fullest potential. It's not their problem that the ISP decided to oversell their bandwidth. Thats like saying four people can have 100 dollars having 200 and when Billy spends his 100 dollars accuse him of stealing from the other 3 because theres only 100 dollars between the last 3.

Re:A little extreme there, don't you think?

[adonoman]

The problem with bittorrent, is that it's MORE convenient than watching TV the old fashioned way. All the benefits of TIVO, except that I can use my computer (and keyboard) to specify which shows I want. I don't care which channels are broadcasting them, they just appear in the downloaded folder. I can watch from any computer in the house (or outside with a laptop). There are no DRM restrictions.

Re:A little extreme there, don't you think?

[Shakrai]

That is a slippery slope, friend. You have chosen to live in a society and by extension have chosen to live by society's rules.

Didn't that society also make a few promises to the people that decided to live in it? Like freedom of speech, freedom to keep and bear arms, freedom against self-incrimination, etc, etc, etc?

If everyone gets to pick and choose which ones they want to abide by and not, then that becomes anarchy

So pot-smokers and people who exceed the speed limit lead us down the road to anarchy?

Good point, but I disagree with your conclusion

[CFD339]

Its true for now that most links are sold purely by bandwidth, so your statement about getting what you've paid for is valid -- unless what you're paying for includes by contract a cap on total use or continuous use, or something else. Most home network access contracts contain those use case caps.

What really caught my attention as I read your note is that comment about the number of open tcp connections. As I read it, I'm surprised that hasn't been used as a valid limit on use by contract.

If you think of things that add cost and hurt performance from an ISP perspective, total number of sessions is one of them. It increases the load on routers and adds overhead and latency to network (or it can, unless more money is spent on bigger and faster routers).

Limiting concurrent sessions is probably just around the corner.

I currently pay for the highest bandwidth version of consumer net access offered in my area. Its more that sufficient for downloads, but because I work from home it is slower than I'd like for uploads. I use a hosted server at a co-lo site so that my business system isn't carried over a consumer line, but I still pull down a pretty huge amount of data sometimes.

I'm completely convinced that if my ISP wanted, they could slow my links by about the third week of most months. I believe they don't only because they don't offer a higher level of service than I'm paying for. At least for me, they've always been fair and responsive.

If anyone is limited by an ISP when they've got an agreement to pay for services that doesn't support those limits being applied, they should take legal action. If not, they should pay more attention to what they purchased and either refuse to buy what's offered or live inside it.

If you can't live with what's in the agreement, lease a line and pay for your own service to somewhere. What you'll find is that without the aggregation that's done by the big ISP's, you'll never be able to afford the on-demand use you want to buy.

I want massive bandwidth on demand too -- I want to download 4gb movies in under 30 minutes whenever I want. I do not, however, want to pay for a leased line capable of doing that. When I buy into a shared provisioning system (a consumer isp arrangement) I'm agreeing to live within that ecosystem and share the cost of that high bandwidth as well as sharing that bandwidth.

The contracts are obscure and don't come right out and say so. Maybe it would be better if they did.

All applications should be what now?

[Digital_Quartz]

It enforces bad design -- most client/server applications should be either stateless or session-based, rather than connection-oriented.

What? Why? Why is a connection based application "bad design"?

A "session" is just a hack to give you connection-like qualities over a connectionless protocol, such as HTTP. If you want connection-like behavior, and you're free to design your own protocol, why not just use connections? Why make your life more complicated?

There are plenty of advantages to connection-based applications; no need to re-authenticate on every message, for one. Clear indications of when a client is done talking to you for another (the connection is dropped, whereas in a connectionless world you never really know if the client has died or is just about to send you another message).

Even most "connectionless" applications, such as your web browser, try to cheat and get connection based behavior. Renegotiating an SSL connection for every request would be remarkably expensive for the server, so the server and browser try to reuse the same connection as much as possible. Fire up wireshark, and you'll see your browser will only open two connections when you read Slashdot, and all the images and text all come across those two connections.

Re:All applications should be what now?

[Man On Pink Corner]

What? Why? Why is a connection based application "bad design"?

Because connection maintenance is a very high-level task that should not be delegated to the very bowels of the application, much less to someone else's opaque API.

A "session" is just a hack to give you connection-like qualities over a connectionless protocol, such as HTTP. If you want connection-like behavior, and you're free to design your own protocol, why not just use connections? Why make your life more complicated?

The complication comes in when you have to code "connected versus unconnected" states into your app all the way up to the user-interface level, and you realize that you're doing a lot of redundant work to try to keep track of what TCP/IP thinks the connection state is. Admittedly, it's hard to explain unless you've been there.

