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Why Australian Telco's Plan To Shape BitTorrent Traffic Won't Work
New submitter oztechmuse writes "Australian Telco Telstra is planning to trial shaping some BitTorrent traffic during peak hours. Like all other telcos worldwide, they are facing increasing traffic with a long tail of users: 20% of users consume 80% of bandwidth. The problem is, telcos in Australia are already shaping BitTorrent traffic as a study by Measurement Lab has shown and traffic use continues to increase. Also, the 20% of broadband users consuming the most content will just find a different way of accessing the content and so overall traffic is unlikely to be reduced."
Just do what everyone else does on any Australian ISP, get a business plan. Isn't that much more expensive and you don't have to deal with fucking Hellstra consumer customer 'service', not that business care is much better but it's a step up.
I don't like this measure (it's what my provider does to me), but it works.
I have a limited amount of data each month to use at my full connection's bandwidth. When I overflow it, my bandwidth is throttled down.
This consumption can be monitored using my cable modem's MAC (or my phone's imei) , and the values are settled by contract.
Speaking frankly, It's a shit. Now and then I must restrain myself from downloading (now) that HD movie. But, hell, this works as a measure to prevent this situation.
Lisias@Earth.SolarSystem.OrionArm.MilkyWay.Local.Virgo.Universe.org
The problem the telcos have is not the total volume of traffic but to use a car analogy the "rush hour" effect. If by traffic shaping they can push the 20% to move some of their downloading outside the peak times, then it means they don't have to buy bandwidth that is going to sit unused 90% of the time.
If the 20% all did their downloading overnight it would not be a problem.
All that slowing down peoples' lines will do is give them more time to find stuff to download before the old stuff is finished. In the end the same amount of data is going to go through the pipes, unless their line was completely saturated 100% of the time.
Help I am stuck in a signature factory!
Unlike the US, Australian broadband plans are tightly capped with data limits, we are paying for a certain amount of GB per month. If the ISP want to restrict the capacity for a user to fully utilise that pre-paid allowance, they should at a bare minimum refund the unused balance at the end of each billing cycle. I will fight this in the consumer tribunal if they every throttle my traffic based upon which protocol I am using.
20% of people do 80% of the work. 20% of the people do 80% of the innovation.20% of the people use 80% of the bandwidth.......Seems to be how the world works.
Maybe charge 5 cents per gigabyte, ie somewhere within 10x of the (telcos) cost and get rid of the socialist business models. The greed never ends.
If they were more intelligent they'd financially sponsor a couple BT clients WITH the minor requirement that 25% of their financial support be spent implementing time based shaping.
I have never downloaded a torrent other than using the command line client on a screen session running on a 24x7 monster file server. However, the family gets unhappy when I use up all the BW in and out of the house while they're home. I've always had throttle-able settings in clients even in the oldest suprnova days. But I want a semi-intelligent auto configuring client such that it cranks wide open from midnight to 5 am, then down to 20% or less during morning time, then wide open during work days of the week but slow on weekends and holidays etc etc.
Or I use a linux based firewall so I'd like a sniffing script such that if there's more than 100 K/s of non-torrent traffic on my connection in the last 15 minutes, the torrent traffic gets shaped down.
Also the provider could provide a mdns or whatever polling system to gimmie a list by hour of their load, and at my discretion I'd only dl torrents during the 12 lowest usage hours. Not because I "have to" but because I'm not a (complete) jerk.
My electric company provides a minor, practically honorary credit for voluntary load shedding (yours may provide a larger credit, or maybe not). I don't see why an ISP couldn't provide me with a minor credit if I were willing to rate limit down to half a meg during their idea of "prime time". Obviously I download about a thousand times more than I stream, which might be a minor issue with this idea as supposedly nobody downloads anymore and everybody streams everything, at least according to the weirdos and astroturfers.
I'm sure they'd be more successful with cooperation that with competition.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Why don't they just upgrade their networks? Do they think people will use 2013 levels of Internet bandwidth forever?
In any situation where not everyone is doing the same thing, there's always some sub-group that is getting more than their share. The only thing that changes is to what degree the effect is. It might be that the top 20% are consuming 21% of bandwidth, or that the top 20% are consuming 99.999% of bandwidth. ...but, whatever the case, the ISPs only have themselves to blame for it.
The ISPs are the ones who decided that the only plans they would offer are "unlimited." If you don't want to offer unlimited service, then don't offer unlimited service. Sure, some people will complain (many here on Slashdot) but the complainers can all move to an ISP with an "unlimited" plan and enjoy their always-slow service while everyone who doesn't have to saturate their connection 24x7 can use the limited plan with more reliable service.
However, the ISPs want to have their cake and eat it too. They want the customers they can only get by advertising an "unlimited" plan, but they don't want to actually give those customers an unlimited plan because they're finding that is expensive to do. They keep thinking "if only it weren't for these 20% who use 80% of the bandwidth" without realizing that they wouldn't have those naughty customers if they weren't explicitly encouraging them to sign up for their service.
