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ISPs Throttling BitTorrent Traffic, Study Finds
hypnosec writes "A new report by an open source internet measurement platform, Measurement Lab, sheds light onto throttling of and restriction on BitTorrent traffic by ISPs (Internet Service Providers) across the globe. The report by Measurement Lab reveals that hundreds of ISPs across the globe are involved in the throttling of peer-to-peer traffic, and specifically BitTorrent traffic. The Glasnost application run by the platform helps in detecting whether ISPs shape traffic. Tests can be carried out to check whether the throttling or blocking is carried out 'on email, HTTP or SSH transfer, Flash video, and P2P apps including BitTorrent, eMule and Gnutella.' Going by country, United States has actually seen a drop in throttling compared to what it was back in 2010. Throttling in the U.S. is worst for Cox at 6 per cent and best for Comcast, Verizon, AT&T and others at around 3 per cent. The United Kingdom is seeing a rise in traffic shaping and BT is the worst at 65 per cent. Virgin Media throttles around 22 per cent of the traffic while the least is O2 at 2 per cent. More figures can be found here."
Or have a crap ISP like Eastlink that has always throttled uploading of any kind. When I upload using ftp or ssh I am lucky to get 60kbs sustained. 1.6mbs down. The CRTC needs to gets its ass in gear and get some real competition. Toronto isn't all of Canada.
Verizon FiOS isn't doing it...yet. I don't D/L all that often, but I did a few days ago and was not throttled. I can get up to 5.1MB down, but I usually get only 2-3MB on torrents anyway. I have not noticed a change.
"That's right...I said it."
"Chronic torrenters use the bandwidth they purchased. The ISPs greedy oversubscribing of their bandwidth shouldn't affect my typical internet usage that we pay the same amount of money for."
Fixed that for you.
You are probably going to get modded down for this, but I agree with you. I rarely have downloaded torrents, but when I do, I enjoy the speed I get. However, if I did that all day long (as I know some who do), I am sure it would effect my neighbors. Until fibre becomes the standard, there needs to be something in place so that average users are not effected by the bandwidth usage of others.
Flexible bare-metal recovery for Linux/UNIX
Mixed on this... On the one had it makes sense to delay a non-interactive protocol and favour an interactive one, like VoIP or web browsing. That way, you have people away (torrenters, ftp, e-mail) waiting a bit longer, while people in front of the keyboard "right now" are prioritized. On the other hand, consistently delivering far less that the speeds sold is a problem. If down reasonably, it would not be a problem. But no ISP so far has been able to resist the temptation to be unreasonable.
In my country (Slovenia) not a single person has ever received a letter of complaint from the ISP (ISPs got several from US, but they trash it instead to harass their users), no one was ever throttled and the line always, without a single exception, delivers the promised speed.
Only people living in rural areas experience internet problems due to old infrastructure, in towns the downtime are limited to a couple of hours a year and it happens only during the night.
P.S: I live in a town of 10.000 people, so size doesn't matter when it come to Internet prices. So if you pay more and get less you only have to blame the greed of your ISP provider.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
If you would like to pay for dedicated bandwidth, you can definitely do so, however you are taking advantage of the cost of the pipe being spread among many people with the expectation they won't all max it out at once. Just a hint, your measily 60 bucks a month doesn't come close to covering a dedicated 50 mbps pipe, it doesn't even come close to a dedicated 1.5 mbps pipe.
Just keep sticking it to the man though.
If I buy a hamburger and fries with a coke at BK, the chuckle-heads behind the counter don't come out and take back ten fries and half the burger.
If I buy a tank of gas the pump guy doesn't follow me around with a hose and siphon back a couple gallons
When I use water the city doesn't ask me to pay for 5 hundred gallons and then say I can only use 4 hundred gallons because 5 hundred would just be too much
When I buy cable TV no one stops me from watching TV 24/7 because I might use too much.
On my land-line I can make non-stop phone calls to Guam and ask the operator there to connect me to Paris and from there to my next-door neighbor and no one complains that I am tying up a line.
If I buy anything else in the entire world no one says boo if I use it all up or even how I use it as long as I don't ACTIVELY stop other people from using it.