There are plenty of advantages to connection-based applications; no need to re-authenticate on every message, for one.

TCP is doing this behind your back. Maybe you can do it better.

Clear indications of when a client is done talking to you for another (the connection is dropped, whereas in a connectionless world you never really know if the client has died or is just about to send you another message).

That's one of the worst examples you could pick. When, and whether, TCP will drop a connection is up to factors far beyond the application's control. You have to handle the "TCP dropped connection" state anyway; it's not really any easier to do that at the lowest networking level than it is to do it at a higher level.

Most applications I've worked on have ended up with their own keepalive-based housekeeping mechanisms anyway; the obvious tactic is to use those mechanisms for connection maintenance instead of a low-level TCP connection whose persistence your own code has to mirror.

Even most "connectionless" applications, such as your web browser, try to cheat and get connection based behavior.

Again you're making my point for me. Because TCP-level connections are not appropriate for Web browsing, various Procrustean hacks get brought into play.

Renegotiating an SSL connection for every request would be remarkably expensive for the server, so the server and browser try to reuse the same connection as much as possible. Fire up wireshark, and you'll see your browser will only open two connections when you read Slashdot, and all the images and text all come across those two connections.

Sure, but that has nothing to do with any inherent advantages of TCP-level connections, except insofar as SSL is tied to them. If you were driven by absolute maximization of server performance and weren't saddled with the baggage of existing protocols like HTTP, you certainly wouldn't use TCP; it'd be like doing unnecessary work in the inner loop of a graphics routine. That's the decision the BitTorrent people are faced with.

Re:All applications should be what now?

[Man On Pink Corner]

It almost sounds to me as if you feel programmers should just build off UDP to achieve what they want from TCP. Looking through your arguments it looks as if your reasoning is because most applications use TCP then have to recreate various functions of TCP to work correctly anyway. So they should just use UDP to begin with [and build the other bits in thier application]?

Opinions will vary, just read the thread. It wasn't too long ago that anyone challenging the supremacy of TCP/IP for any and all networking applications would have been modded down to -1, Heretic.

From the application developer's perspective, TCP maintains connections on your behalf. What's a connection, you ask? Simply a remembered state ("I'm talking to host X on port Y") with a bunch of buffers associated with it to guarantee reliable delivery of the data you send to host X. Outgoing data is kept around until the remote host sends an ack back saying it got it OK. If the ack doesn't arrive within a certain amount of time, typically measured in thousands of milliseconds, TCP helpfully retransmits your data. The reverse happens on the receive side; because outgoing packets are sequence-numbered by the transmitter, duplicated or out-of-order packets can be thrown away (if duplicated) or buffered up until the missing packets arrive to fill in the gap (if out-of-order delivery is detected).

What's wrong with that? Not a thing, if your application is synchronously sending and receiving chunks of text or linear pieces of binary data between two hosts.

The thing is, that's not a good description of what most of the Internet's publicly-visible applications do anymore. If you're streaming VoIP, music, or video, you don't want to stall the stream for thousands of milliseconds if a single packet gets lost. The application already has to maintain its own media buffers to hide latency from the user, and it may be able to synthesize missing VoIP frames from context, drop video frames when necessary (and compensate by adjusting timing), or whatever. If you're running a game server, the client physics is already doing prediction and interpolation to hide latency and packet loss, so when a packet gets lost, it's a case of "It's gone, dude, let it go."

Similarly, if you're running BitTorrent or something else that amounts to a peer-to-peer file system, you're already using your own high-level protocol to assemble file images from disparate, potentially out-of-order fragments. You probably want to be able to determine your own strategies for acknowledging packet delivery, abandoning or punishing uncooperative peers, and managing peer traffic volume.

TCP brings essentially no value to the table in any of these situations. It's going to fanatically deliver that data to you, even if it has to retry 10 times and choke back a megabyte of traffic to maintain packet order. It'll get that data to you, even if you don't need it anymore.

So yeah, conceptually, you'll end up using UDP to emulate a lot of the semantics of TCP, but in practice what you do as the application developer is probably quite different than what TCP would do on your behalf. Applications nowadays are more distributed, less synchronous, and more latency-sensitive than they were back in the 1980s when Unix-heads used the terms "file" and "stream" more or less interchangeably.

There is nothing wrong with TCP/IP -- it's a hell of a nice piece of engineering, in fact. So was the Apple II. The world moves on.

Re:A little extreme there, don't you think?

