WISPs are not always "line of sight." They use different radio technologies, some of which require a line of sight and some of which do not. Check with the provider.
It's a shame that the final product was GPLed. A GPLed driver is compatible with Linux, but couldn't be used in other operating systems such as NetBSD, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD. How about releasing driver under a truly free license, such as the BSD license, which would make it usable by all operating systems? Or, if for some reason the authors won't consent to that, how about releasing the specs from which the driver was implemented?
Someone please tell me why this is a big deal.
on
Google Router Rumors
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· Score: 1
Anyone can develop a router. It's easy. Just put FreeBSD or NetBSD onto a platform and tune it the way you'd like it. Want to build a high end product? Add a little hardware acceleration (maybe some ASICs or a separate CPU to manage the Ethernet ports).
In the posting above, "prevent bandwidth hogs from soaking up all of that expensive bandwidth" should be "permit bandwidth hogs to soak up all of that expensive bandwidth. Gotta learn to edit more carefully.
There are many problems with the Free Press proposal -- not the least of which is that people wouldn't be able to afford the service they propose to roll out. They propose 7 Mbps, unthrottled, non-oversold pipes to everyone in rural areas, where backbone bandwidth costs as much as $300 per Mbps. Let's see; that's only $2100 per household! They also propose that so-called "network neutrality" regulations apply to the new pipes. ("Network neutrality" is a misnomer, because the policies that are proposed under that label are not neutral; they favor certain big Internet content providers such as Google, which funds Free Press.) These regulations would do several nasty things. They'd prevent bandwidth hogs from soaking up all of that expensive bandwidth; they'd strangle small, local, and independent ISPs with red tape; they'd make it completely infeasible to offer wireless broadband; and they'd destroy competition, so that the cable companies and telephone companies which would be subsidized under Free Press' plan would be the only providers left standing... total duopoly. Robert Atkinson of ITIF has much more sensible ideas; see http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-d-atkinson-phd/the-right-broadband-stimu_b_152884.html for his proposal (which really deserves a Slashdot article of its own).
There are more than 4,000 independent, wireless ISPs in the United States. None of them requires you to have a phone line or cable to hook up. And many serve areas where there's no other broadband. See http://www.wispdirectory.com/.
ACAP, BMI, and SESAC all impose fees upon venues where music is played (and also radio stations), and then distribute the royalties to artists. Why wouldn't the same thing work for music downloads? I can't see any reason why not. Even if the distribution wasn't perfectly accurate or some people paid a little more or less than they really should, it seems to me that overall it'd be pretty fair. And it'd sure be worth it to get rid of all the wrangling, deception, piracy, lawsuits, and everything else! Internet radio might even flourish again.
uTP was explicitly stated -- by its developers -- to be an end run around providers' reasonable network management practices, and Richard is absolutely correct when he notes that it could cause severe network problems.
In fact, Ricard understates the case, because he neglects to mention one extremely important point. By switching to UDP, BitTorrent will not only compete with VoIP and some video and audio applications but also with DNS.
This could well be catastrophic, because DNS (domain name service), as ISPs know all too well, is a "critical path" protocol in virtually every application. If DNS is slow, EVERYTHING ELSE that users do will also be slow. Remember, most network applications, including Web browsers, have to stop and wait -- unable to do anything else -- until they resolve one or more domain names. So, they'll hang frustratingly if DNS packets are dropped due to congestion. And what underlying transport protocol does DNS use by default? UDP. (It can use TCP as well; however, it does so if, and only if, it has a lot of data to transfer. And TCP, due to its complex handshaking and "slow start" flow control, is much less efficient and much slower.)
So, what we're talking about is not just congestion but sand in the gears of the entire Internet.
Also, because uTP does not conform to any explicit congestion management protocol that could detect congestion BEFORE packets are dropped, the only way it would be able to detect congestion in the network would be after packets were dropped. Which means that by the time it did anything -- IF it did anything -- to mitigate the congestion it caused, it already would have damaged the network.
Finally, do you actually trust P2Pers -- who already, in the vast majority of cases, are brazenly engaging in illegal activity -- to be courteous to anyone? There's no honor among thieves, folks.
YMMV, but personally I wouldn't want to be on the same cable segment with someone using this new version of BitTorrent.