God damn it, if you sell me something and I use it, don't come back and say i can't use it because you didn't plan ahead. Get some more bandwidth or cut my rates.
This is BS! These idiots are just shills for the RIAA and co. No other business in the world works like this.
I've always wondered what it would be like to fight back against some of these throttling mechanisms. Since they rely on breaking tcp/ip (Actually forging packets between you and a third party) I think it would be fair game to poke back at some of these systems.
Since these are "carrier grade" monitoring and throttling solutions sold by "enterprise" software developers, we can safely assume that they're crap. I'm sure the developers think they're secure, since they're "invisible" passive monitoring/insertion systems. Why is this important? I bet you could crash any and all of pretty easily. I bet it will be as easy as generating some "interesting" traffic, then inserting lots of invalid/random garbage in fields/payloads that the throttling system might inspect.
This simple "technique" has been known to crash IDS/passive monitoring systems pretty much since they've been around. For whatever reason, nobody thinks that passive monitoring systems can be the targets of attack simply because they're "invisible" and don't respond to direct requests on the network being monitored.
If not outright crashing, you could attempt to bog down said throttling systems. It might not be hard to create a torrent client that generates a lot of noisy garbage that would cause an asymmetric load on said throttling system.
Avoid them like the plague.
Then the ISP should not sell it as if it does.
Dear God, the above comment needs to get modded up to the max. It's no different from the morons who go on about population density in Canada being the reason for ancient speeds and horrible prices.
No, you dipshits, if that was the case, some of the provinces east of Ontario wouldn't have 100/100 connections in cities of 1000 people for less than $100/m. If "horrible" population density was really the case, Toronto, which contains 1/6th of the population of Canada in a tiny* city, would have unlimited, unfiltered transfer on gigabit connections to the home for less than $50/m. Yes, I know you can get 100Mbit connections in some parts of the west, and it costs a fortune too.
I limit my total upstream because performance really sucks if you use up more than about 85% or so of your upload speed. The reason is that ACKs will start to get dropped (unless you have a router with a good QoS algorithm). I set my limit to 20KB/sec (I have 6Mb down/~600Kb up, so that's about 33%), and just let it sit longer until I hit my ratio.
I wonder how many people think they're being throttled when actually they don't limit their upload speed and are completely fucking up their connection with lost ACKs and retransmits.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
High bandwidth users encourage infrastructure investment which gets you the speeds you have today. You could have made the same argument about MP3s back in the 56K days, and if it prevailed then we'd all still be on dialup speeds.
We should all pay the same for the same access to the network, and we should all use as much of it as we need. If the network isn't sufficient for that, we should all invest in a faster network.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
why would fibre becoming standard change the thing at all? you see the same argument applies when you're on 64kbit connection and so is everyone else. it does so on 1mbit, it does so on 10mbit and will apply on 100mbit too.
"something in place" could only be not overselling your bandwidth. if they don't want to do that they could start advertising and contracting it as being base speed of say 0.5mbit/s and a burst speed of 10mbit/s for max of one hour.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
They don't, they sell speeds "up to".
If they cant handle it, they should stop selling it. As far as I am concerned, I pay for unlimited bandwidth at 50 down 25 up. If I want to upload all 25 and download all 50 24/7/365, that is what I payed for.
You dont go to an all you can eat buffet and have 1 burger and fries right?? unlimited should be unlimited
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Name another industry in which you pay for an advertised service and then get far far less.
Would you buy a computer that claims 8GB of ram but you could only utilize 3?
Would you buy a camera that claimed it could take 1000 pictures but only could store 100 maximum?
Would you buy a car that advertised 200 HP but could only output 50 HP?
Would you buy a 3 bedroom house that only has 1.5 bedrooms?
Would you buy a food product with printed 350g on the container but the contents only weigh 180g?
Would you pay for a meal if it claimed it would come with sides that you never received?
Would you buy a gallon of gas if you only got a pint?
Would you buy a 24 pack of beer if you only got 16?