[SecretSquirrel321]

Yes, I do have 10,000 sheep. But this land is common, I have a right to let them all graze there if I want to.

You can only do that a the very edge

[Nicolas MONNET]

Routers deeper inside the network cannot keep tabs on millions of IPs and who uses how much, they already have much to do.

Re:A little extreme there, don't you think?

[AceJohnny]

Can you imagine signing up for a "3 DVD's at a time" plan from Netflix and then when you actually check out 3 at a time they start bitching up a storm because "You're hoarding the DVD's!!! None of the other customers will be able to rent any of them!!!". Of course not. Because like most industry's they understand that if you sell a capacity you better damn well be able to meet it.

Actually yes, I can very well imagine that. Overselling capacity is a common practice in lots of industries, based on the customers' statistical use. For example, where I live, I have signed for an electrical plan that entitles me to use a certain amount of electrical power at a given time (=bandwidth). If everyone in my neighborhood used the power they're entitled to, the power lines would melt.

See also: banks and loans, but that's not a good example nowadays ;)

The ISP's problem is they oversold based on a given statistical model. That model is becoming obsolete as people increasingly use P2P. So they're trying to stem the tide by crying wolf (as in this example), or by claiming that the users are doing illegal stuff (copyright infringement) and should stop.

Ignorant much?

[burris]

The author of this article could have called or emailed Bram Cohen before writing this article, but then he wouldn't have had such sensational tripe to garner page views. If he had, he would have known that he has got it completely wrong. The switch to uTP is actually to make BitTorrent traffic more friendly to Internet traffic. You see, BitTorrent is trying to sell a content delivery service based on their client and the #1 complaint from their customers (businesses with content to deliver) and their customer's customers (end users) is that the BitTorrent DNA client seeding/downloading in the background hurts the performance of other applications. That's unacceptable if you're trying to sell an unobtrusive alternative/complement to traditional CDN.

Yup, good ol TCP is what is causing the problem. That's because BitTorrent breaks the assumption in TCP that one application needs only one TCP stream to do its work. To solve the problem BitTorrent acquired advanced congestion control techonology and it's inventors from "Plicto." The congestion control technology lets BitTorrent work without causing crazy latency for other applications on the box. BitTorrent is the responsible party here, recognizing the need for congestion control and implementing it in their protocol. Compare that to the author of this article who saw that BT was using UDP and assumed it was a naive attempt to get around ISP blocks.

The people who work at BitTorrent are smart enough to know that you can't beat your ISP by making a new protocol. The ISP sees all and can control all, even if it may lag behind the changes. That's why BitTorrent has been working to make changes where it can make a lasting difference, in the political layer of the network.

Re:A little extreme there, don't you think?

[multisync]

You know what I'd like to see happen? Anyone who is caught using uTorrent with this setting gets their broadband internet access contract torn up.

You know what I'd like to see happen? Deliver the throughput that I pay for. If I exceed that throughput, charge me for whatever I use in excess of my allotment, or cut off my service. Whatever the terms of my contract state.

My ISP charges me a fixed rate for a fixed amount of throughput (100 GB per month). If I and everyone one else try to download large files during peak times, our transfer rates will suck. Just like everyone getting on the freeway at the same time to drive to work causes traffic congestion, or those same people all firing up the air conditioner at the same time when they get home from work may cause brown outs.

Do you want the utility company to decide how you can use the electricity that comes in to your house?

Don't even pretend that most bit torrent traffic is legitimate and legal.

My traffic is just as "legitimate" as yours. We're both just moving bits of data. Why should your bits take priority over mine?

IETF ALTO

[mbone]

Both BitTorrent and Comcast are working in the IETF ALTO working group, which is intended to improve the use of bandwidth and other resources by P2P.

Having been in these sessions, it is clear to me that BitTorrent has no interest in melting down the Internet and is well aware of the implications of what they are doing. Note that if worse comes to worse, UDP can be blocked too.

Re:A little extreme there, don't you think?

[jbezorg]

A car lease would be a more accurate analogy since you are only leasing the equipment.

Still, would you lease a car if it came with some guy who sat in the back seat and bitched about the miles you put on the vehicle? Maybe disable the car or limit how far you can travel during periods of high usage? Or said "No, you can't drive to X because X is the bad part of town and you can't possibly have a legitimate reason to go there"?

Re:A little extreme there, don't you think?

[Real1tyCzech]

...and those 10 guilty persons, what about them?

They'll never cause another innocent to suffer?

