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BitTorrent Ponders Releasing World ISP P2P Speed Report
Mark.JUK writes "The San Francisco-based inventor of the hugely popular peer-to-peer (P2P) internet file sharing protocol BitTorrent has revealed that it is considering whether or not to release the broadband performance (speed) data for more than 9,000 ISPs around the world. The technology company claims that the data forms part of its new project, which is sadly still in the very early stages of development, but could one day give consumers a near real-time perspective of how their ISP is performing. It wouldn't just cover P2P traffic either, with BitTorrent also tracking general HTTP transfers too. BitTorrent claims that its service can, for example, display that most UK ISPs 'aggressively throttle BitTorrent traffic after 6 p.m. at night,' with speeds suddenly going 'off a cliff.' Suffice to say that such information could prove to be very useful for consumers and advocates of Net Neutrality."
Consideration of performing an action is news now?
This is not the penguin you're looking for.
TFS: "The San Francisco-based inventor of the hugely popular peer-to-peer (P2P) internet file sharing protocol BitTorrent..."
you mean this guy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bram_Cohen
TFA doesn't mention his name, either.
P2P Throttling, always trying to gouge costumers for more money (yes, they're the ones behind UBB)
i doubt there is someone in the U.S. that believes there is an ISP that doesn't treat their customers like cornholio. i guess this intended for other nations.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
Purportedly from Netflix:
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_gC6nMAI6mu8/TUHG6jsQq-I/AAAAAAAAADE/Bwe1fkAUxzA/s1600/isp_usa.png
Perhaps people would like to know tha the 10Mb/sec speed advertised by their provider is only available from 4am to 6:30am on weekdays.
These actual usable bandwidth numbers should be general public knowledge. It would enable consumers to make valid choices and perhaps make providers do some real provisioning to support their advertised bandwidths.
Suffice to say that such information could prove to be very useful for consumers and advocates of Net Neutrality.
What a stupid thing to say. It doesn't offer any insight as to why bandwidth may have gone off a cliff. Net Neutrality is not the same thing as responsible QoS! Get that through you heads!
After 6pm, Internet traffic for most ISPs goes through the roof. With it, latency and available bandwidth are typically negatively affected. With a responsible QoS, which is still fully Net Neutral, its easily possible to explain services such at BT "falling off a cliff." After all, if you give it a low priority, which reasonably it should, other users may simply be driving it "off the cliff."
Me, like most every reasonable person in the world, certainly does not want to have You Tube, general web browsing, email, IRC, streaming music, game playing, or any of a number of other services negatively affected because Joe down the street is downloading his fifth illegal movie for the day, especially when he's likely to watch it later, or getting his next WoW update. Some things require an interactive level of performance - some others do not. BT, by definition, is a service which should receive a low priority in any QoS infrastructure.
Net Neutrality is about ensuring company X doesn't get premier service at the expense of its competition. Its not about ensuring reasonable QoS to ISP customers. Please stop conflating the two.
Now having said all that, there may be other things are work here, but there is nothing in the article which suggests there is anything controversial going on. As is, things are reasonably explainable with traditional usage trends and a reasonable desire to maintain a reasonable QoS to customers.
What does the scouter say about the data level?
It's over NINE-THOUSAAAAAAAAAND!
Why are they worried about ISP reactions? They're just (hopefully) releasing data. It isn't biased or skewed, it just is. If the data is embarrassing to an ISP, that's the ISP's problem.
Trolling is a art,
Eben Moglen http://lastonk.blogspot.com/2011/02/freedom-box.html is trying to make a box that makes it damn hard to track people using this sort of stuff. I'm not tech savvy enough to know if these things would help in this situation, but I strongly suspect it would.
If nothing else... you could use them to create ad hoc darknets capable of distributing p-p without ever going through an ISP at all... I'm thinking this is the right kind of forum to find people with the skills to help Eben out.
I am speculating, but this information could tell certain copyright cartels where to target their legislative action. Considering that risk, should these data be made public?
display that most UK ISPs 'aggressively throttle BitTorrent traffic after 6 p.m. at night,' with speeds suddenly going 'off a cliff.'
No, that's quite normal for some areas. It's not just BitTorrent but everything, due to oversubscription on BT's infrastructure. Right down latency, like a 12ms ping turning into a 50ms epic journey.
i dont understand. are they trying to threaten someone through a paper thin veil? just release the damn information for fuck's sake.
I can imagine a couple reasons why BitTorrent might be throttled. First, I'd bet BitTorrent users are sending and receiving a lot more traffic than the average user. Second, BitTorrent is essentially the lawless wild-west. This is why it's the first choice for warez. If BitTorrent users want faster speeds, I'd recommend finding ways to make the BitTorrent landscape less populated by illegal warez. Perhaps companies who want to distribute Linux or World of Warcraft patches via BitTorrent should find ways to edge-out the illegal BitTorrent traffic by creating certificates. I understand most BitTorrent users won't be happy with that, of course, because illegal warez is the major reason people use BitTorrent. But, until that happens, I really don't care if ISP throttle or cut BitTorrent traffic entirely. (Sorry, illegal bit-torrent users: you can come in from the rain when you behave on the internet.)
We can't have some self-appointed "activist" running around telling the world our secrets. Let's start preparing some "events" that can be used to discredit him down the road if his crackpot idea comes to fruition. I hear that charges of rape are particularly effective at deflecting attention away from uncomfortable revelations like lousy network performance, or war crimes.
Better still, for $200MM I do it myself
...pondering what I'm pondering, BitTorrent?