It seems to me that this system is based on a false premise: that throttling or blocking of BitTorrent traffic means that something is wrong. In fact, the ISP could be doing P2P mitigation, which improves the overall performance of the network by preventing kiddies who are doing illegal downloads via BitTorrent from degrading legitimate users' performance.
Incidentally, the moderation of this comment demonstrates the fact that some, but not all, of the software community has gotten wise to the agenda behind the GPL. One moderator moderated it up as "Insightful" (perhaps noting the history that I covered and the actual harm that the GPL is causing). Then, another -- probably someone who has been swept into the misleading ideology that was written into the GPL -- moderated it down as a "Troll." We see this conflict within the community all the time, but the balance is shifting. As more and more companies that have based their business plans on GPLed software fail, it will be increasingly difficult for people to delude themselves into believing that the GPL is a positive thing for programmers or for companies.
The intent of the GPL -- which is, arguably, not "open source" software because it fails to meet the non-discrimination requirement of the "Open Source Definition" -- is, indeed, to cause a race to zero.
Richard Stallman specifically said this when he authored the GPL: his goal in creating the license was to extinguish programmers' chances of making a living via what he called "proprietary" software. (The correct term is "commercial" software; the word "proprietary" actually has a different meaning.) He hoped that programmers -- not being businesspeople -- would be naive about the economics of software, and could be duped by rhetoric into dooming their own profession. They haven't completely doomed it, but they certainly have done great damage to it. Fortunately, they are beginning to realize the ruse that has been perpetrated upon them.
The GPL and other viral, confiscatory licenses do their damage because they discriminate against programmers (the reason why they do not conform to the Open Source Definition). Anyone else can use the software as he or she sees fit without giving anything up, except for programmers -- who must give up the right to their incremental improvements. Since incremental improvements to the technology are precisely what programmers are rewarded for, forcing them to give away this valuable work reduces its market value to zero and prevents them from being successful in business.
Why, then, does the "opensource.org" Web site claim that the GPL is an "Open Source" license? Primarily because the founders of "opensource.org" had financial and personal interests in GPLed software -- Linux in particular. They therefore ignored their own definition, on purpose, and added the GPL to their list of "approved" licenses. But it shouldn't be there. Other licenses on the list, such as the BSD license, do conform to the definition and are also much more favorable to programmers because they allow programmers to retain the rights to their incremental modifications and thereby to be rewarded for the advancements they contribute to the technology.
Susan Crawford doesn't "get" the Internet. It was intentionally designed NOT to be a "utility," but rather a loosely federated collection of independent networks bound together by a common protocol. In fact, its original designers made much of the fact that it was to be very different from the Bell System -- in other words, not a public utility with big monopolies and regulators (who would then be subject to "regulatory capture"). No one could "own" the entire Internet, but anyone could own a piece of it -- and impose acceptable use policies for that piece as he or she saw fit (just as the universities and companies that were first on the Internet did at the beginning and still do today).
But Crawford isn't a technologist; she's a lawyer. And lawyers are ensured of full employment by regulation, because they can make millions representing clients before regulatory bodies, interpreting regulations, filing lawsuits based on regulation, etc. -- and so, naturally enough, they are biased toward it, even if it's very bad for the public.
The regulation that Crawford favors (and she has argued for it by making false statements to Congress) would be horrible for the Internet. It would ensure that no independent ISP could survive; everyone would HAVE to get Internet from a telephone company or a cable company. You couldn't pay more for more bandwidth if you needed it (even though it's natural, because more bandwidth costs the provider more money)... somehow, that's not egalitarian enough. Crawford isn't a realist; she's a lobbyists. And woe betide us if we give lobbyists control of our country....
You can bet that the same lobbyists who went after Comcast at the FCC would be all over them -- again -- if they charged P2P users more, even though that's a fair thing to do. But if one does charge P2P users more, there's the matter of how to do this. Should all connections be metered by the bit? Users overwhelmingly do not want this, and it seems unfair to do it just because a few other folks are bandwidth hogs. The other alternative is to have two rates: one for a connection on which P2P is prohibited and blocked and a higher one for a connection which allows P2P. This is what my own ISP does, in fact. We prohibit P2P on residential class connections but not on business class connections. The rate we charge for business class connections allows for the possibility that it will be saturated 100% of the time, and is sufficient to let us break even if that happens. But will the lobbyists come after us next?