Your logic (I know it's a stretch to even call it that) falls flat when those 10 guilty persons set free cause suffering to countless other innocents; such that could have been prevented but for the suffering of that one innocent.

We all suffer for the individual and the individual suffers for all. That's called society. Deal with it.

Re:A little extreme there, don't you think?

[Anonymous Coward]

I order something online from a retailer, does this give the shipping company or government the right to open my mail and packages because it passes through their facilities? It's bullshit plain and simple. They don't have a right to watch and monitor what you send.

FedEx/UPS/DHL have every right to open your packages, yes. You grant them that right when you agree to their shipping terms. Perhaps you should read the airbill before you sign it. The government operates under a different set of rules than private companies. If you'd like the government to run you ISP service then you can have the right to not have your traffic monitored.

Re:Well Duh

[MasterOfMagic]

Don't meter then. Sell them a realistic line speed.

My ISP is selling me a line speed. In an ideal world (leaving out the marketing droids), they will be selling me a speed that I can reasonably expect on their already oversold network. They will cap my network connection at this speed such that I can never exceed it, and that's it. That's all that they will need to do.

In the real world, however, the line speed they sell seems to have nothing to do with what their network capacity is. Their line speed seems to do with "having a bigger one than the next guy" to bring in more subscribers even if their network can't handle it. As a result, they oversell a network that already can't realistically cope with their utilization numbers. Instead of looking at utilization and capacity numbers and figuring out what they can realistically support, they make shit up.

This making shit up is biting them in the ass. Hard. The need to do one of two things:

1. Increase network capacity - we gave them tax breaks to do it, so where are the results and why shouldn't the ISPs have to pay those back taxes with interest if they refuse to do it?
2. Decrease the line speed of all of their users so that they can cope with the utilization of their network

They've been dragging their feet on the first item because they want to erect tollbooths and speedbumps (destroying network neutrality along the way) so that they become the gatekeepers of the Internet - using public funds to fuel a private agenda, penalizing popular sites because they didn't think of the idea first or because it threatens their business model. They won't do the second because honesty is apparently taboo even if their realistic line speeds are pretty much an open secret (see dslreports.com).

Overselling peak bandwidth is fine

[roystgnr]

Mislabeling it is not. If you sell 1MBps with a 25GB/month cap, then you need to be advertising your "1MBps peak bandwidth, 0.01MBps constant bandwidth" service, not misleading your prospective customers.

Practically every ISP should be overselling peak bandwidth; because people don't all use it at the same time, your only choices are to let them use as much as they can (overselling) or to throttle them. But both peak and aggregate bandwidth are important; if you're not providing much of the latter you shouldn't get to imply otherwise.

Re:A little extreme there, don't you think?

[srussia]

If you took the current ISP business model to any other industry you'd be laughed out of town, yet they get away with it.

Cough...fractional reserve banking...cough

Re:A little extreme there, don't you think?

[Jimmy King]

While not correct if someone wants to be pedantic about it, it's very common to refer to the entire IP stack as TCP/IP or the TCP/IP stack. I can't think of a book that touches on networking either in part or is the entire subject of the book that I've read that does not use TCP/IP as the generic term for the entire stack. Possibly not a good idea for a legal document, but that's how it is.

Just like even though kleenex is a type of tissue, but tissue is not a type of kleenex, if someone asked you for a kleenex you wouldn't respond "I don't have any. All I've got here are these Great Value Facial Tissues", you'd just point them to whatever you have and know exactly what they meant. The same goes for when someone says "TCP/IP", while TCP/IP is a more specific thing than just IP, you know (or should know) what someone means and know that they very well may be referring to the entire stack, not just TCP and its sub-protocols specifically.

Metered QoS

[cam312]

I've been thinking about this topic for a while. It almost always degenerates into a "I paid for X mbps, I should get to use it 100% of the time" vs. "You're killing my connection, and my XYZ traffic is getting hit even though I'm a good consumer, we should pay for each bit we use, and let the market sort it out." What if we implement a QoS service level based largely on the existing pricing model. When you subscribe, you get a certain bandwidth of traffic that you are (almost) GUARANTEED (as if you were (almost) leasing a T1 to yourself) The ISP doesn't mess with it. The rest of your traffic is "best efforts" at between X and Y mbps. Let the ISP shape the "best efforts" bandwidth in whatever way they feel brings the best average consumer experience. Let the customer choose if they want to use their guaranteed traffic to surf the web, run VOIP, Games, BT etc. That way I'm not limiting your BT, and your BT isn't killing the voice quality of my phone. Everyone talks like QoS, shaping, and throttling is a bad thing. I've used all 3 tools on my own LAN to IMPROVE the connection of my network for ALL it's users. Sure some HTTP traffic gets delayed while Voip jumps the queue, and when there's heavy surfing, BT slows down. Network bandwidth is a finite resource. Burning it up like fossil fuels in the 60s is a bad long term idea. I can't afford a guaranteed bandwidth connection at home. I'd much rather participate in a MUCH bigger shared and shaped pipe than be stuck with what I can afford to buy all for myself.