BitTorrent claims that its service can, for example, display that most UK ISPs 'aggressively throttle BitTorrent traffic after 6 p.m. at night,' with speeds suddenly going 'off a cliff.' Suffice to say that such information could prove to be very useful for consumers and advocates of Net Neutrality."
And a jolly good thing this is too. I need my ping to be as fast as possible in order to play online first person shooters and at times when bandwidth is short I would rather they throttled stuff that would not be adversely affected by a bit of a delay and prioritised my traffic that needs to get to its destination more quickly for it to be of any use.
I also understand them prioritising web browsing over P2P as well as P2P traffic is generally far more constant over a 24 hour period. As an P2P user as well I do not mind waiting until the midnight hour for it to really let rip take advantage of the fact that other people are not using the net by then. BitTorrent will chew up as much bandwidth as you have available on 24/7 basis so ISP's have to do something or give everyone a 1:1 contention ratio. A 1:1 contention ratio would not be very efficient for the vast majority who do not use P2P at all as this bandwidth would be unused between 1am and 6am when most people are asleep.
The fact is that many people are to daft to set a realistic bandwidth limit on their P2P client so it will try and use all the available bandwidth on a 24/7 basis. If you want to do this then buy a leased line with no contention ratio. These accounts are available in most cities in the UK, they are just prohibitively expensive as most people do not need or want the extra cost involved. Instead, most internet users just want to use it for an hour or so when they finish work until they go to bed, go out later in the evening or settle down in front of the TV.
I dont read
Why does this have anything to do with ISP performance, other than being a positive story that ISPs are protecting their networks by ensuring that everyone has appropriate access to limited bandwidth resources?
In particular, they're ensuring that services that require "instant" access, e.g. streaming, gaming or delivery of websites, takes precedence over something being delivered in "batch"? Mainframe developers have been doing that for 30+ years - ensuring true online access is protected while batch downloads are throttled due to no need for synchronised delivery.
If I'm playing COD or watching a film live on LoveFilm, I want to ensure my traffic gets through now, rather than ensuring someone gets their download 10 seconds faster.
Why consider?
Just do it!
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
If you don't like BitTorrent being throttled, get a real download service and download through SSL on port 443. There is this whole world of shit out there being replicated all over the place and the service providers will gladly encrypt it and send it to you on port 443. It won't get throttled.
BitTorrent users are like the 4chan fags using that ion collider or whatever it is.
I'm going to run right over to the ISPs that throttle. Why? Because I don't use bittorrent and I hate to pay an equal share of those overconsumers and abusers of "fair use". This is a great indicator of which ISPs care about decent folk who pay their fair share and those that cater to the couchpotatoes who are too cheap to pay 99 cents for a song.
I will teach you the secret techniques of Llap Goch!
As I read this I thought... "Why announce something and not release it? Everyone will bug you until you do, now you have to do it"
Then I realized... ahah! This creates a buzz and demand for the information that wasn't there before. If he'd simply released it how many would have noticed? Yet mentioning it first creates controversy and gets people insisting on their right to the information guaranteeing instant popularity and followup discussion.
Yeah I should have figured this out months ago in the lead-up to the Cablegate thing... I'm slow. (See ironic sig)
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
I recently upgraded to their 50meg service. That comes with the 'super hub' which is a combined modem/wireless router.
Annoyingly, you can't set the DNS server - which seemed odd.
That made sense when I realised that the Virgin DNS claims that it has no record for
torrent.piratebay.org
You can still set dns to opendns on a computer by computer basis, but I'll bet this stops a lot of casual torrent users. Of course, piratebay.org resolves perfectly, so it looks like the site is working ok...
Blizzard implemented a change recently. You can go google it in recent posts, but the net effect was a big drop in latency for most WoW players. The details aren't known, but the effect was to basically triple the amount of game data being sent up and down stream. WoW does not transmit a ludicrous number of bytes per second, so tripling it doesn't break anyone's bandwidth limits or anything- but suddenly, some of our raid (always the same people) started disconnecting hard. They could barely be online- whenever anything was going on in game, sure enough, they would disconnect.
Blizzard made a post about it blaming the ISPs, and reverting the change (until they can implement it if it will help your connection, and not if some Nazi will come along and stamp it). Essentially, it "looks like bittorrent" to the ISPs, and they block it. We've had a LOT of really frustrated raiders who can't raid, and generally the game was impossible for them- and of course, Blizzard had no way of knowing that their legit update would run afoul of really sketchy practices.
You can argue this isn't a net neutrality issue, but it clearly is. The data was always from Blizzard server to your client and back, but suddenly it started getting throttled to the point of no connection.
I have Comcast and Qwest currently. In both cases, I see odd behavior when I am torrenting:
The ability to browse the net (and often to do ANYTHING) goes to crap. It doesn't matter how damned little I set the bandwidth too, an open Bittorrent quickly renders me useless in Comcast, and sometimes in Qwest.
Now, importantly- is there a way for me to communicate via torrent WITHOUT the ISPs knowning? Could I just have encrypted point to point traffic? Can this be done, and how do I do it?
Really -- why doesn't he just release it? Guess it needs 'staging' so it gets the proper attention paid to it in the press....?
Or give it to wikileaks whilst Julian Assange hasn't been assassinated by some upset government yet!
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
I don't think people who are paying £7.50 ( $13 ) or less per month for their Internet connection should be particularly surprised if they are subject to throttling and blocking. Do they really think that is a realistic price?
Mainstream broadband in the UK has been commoditised to such a degree that it is now "cheaper" than a month's worth of tabloid papers. That should illustrate how many people here think.
If one looks at other UK ISPs that do not throttle, block or cap they usually cost upwards of £30 per month. Even then I'm sure margins are thin.