If an application abuses the network, it is reasonable to target it. P2P, in particular, is used to shift the costs of distributing content from the content provider to an ISP. And because bandwidth is more expensive at the edge of the network than at a server farm, the cost is not only shifted but multiplied. ISPs have the right to stop costs from being dumped upon them, and therefore have the right to throttle, block, and/or prohibit P2P. If they can't, your bill will have to go up, because the ISP has to at least break even to keep providing you with service.
This is not only a non-technical argument, but a fallacious one. No ISP offers "unlimited" bandwidth or throughput, and all have terms of service which limit what you can do with it. And this is a good thing. You shouldn't be allowed to degrade others' service or hog bandwidth. If your ISP does so, then it's being negligent.
The use of RST packets to administratively terminate connections goes back more than 15 years. I know, because my ISP has been doing it for that long -- as have many, many others. (The WebSense software has also been doing it for nearly that long.) It's a reasonable and in fact common practice. We started doing it back in the days of dialup... specifically to protect dialup users' privacy. When a dialup user hangs up, it's possible for the next caller on the same line to receive packets, containing private information, intended for the previous caller. So, we set our systems up to send RST packets to anything that was communicating with a dialup user at the time of a hangup. We still do it to this day, and the open source software that does it (it's called Slirp, developed at the University of Canberra in Australia) is still popular.
As for being "protocol-agnostic:" As I have mentioned in another posting, the word "agnostic" means "without knowledge" -- or, to put it another way, "dumb." The more intelligent your bandwidth control mechanism, the better it can handle certain bad actors -- including BitTorrent, which tries to exploit a vulnerability in TCP to seize priority over other applications, including time critical ones.
Apparently, the reason why the EFF got involved in this affair is that its Chairman, one Brad Templeton, happens to be on the Board of Directors of BitTorrent, Inc. IMHO, it is embarrassing and a direct conflict of interest for Brad to make the EFF act in his personal financial interest. They should fire him as Chairman. If they do not, it again shows their lack of ethics in that they are willing to tolerate this direct and blatant conflict of interest.
OK, this is somewhat of a network techie/geeky thing, but you can hog the network even if your bandwidth is capped. This is due to a flaw in TCP, which does very weak, per-flow congestion avoidance. Suppose one user is running a single download at X bits per second. A second has 100 streams going, each with 1/100th of the bandwidth (or X/100). Which one gets priority if the network gets congested? The second -- by a factor of 100! BitTorrent, which is used for downloads that are not time critical, seizes priority over other traffic such as VoIP, which really needs real time performance. What's more, the streams for which it seizes priority use large packets because they are downloads. The large packets, in turn, create jitter, which really messes up VoIP. The same is true for gaming. So, ISPs are doing the right thing when they throttle BitTorrent and keep it from opening up too many streams. And if they recognize that the thing that's hogging the bandwidth is BitTorrent, they can do so gracefully. They can undo the attempt to seize priority and mete out the bandwidth appropriately. If they are forced to be "protocol agnostic" (the word "agnostic" means "without knowledge;" in other words, their bandwidth limiter is not able to recognize exactly what's causing the problem), they can't use a strategy that's carefully tailored to the problem. So, the networking management can't be as good, and all users suffer. That's what the Sandvine appliance does. It "prunes" the number of streams started by BitTorrent down to a manageable level. It doesn't stop it altogether, but it keeps it from interfering with others by exploiting a vulnerability in the protocol.
Mod the message above as "Funny!" The EFF is most assuredly not trustworthy. Only a few years ago, the EFF had the ability to halt passage of CALEA, a law which allows wiretapping of not only regular telephone calls but also of VoIP and Internet traffic. Guess what? It told the Senator who was holding up the bill -- Malcolm Wallop -- to go ahead and let it pass. And now we're stuck with a law that requires every ISP to be able to tap your Internet connection without you being able to detect it -- not even with tools like the "Swizzlestick" program described in this article.
EFF also pushed for the FCC to implement "network neutrality" rules, which let bandwidth hogs take over ISPs' networks and slow down your service. Those same rules, which were just put into force on Friday, August 1, 2008 (though the FCC has not published them yet), are likely to force ISPs to begin charging by the bit and charging higher prices. They're also likely to put competitive ISPs out of business, leaving you stuck with a choice of at most two providers: the telephone company and cable company.