Re:A little extreme there, don't you think?

[mweather]

A car used to run drugs can be confiscated, costing the dealership money if you are still making payments.

uTP has congestion control ?

[mbone]

See http://forum.utorrent.com/viewtopic.php?id=49813

"What is in 1.9:
uTP, the micro transport protocol. This UDP-based reliable transport is designed to minimize latency, but still maximize bandwidth when the latency is not excessive. We use this for communication between peers instead of TCP, if both sides support it. In addition, we use information from this transport, if active, to control the transfer rate of TCP connections. This means uTorrent, when using uTP, should not kill your net connection - even if you do not set any rate limits.

What was in 1.8.1:
uTP, but connection attempts were not initiated by default, and there was no control over TCP as described above. You can enable it, but likely you will see the uTP connections not transfering much data, because they are pushed out of the way by TCP."

This sounds like congestion control of some sort to me.

Re:Imagine:

[StikyPad]

LOL! Well.. good luck, I hope she's worth it, and with any luck the wife will never find out about her. Don't forget to burn the receipts!

Re:A little extreme there, don't you think?

[dumb_jedi]

For example, where I live, I have signed for an electrical plan that entitles me to use a certain amount of electrical power at a given time (=bandwidth). If everyone in my neighborhood used the power they're entitled to, the power lines would melt.

That's half-true. The power company MUST meet peak demand, as well the rest of the electrical system. You can't say to people "sorry, you won electricity tonight because your neighbor is consuming too much power". That's absurd and ridiculous. What ISPs did was to HEAVILY oversell capacity. Too much greed is the problem, not heavy usage.

SCTP

[sgt scrub]

p2p applications should switch to SCTP.

http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2960.txt

Re:A little extreme there, don't you think?

[lysergic.acid]

exactly. the argument espoused in this article is fundamentally flawed. in fact, it reads like it was written by an industry mouthpiece for the sole purpose of demonizing P2P users without absolutely no regard to logic or reality.

first off, as you said, it's impossible for the "download fiends" to actually use more than their share of bandwidth. if i have a 56K dial-up connection, there's no way for me to just decide, "hrmmm, this isn't fast enough for me. i think i'll be a dick and download at 9 Mbps by stealing bandwidth from my neighbors."

secondly, the author seems to be suggesting that everyone should use, or have access to, the exact same amount of bandwidth regardless of what they paid for, and that this level of bandwidth is decided by how much he personally uses/needs. well, that's very convenient for him and the ISPs. most of us are paying for 3+ Mbps connections, some people are paying for much more than that, but i guess we should all only be allowed to use 1~3% of the bandwidth we paid for because that's how much the author needs for his daily web surfing, e-mail, and posting of shitty articles on the web.

but why stop there? why not divide up internet bandwidth evenly between all 6.6 billion people around the globe. total global broadband internet bandwidth was estimated by Cisco to be 5,372 petabytes per month in 2008. divided up between 6.6 billion people means we all get a 0.00265869476 Mbps connection--that's each person's 'fair share' of internet bandwidth. of course, we would all have faster internet connections if it weren't for those darn greedy business/enterprise internet subscribers.

internet bandwidth isn't a fixed commodity, or a limited natural resource. technology has always been driven by consumer demand, and broadband internet is no different. it's bandwidth-intensive applications like P2P, streaming-video/audio, enterprise applications, etc. that create the push for infrastructure upgrades and ever-increasing connection speeds/network capacities. it's idiotic to accuse "power users" or "downloaders" of destroying the internet or stealing other people's bandwidth. it's even more idiotic to think that everyone should use as little bandwidth as you do, as there's always going to be a someone who uses even less bandwidth. artificially manipulating internet usage while overselling more and more is what's going to cause broadband connection quality to continue to decrease. meanwhile, there are ISPs in Japan and Korea who are doing the exact opposite by increasing network capacity and connection speeds to meet the growing demand. perhaps if ISPs in the U.S. and Canada focused on making technological progress rather than opposing it, we'd be rolling out 1 Gbps symmetric broadband connections too, rather than fussing over people actually using their 3-4 Mbps connections.