So in what FREAKIN reality is it acceptable for ISP's to charge you for an advertised speed and then offer you something far less then that on average.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
Come on. These ISP are throttling (buying technologies to limit bandwidth in both directions) rather than spending to increase their bandwidth (building out their infrastructure). If the did that they'd be satisfying customers and not restricting everyone. People that torrent and use a lot of bandwidth are doing so because that's what they bought, and they deserve to be able to use it. Because these ISPs sold you a bill of goods that stated your bandwidth is X amount and then set it up to share in your neighborhood, then turned around and started throttling you, doesn't make the torrenter the bad guy.
What does it take to get you guys to understand: They sold you bandwidth, then limited you by sharing that same connection with those in your neighborhood, when you started using it by downloading via torrents they began throttling you because others in your neighborhood couldn't use the bandwidth they sold them, then they capped your usage. Seriously, that's a massive bait and switch. These guys should be held legally liable.
Comcast should not be throttling anything. That was part of their agreement to buy NBC Universal.
It is not the torrenters, it is the ISPs not advancing their technologies and building it out, rather they want to soak up the big bucks by ever increasing the cost of the services that they hobbled (as per above). Look at what Google did: $70.00 (+ $300 connection fee) and you get a gigabit upload and download without caps. Given time we should see more of Google's offerings in other cities. Comcast, et al, you are on notice. And let's not forget what almost every other country in the world has done by offering massive increases in bandwidth and no caps.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
"Just a hint, your measily 60 bucks a month doesn't come close to covering a dedicated 50 mbps pipe, it doesn't even come close to a dedicated 1.5 mbps pipe."
Nonsense, at least here in the U.S. While it might be catching up (hard to say for sure), compared to most "first tier" countries the U.S. has averaged significantly lower bandwidth at much higher cost. Mainly due to insufficient competition.
Bandwidth for ISPs gets cheaper by they year, as they have continued to steadily raise their monthly rates.
They can afford it.
>>>"Chronic torrenters use the bandwidth they purchased. The ISPs greedy oversubscribing of their bandwidth shouldn't affect my typical internet usage that we pay the same amount of money for."
And yet if they installed a 200GB cap (with an option to buy another 200GB chunk when the first runs-out), then you would bitch about it. Why? Because you want expensive service AND a cheap bill, at the same time. You don't want to actually pay to cover the expense you are incurring. (Like those who complain a 99 cent ebook is too much money so they go swipe the book for free.) (Or demand the power company give-away unlimited electric for $100/month.)
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
Then as long as my torrenting doesn't increase your speeds above the "up to" number you're buying from your ISP, you can STFU, you're getting what you're paying for. If my torrenting ever causes your speeds to exceed your purchased "up to" rate, then you can complain about it.
Wait, what? Why are you defending that practice?
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
oh no that would mean they would have to invest in infrastructure
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
that Is my point, if they dont want me using the service they sold me, they should not sell me that package and do something that does work
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
"They deliberately throttle down traffic they feel is associated to pirating."
I think you mean filesharing, not pirating. They are not the same things. Pirating is a crime, filesharing is not. Look it up. Copyright "pirating" has been a specific legal term for close to 100 years. It's amazing how many people have come to misuse it in just the last few. Of course, we have the "content industry" to thank for that propaganda.
In any case, here's the problem: first off, throttling filesharing requires deep packet inspection, which is very undesirable and may be illegal in some circumstances. Second, throttling regardless of what is being sent or received is illegal in the United States. Comcast has already been chastised by the FCC for that. I don't recall exactly, but I think they made a settlement and agreed not to throttle, in order to stay out of litigation (which Comcast would almost certainly have lost).
Why should "unlimited be unlimited" and does any ISP ever explicitly state it's "unlimited?" Most major carrier and cableco ISPs have bandwidth caps so by definition there's no such thing as unlimited.
What you're paying for is a very cheap, shared, commodity pipe to your ISP. Beyond that it's a crap shoot. Hopefully they have multiple 10-40gig uplinks to the major carriers, private peering with the largest video web sites (Netflix, Youtube, etc.), and possibly caching to make the "average user" happy that they're "getting what they paid for." Most of the major cable/telco ISPs have this kind of infrastructure to support their broadband users so if you "only" get 5-10 meg downloads sometime instead of 50, that's not a bad deal, really.