Even if they lost those customers, they'd still likely find that 80% of bandwidth is consumed by the new top 20%, despite the fact that their customers are now using 80% less bandwidth. So they'd still have reason to complain if that's their only reason for complaining.
If I buy a car that reads 220kph on the clock, I expect it should do at least that; it would be grossly misrepresentative and false advertising of the product to do otherwise. Apply this to bandwidth and quota, if I lease a service that potentially offers me 24mbps but I receive 10mbps (environmental factors, similar to a car entering a corner) then I expect to consistently receive this bandwidth, and quota is the fuel tank till empty.
Unfortunately, Telstra oversell's its pipes between exchanges; this means they are gaming the system by cheating the end users out of the service if all users decide to use the system at once. This, obviously, is how Telstra has been doing things since they could multiplex lines using pair gain systems; such as the 2digi, 4digi, scads (my person fave), rims, irims, dslams etc et al. They all have one thing in common, if 100% try to use the system at once, people suffer, and in the 2 and 4 digi cases, people get no service at all.
It's a giant con and we have been suckered into their system of hype, smoke and mirrors. This applies globally as well to an extent. Find a good provider, seriously. Australia has dozens of providers who ALL provide better quota's by at least double to unlimited for less than half the cost. Shop around. This only applies to metro areas on dsl. Mobiles, unfortunately, is Telstra for coverage by a continent.
Since that is static content, the last mile cache would actually be a better solution for this.
The Last Mile Cache
Just use market forces: Charge the people who use more bandwidth more money - Grandparents who are watching 3-minute YouTube videos of their grandkids will pay less than Joey Hackerston who is downloading HD movies every night. Or charge more for data in the evening and less at 3AM - The market will sort out the problem - Those people who Torrent will adjust their behaviours (or pay more).
Well at least now people can churn from Telstra to some other ISP who doesn't block at the moment.
When everyone is forced to use the NBN there will be no other option, they'll simply block/filter anything and everything they want across every downstream ISP. Don't like it, tough, can't complain to ISP, not them doing it, all done by upstream provider controlled by the Government.
The NBN is about having complete control to block everything they want, monitor everything they want, and not have to worry about dealing with all those pesky ISPs and customers.
One pipe, complete control, Nice Bloody Network NBN. Even China would be envious, and I'm sure they will appreciate the extra egress bandwidth for their attacks.
The Telcos in NZ and AU have been doing this for years, and have offered all sorts of various schemes to manage high volume users while still making some money out of them. Bandwithd caps that dont roll over each month, and get eaten away with every single byte of data that flows over your DSL line has been the norm for years. These top 20% internet uses seem to just take all the can get, possibly because it's perceived as a limited resource, every time an ISP comes out with some plan that is slightly better, they all jump ship and swamp it until the ISP figures out a way to get rid of / become 'less attractive' to them.
The other problem is Free to Air TV is full of crap, and pay tv is not cheap compared to the US and other places.
... the plan will fail because ... it's already happened?
That's some hella logic going on there...
In other news: the Australian porn industry wants teenage boys to masturbate, Julia Gillard is thinking of becoming a redhead, and Australian TV networks want to try packing 7 ad breaks into an hour of TV.
What part of "a well regulated militia" do you not understand?
The situation is (somewhat) similar to Telephone bandwidth. In the U.S., before modems became widespread, the phone company could easily offer unlimited service for a fixed price. This was possible because they had reasonably good usage models and could predict the infrastructure needed to provide some level of service.
When the internet exploded, people drastically increased their modem usage and some people were literally using the link 24/7. This left the phone companies with far larger hardware requirements than predicted and no easy way to increase revenue (based on the old pricing model contracts).
Today, with the significant increase in broadband traffic, ISP's find themselves faced with similar problems are are attempting to address them in several different ways. BT throttling is one of them.
have fun corporate monkeys targeting Channel BT.....
My ISP (Not saying who) I have 100Mbps Fibre connection connection with 200GB monthly limit. but I quite regurly get 500Gb (or last months 700GB) without being slowed down. that with my unlimited Usenet connection ($12 a month plus free VPN) I'm laughing.....can watch US shows directly from fox.com if I want... watched CBS's alternate camera angles for the big NFL game that just past.... endless.....
but no no... target BT...... use all your resources on that please....
Where businesses publicly announce plans to deliberately not give their customers the thing the customer paid for.
Well all i have to say is that clearly Australia needs more bandwidth. if 20% of the population can use 80% of the whole bandwidth upgrade the the friggin infrastructure so that the speed and connect-ability is readily available to the majority of Australians. Which it currently isn't. I think a measly average 300k download speed for most Australians is pretty shit by comparison to the rest of the world. Especially because of the horrendous cost of having small download limits like 60 to 1000 gig a month for anything up to $100 plus P/M but we have no option to pay it because everything is going digital now they charge you for all paper bills for most things. SHAME ON YOU AUSTRALIAN GOV not not investing in Australian's and their internet needs. End rant