Re:why

[AK Marc]

I see TFA's point is not that UDP increases traffic, but they are harder to be throttled by ISPs. Well then why don't the ISPs upgrade their own infrastructure to handle the increased traffic and charge their users accordingly to cover the cost? Blame the current economy?

It's not that it's harder to throttle. It's that if a network is a mix of TCP and UDP traffic filling up the capacity, the TCP will back off, and the UDP won't. In fact, with a crappy back-off protocol in a UDP application, the TCP will continue to back off until almost nothing is left, while the UDP grows and takes it all over. UDP was not intended to be a peer of TCP, but a tool to help. Using UDP to transfer large files in this manner makes as much sense (from a network design logical stance) as using ICMP. Sure, it could be done (embed data in the ping packets), but why? TCP exists to do this, and already does it well. UDP should be left for real-time appliations only where lost packets could never be usefully recovered, and some light-weight low-use applications like TFTP.

All capacity will be used sometime. If there's a backbone problem and smaller links carry more traffic there could be bottlenecks. Maybe we are just talking about the access to someone's house, and that's easier to clog. Whatever it is, the issue is that the Internet will experience congestion. It has to, that's the way these things work. What matters is what happens when it is full? With more UDP and less TCP, TCP will generally suffer a greater impact. At the heart of it, that's the real issue. Yes, they should have enough capacity to hold the traffic almost all the time, and people won't be filling their tubes all the time either. But this is a design issue that would be true no matter what the capacity is.

Re:Hello!

[danieltdp]

you missed the "World" part

Re:A little extreme there, don't you think?

[i_ate_god]

It's called a society and there are acceptable and unacceptable behaviors. Being a filthy pirate and hogging all the bandwidth is not nor should be acceptable behavior even though you really like all the free stuff you get from it.

You can't hog all the bandwidth, you can only hog the bandwidth allocated to you.

What you're saying is this:

The ISP gave my neighbourhood 500mbps, and some asshole is using all of it so I can get on the internet, but still paying for it!

The realty is this however:

The ISP gave me personally 10mbps, and the asshole ISP is telling me now I can't use all of it but still expecting me to pay.

See the difference here?

Re:A little extreme there, don't you think?

[SanityInAnarchy]

See also: Airlines.

The difference is, of course, that if your flight is overbooked, the airline will actually spend more money -- on hotel space, a taxi to take you to the hotel, dinner, etc -- and then put you on another flight.

If your ISP has determined that they've got too much load, they can just cut you off -- this would be like the airline telling you to go home.

Re:A little extreme there, don't you think?

[BlueStrat]

...and those 10 guilty persons, what about them?

They'll never cause another innocent to suffer?

Your logic (I know it's a stretch to even call it that) falls flat when those 10 guilty persons set free cause suffering to countless other innocents; such that could have been prevented but for the suffering of that one innocent.

We all suffer for the individual and the individual suffers for all. That's called society. Deal with it.

The difference you're missing here is that 10 *individuals*, even if guilty and sure to cause harm, have a limited ability to cause society harm as they have only the power to compel others on a limited basis as individuals, whereas government has, for all practical purposes, unlimited ability to compel through force of arms & law, and hence the power to cause nearly unlimited harm to society and the individuals within it.

Cheers!

Strat

Re:A little extreme there, don't you think?

[Sapphon]

You do, if you've paid for the right to graze 10,000 sheep there. If the land can handle 20,000 sheep, and the land owner has sold these grazing rights thrice, who is at fault?

Re:A little extreme there, don't you think?

[Spez]

You're absolutely right.

And while we're at it, most thiefs enter houses using doors don't they? We probably should ban doors.

And people who do highway speeding or drug smugling use cars? Probably should ban cars also.

Do you want me to follow that line of thoughts? Because some people use some things illegaly doesn't make it right to ban the thing outright! That's not the same problem!

Re:A little extreme there, don't you think?

[phoenix321]

Excellent analogy.

Selling a clearly marked service "
- "5mb/sec, 50gb/month"
- "1 air transfer to new york, you and 20kg of stuff, this friday at 0800"

then they oversell their capacity based on statistical analysis and when their statistical model fails, which it will always do, statistically speaking, they tell you

- "you bandwidth hog, we bill you on a backdated, horribly expensive business plan AND cut you off from now on AND never deal with you again. And if you sue, we tell everyone about your midget porn"

respective

- "We are totally sorry you cannot take this plane, take a later plane with an upgrade to business class OR take a hotel on us OR take some hundred dollar compensation"

And I was always furious about airlines doing this. Now it turns out they're actually pretty sensible about this matter and pure angels when compared to other businesses.