If you understood anything at all about the costs and economics associated with bringing 50/25 to your door step for how little you pay for it you'd never again feel the indignant and petulant sense of entitlement you feel now about what you think you "should" be getting from the ISP. As someone who worked for several years in the dialup ISP business I got a major whiff of that entitlement and it's quite unappealing.
Some of you may have used usenet back in the day when there was a lot of work involving downloading a ton of RARs, PARs, and then going through the process of PARing, and unRARing.
Excuse me: some of us actually used USENET back in the day before binary groups were invented!
Actually I still follow a handful of text-only groups and the quarily of discussion is improving again as web fora draw-away the trolls and twits.
Um, didn't US ISP's get billions of dollars in tax breaks to lay down fibre across the country a decade ago? You're getting ripped off with prices, compared to most other first-world countries; you're getting ripped off with service, with unadvertised bandwidth caps and throttled protocols; and you got ripped off by paying taxpayer money for something that was never done. If I lived there, I'd use every bit (pun not intended) of bandwidth I was paying for, all the time, just out of spite. Not that using a service you pay for should be considered a spiteful act.
I explicitly release the above into the public domain.
you are only thinking in one term. why does there have to be a one size fits all scheme? time warner already sells 3 or 4 tiers at different speed rates from 5-1 to 75-30. If those people who only want to use email and news readers, they can gladly save money by using a lower tier. if they need to chage people like me a few bucks more to cover them paying less, also a fair trade.
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
There is no ISP or book publisher that bills based on cost. This requires auditing by a 3rd party, like the government's regulation of the power company.
If you would like to pay for dedicated bandwidth, you can definitely do so, however you are taking advantage of the cost of the pipe being spread among many people with the expectation they won't all max it out at once. Just a hint, your measily 60 bucks a month doesn't come close to covering a dedicated 50 mbps pipe, it doesn't even come close to a dedicated 1.5 mbps pipe.
Just keep sticking it to the man though.
So I guess my euro45/month does not cover the 100/100Mbps fiber link we have at our house? It's a standard domestic service: uncapped, unthrottled, with no blocked ports or other limits. I don't think we've gone past 1TB in a month, but we've certainly exceeded 500GB a few times. Two adults and two teenagers and our own web server add up to a fair amount of traffic. We're not egregious users either, and some others in the area do exceed our throughput. Some ISPs are not as miserly as others, but still manage to make a profit.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
If they cant handle it, they should stop selling it. As far as I am concerned, I pay for unlimited bandwidth at 50 down 25 up. If I want to upload all 25 and download all 50 24/7/365, that is what I payed for.
Every ISP I've dealt with in the last ten years has included terms that they can throttle or cap your service at some point, and also do not guarantee a particular rate. As far as I'm concerned, you're getting what you paid for -- unless your ISP's terms say differently.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
I agree with you (chronic torrenter here), but it does make sense to mark torrent traffic as less important than other traffic. It makes little difference if a torrent is slowed down due to peak network demands, but you don't want a Skype call to fail.
I'm with Virgin Media and they will throttle you if you use too much bandwidth during the day, so I set up transmission to run full speed overnight and throttle down during the day.
I'd like to see some kind of QOS that lets torrents be marked as less imortant than http/https, but I don't want ISPs to enforce really slow torrent speeds all the time - just at peak times.
You're a temporary arrangement of matter sliding towards oblivion in a cold, uncaring universe
Next time my speed exceeds what I was promised, I'm suing.
That's stupid!
The routers should be configured such that when 100 users are moving data at a given moment then each user's data moves through the link at the lesser of 1/100th of total speed of the link or the greatest speed at which the link feeding the user's data into this one is sending it. (Actually, when you consider the links that some of the other 99 users's data is coming in at are probably not coming in at 1/100th the speed of this link the others can be sped up to greater than 1/100th to take advantage of this) Anyway, the point is why aren't these routers smart enough to route fairly yet? Why is it even possible for one user to "hog" the pipe? This seems like yet another case of attempting to solve a technological problem with policy.
There is no reason why a specific protocol should be targeted for throttling. That just makes an incentive for somebody to come up with a new protocol whose only advantage is that it doesn't look like the old one to the traffic shaping software. Then that one can get throttled too. So the cycle repeats. The likely result is that the ISPs throttle any data that is between two residential connections as opposed to a residential connection downloading a page from some commercial site (if they aren't doing this already). Then the only way you can get a decent presence on the internet is to buy into some corporate host. Thus the internet becomes less an open network and more just a media tool like AOL was.