Re:A little extreme there, don't you think?

[Shakrai]

Civil disobedience in modern society just gets you in a lot of trouble.

Stupid Rosa Parks and her civil disobedience. Could have avoided all that hassle if she had just given up her seat......

Re:A little extreme there, don't you think?

[phoenix321]

The real world of us grown-ups outside the Soviet Union is not about real actual costs and real actual usage, it is about contracts and contractual compensation.

Which is the reason why a bottle of Coke costs 1 dollar at the store and 20 dollar at a fancy restaurant.

Which is the reason that all the people flying with you in an airplane all paid a different price for their seat.

If you abolish that, you help people in the short run, but instantly abolish freedom of contract as the basis of any and all successful economies.

But that's too far out to mention here, because in this country, we have laws of commerce which basically just say "a contract is a contract is a contract" albeit in a hundred different clauses.

Which brings us back to your post: company A offers a contract to the general public explictly stating "x mbit/sec and no other limits for the low low price of 10 dollars per month". When General Joe Public accepts this contract, Company A and Joe are in a binding contractual obligation with each other, out of which neither can escape for non-serious reasons without serious lawful consequences.

Company A didn't sell "a reasonable and sane share of x mbit/sec, while we define what 'sane' actually means" just as Joe Public didn't pay with only a part of his 10 dollars.

If that wouldn't be the case, we would have an economy where every partner in a contract could give as much or as little as he wanted. This may work for money donations on Christmas and candy on Halloween, but is no basis for an economy. That's why we write down contracts since the Middle Ages and have contract lawyers a dime a dozen.

If you object to that, I will gladly sell you my new car for which YOU pay full retail while I deliver only a glossy brochure, three wheels, a tiny spare wheel and a bag of seat stuffing. And then terminate my contract with you telling all the world how greedy YOU are.

Re:A little extreme there, don't you think?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually the whole "better 10 guilty people go free than 1 innocent person be punished" is the basis of the legal system's "innocent until proven guilty" and "beyond reasonable doubt" standards.

We, as a society, have made the choice. We would rather risk a guilty person walking free, and possibly harming more people, than risk punishing an innocent person. *That* is society, deal with it.

Re:A little extreme there, don't you think?

[IamTheRealMike]

I think you lost a lot of credibility when you called a contributor to the WiFi and Ethernet specs an "industry mouthpiece".

Re:A little extreme there, don't you think?

[HiThere]

Actually, one could block BitTorrent. It's possible. Of course, it would be re-written into a different form, that one would also need to block. And again. And again.

The general term for such a game is "arms race". It frequently continues until both participants are eliminated. You don't find either saber-toothed tigers or mastodons around anymore. And BOTH Athens and Sparta ended up conquered by Macedonians.

Personally, to me it seems fair to offer a fixed amount of service/month + a cost for extra service. AND TO MAKE IT CLEAR!!! Hiding things in blocks of text is not making it clear. And if they advertise unlimited service, then they are *emphatically* required to deliver on their promises, even though they can't possibly do so. There should be (are?) severe legal penalties for lying in your advertisements. They should be enforced.

I see the entire mess as companies trying to get out of living up to their advertising claims. I see no justification in allowing them to do so.

Re:A little extreme there, don't you think?

[jmilne]

The Post Office is a good example for the Internet. Right around the holidays, everyone starts to send catalogs, Christmas cards, and other packages. Far more than the Post Office deals with on a normal basis. Which causes delays in delivery. They even warn people: send everything by such-and-such date or it won't arrive in time for Christmas.

That's pretty much the Internet. Everyone expects a certain amount of bandwidth to be used. Occasionally, someone will exceed that, but usually at the same time, someone else isn't using theirs, so it's okay. But with Torrent, it's basically everyone using their bandwidth all at the same time. It's always Christmas. Now, the Post Office could staff for that situation, but obviously, prices will have to go up to accommodate their extra load. Likewise, your ISP can provide all the bandwidth necessary to let everyone use their limit of bandwidth all the time, but they're going to have to raise the prices a lot in order to provide that.

Re:A little extreme there, don't you think?

[blahplusplus]

Note that they don't actually open the packages themselves unless there is an extenuating circumstance (bomb, etc), they might quickly look inside the box with a scanner to detect explosive devices/etc, but this is far and away from what ISP's can do, you can't send bombs that can blow people up in packets. Your counter example is not with the intent of my original message - being able to open private mail.