"I haven't seen any evidence that my ISP throttles File Sharing. I can download legit Torrent files very quickly, but try downloading a movie and it's almost impossible..."
Downloading a movie is filesharing. It is NOT "piracy"!!!
"Piracy" is a legal term, and it means copying and distributing copyrighted works for profit.
Close to zero percent of the people uploading and downloading files via P2P are "pirates"... that would defeat their whole purpose.
I'm not picking, this is an important point!!! Filesharing (uploading/downloading via P2P) is a civil infraction. Piracy is a crime. In some cases, a very serious crime.
What about the simple fact that the internet is fundamentally designed to be oversubscribed ? I'm not just talking about the consumer to lex level. But lexes to central sites. Central sites between one another. Central sites to other isps (especially once one moves long distance) ?
Think about it. What is the mathematical implication of a non-oversubscribed internet ? Ah simple, that every host can satisfy the maximum possible request that can come in. What is that maximum possible request ? Well, what comes in if every other host on the internet fills it's bandwith sending to your station, and receiving the same amount of data (symmetric) or 10x more (assymetric).
Obviously that means that an internet that actually delivers "what is advertised" can only have 2 computers on it in the symmetric case, and is not possible at all for any number of computers in the assymetric case.
And if the isp does not get to treat packets special, then you're mandating by law that one customer can destroy the experience of all other customers (well, ont one, but the smallest number of customers that can fill any backbone connection, usually 100 or at most 1000 customers). Given bittorrent's popularity, it's very simple : if you have low latency on your internet connections, if skype is actually usable on your connection, your isp is not running a neutral network. If they weren't, bittorrent would fill the pipes and the buffers of all devices in the chain, creating huge delays and packet loss, and because the vast majority of tcp connections would be bittorrent connections, it would receive 99%+ of the available bandwidth.
Would you really want to be on such an isp ?
Nah he's the guy that takes the $300 when the airline tells him they overbooked and would he mind going on standby on another flight over the next couple days. He thinks he's getting a sweet deal, too. That airline is being so nice to him, giving him free stuff and everything...
There are lots of people that would be right that's the airline offer is a great deal. Maybe you took the cheapest ticket and $300 is actually a pretty good return. More likely, you get told an actual flight; you get given a hotel and you get to spend another day or two in your holiday destination that you couldn't afford otherwise. You may be a student travelling around the world not caring where or when you get to a place and $300 is an entire weeks budget. If people are happy what's the problem? If they aren't then they should just learn to say "no thanks".
What's key here is that, every time I see it, the airline is completely up front about what they offer. Everyone gets to make their own adult choice. In the case of ISPs, it's impossible for an ISP to offer a real "unlimited" subscription. They will always find that the price they can charge is below the cost because the other companies pretend to sell "unlimited" but in fact don't deliver. This undermines the customers percieved value for the real unlimited offers.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
They also say "up to" with the knowledge that nobody will understands it means "hardly ever reaching". I wish we had laws against misleading advertising in the United States. Instead, they allow "puffery", which seems to me like the opposite of a law against misleading advertising. As a side note, Google Fiber also says "up to".
Actually, it does matter. FiOS isn't oversubscribed.
Yet. The fallacy in your argument is that you assume a system capable of providing 1Gbps to each user at the same time all the time. Hardware doesn't work like that. The fibre may depending on how users are allocated and how it's setup, but the routing system certainly can't.
Then there's the fallacy of assuming free time on the fibre due to peak usage being spread over time. It's not, as any mobile data subscriber can tell you the system typically slows to a crawl at 6pm when people come home from work. So now we got you and all your neighbours using the 1Gbps at roughly the same time.
The division of bandwidth must come in at some point. Unfortunately there's nothing that is going to stop ISPs over subscribing FiOS. Also with the rapid growth in the size of data there's nothing slowing down the growing complexity of our day to day web use. With greater speed comes the ability to assume larger amounts of data. 3DHD Youtube!