Re:A little extreme there, don't you think?

[WhatAmIDoingHere]

Haven't you heard of "rolling blackouts?" They're saying "sorry, you won't get electricity tonight because your neighbor is consuming too much power."

Recently the hospital I work at got a call from the local power company asking us to run on genny for a few hours and sell them some of our excess juice.

Re:A little extreme there, don't you think?

[bluefoxlucid]

You can't destroy the Internet; it's an instantly renewable resource. Once it's exhausted, it's done. It's a pure flow resource and if you overuse it the way to fix it is to back off; if you overuse a stock-flow resource like land, you have to back off AND wait, or you may find that it just doesn't grow back anymore.

Re:A little extreme there, don't you think?

[i_ate_god]

That's equivalent to saying "here is some electricity, but you can only use it to power your stove. If you use it for your air conditioner, you're violating our ToS and we'll cut you off"

It makes absolutely no sense.

Re:A little extreme there, don't you think?

[Dallas Caley]

I didn't realize i was griping, but i'll address your points one at a time here:

Commercials yes i realize they make money from the commercials, why don't they just make their own torrents which include commercials? Personally i wouldn't mind a bit, it's not the commercial-freeness of the shows i see online that i like, it's that i can get an entire series all at once and not have to worry about missing an episode.

No TV/Radio/Internet without advertizing? I agree on the TV and the Radio, but i pay for my internet with cold hard cash, without advertising, there may be less content, but advertising has nothing to do with my internet connection, or are you saying that they subsidize the internet with advertising dollars that they make from cable?

Higher Prices yes, perhaps for some the prices will be higher, however if they were to offer many tiers of bandwidth then the prices might actually be lower (assuming that all programing and internet were through one connection) Here's an example. i use an average amount of bandwidth, and watch relatively few shows on cable, so adding the cable shows to my internet bandwidth would not really affect it much, for others however, they might not use the internet much and instead chose to spend countless hours watching some inane completely mindless utterly ridiculus cable programming (such as ESPN) for them, adding the cable would drastically increase their bandwidth and therefore they would have to pay more for it.

Other countries? first, i mentioned absolutely nothing about other countries, but what you say is probably true, and the reason for it is likely that the technology originated in this country therefore since it's been around awhile we now have an antiquated system whereas newly connected countries can put the highest quality systems in right from the begining. its the same reason why there are more cell phones vs landlines in Iraq than there are here. it costs money to change the systems, but at some point you have to do it if you are going to remain competitive.

Re:A little extreme there, don't you think?

[i_ate_god]

I don't know where you live, but I can use electricity any way I want, how ever much I want.

The limitations are not from the electric company, but the buildings own infrastructure. Glass fuses are pretty old school. Probably not a good idea to have 3 computers plugged into the same outlet. But if I decide to run my own mini datacentre with AC and humidity control, in my own apartment, the electric company can not say anything.

A sudden spike in electricity usage is also not grounds for termination, but it can be grounds for a search warrant due to marijuana hydroponics, but that mostly applies to homes. And even then, if police discover you growing tomatoes instead, there is nothing the electric company can do.

Of course, if you're running a hydroponics growing operation, regardless of what you're growing, your electric bill will be pretty high. But hey, if I transfer 500gb of data in a month, my internet bill should be kinda high too.

I think the trick here is to find the right balance between dollars and bits and turn the internet into a utility. $1 / gigabyte is NOT a good balance. $0.10 / gigabyte might be. That's $50 on that month if I downloaded 500gb.

These are numbers pulled out of my ass here, but in my non-expert opinion, $0.10 to $0.20 / gigabyte of data transferred seems like a good rate, maybe ontop of a small set monthly rate for speeds. $5/month for 3mbps, $10/month for 8mbps, + $0.10/gigabyte transferred.

That seems fair to me.

Re:A little extreme there, don't you think?

[riceboy50]

Does that give the Post Office the right to screen my mail and packages for things it considers not worthy of delivery? The real problem is the way the ISPs are selling their service. It needs to become utility pricing $10/Gb or something similar. All the other utilities manage to price their service based on usage, it's time for the ISPs to step up.

BitTorrent calls Register report "utter nonsense"

[Ian Lamont]

BitTorrent claims it is actually trying to reduce congestion.

Re:A little extreme there, don't you think?

[dacut]

Last I checked, the USPS still asked if you were shipping anything dangerous, flammable, or perishable. They also employed a team of postal inspectors to handle cases of fraud, abuse, and other illegal activities taking place in the postal system.

So, yes; they do have the right to screen your mail.