Way to go, EFF! Tap our communications, raise our prices, and limit our choices! Surely we can trust your software on our machines.... Not!
Cell phone networks were, naturally enough, designed to carry phone calls. They can do a limited amount of Internet as an extra feature, but could easily be saturated by it. The government hasn't given them enough radio spectrum to carry megabits, constantly, for even a few customers per cell site. Would you rather have kiddies downloading porn and illegal copies of music, or have your 911 calls get through in emergencies?
Comcast was throttling based on behavior, not content. (And it was doing something very reasonable. BitTorrent is a bad actor; its purpose is to hog bandwidth.) It's the FCC, on the other hand, that has proposed blocking content. (See the link about sanitized public Internet above.)
By this I do not mean that corporations should always be trusted, but in this case Comcast appears to be far more trustworthy than government.
You obviously have some deep seated problem with ISPs. And know very little about the realities of the business.
As an ISP myself, I can tell you that we often pay quite a lot for Internet bandwidth. In my area, the wholesale price is currently $100 per megabit per second per month. Or more. I know some other ISPs who are paying up to $500 per Mbps per month. Why? Because the major backbone providers -- like Cogent -- only offer connections in "NFL cities." And if you are not close to one of those cities, you must have your data backhauled by a telephone company -- which will often charge you several times as much to take your data 50 miles as the backbone provider will charge to get it to the rest of the world. And don't think that the cable providers and cell phone companies always fare better. Cable systems in small and rural cities often pay similarly high prices for bandwidth.
If you really did install fiber for a living, you know that while fiber does by most of America, but doesn't stop. And you very often can't get the owners to let you on, for love or money. I live in a city of 28,000 people -- the technology capital of my state and the home of the sole campus of its state University. Yet, not a single backbone provider has a point of presence here. Try calling them for service, and they tell you that they will only sell it to you through the local telephone monopoly (in this case, Qwest) at huge prices. Ask them to connect to you directly, bypassing the phone company, and they'll laugh in your face.
Want to bring broadband to America at reasonable prices? This issue -- which is called "special access," not "network neutrality" -- is the one you should be on board with. A proceeding regarding it has been stalled at the FCC for years, and Congress has no legislation pending to address it.
So, before you throw stones at condemn ISPs like myself (it has been my mission to provide the most reasonably priced bandwidth I can to customers for 16 years!), learn the facts.
I'm no "shill" for McDowell. However, I do have a very high opinion of him and strongly agree with his stance against regulating the Internet. He doesn't have much chance of chairing the FCC for political reasons (McCain would have to win the November election, and I'm convinced that Obama will win by a landslide). But frankly, he deserves to.
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WISPs are not always "line of sight." They use different radio technologies, some of which require a line of sight and some of which do not. Check with the provider.
It's a shame that the final product was GPLed. A GPLed driver is compatible with Linux, but couldn't be used in other operating systems such as NetBSD, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD. How about releasing driver under a truly free license, such as the BSD license, which would make it usable by all operating systems? Or, if for some reason the authors won't consent to that, how about releasing the specs from which the driver was implemented?
Anyone can develop a router. It's easy. Just put FreeBSD or NetBSD onto a platform and tune it the way you'd like it. Want to build a high end product? Add a little hardware acceleration (maybe some ASICs or a separate CPU to manage the Ethernet ports).
In the posting above, "prevent bandwidth hogs from soaking up all of that expensive bandwidth" should be "permit bandwidth hogs to soak up all of that expensive bandwidth. Gotta learn to edit more carefully.
There are many problems with the Free Press proposal -- not the least of which is that people wouldn't be able to afford the service they propose to roll out. They propose 7 Mbps, unthrottled, non-oversold pipes to everyone in rural areas, where backbone bandwidth costs as much as $300 per Mbps. Let's see; that's only $2100 per household! They also propose that so-called "network neutrality" regulations apply to the new pipes. ("Network neutrality" is a misnomer, because the policies that are proposed under that label are not neutral; they favor certain big Internet content providers such as Google, which funds Free Press.) These regulations would do several nasty things. They'd prevent bandwidth hogs from soaking up all of that expensive bandwidth; they'd strangle small, local, and independent ISPs with red tape; they'd make it completely infeasible to offer wireless broadband; and they'd destroy competition, so that the cable companies and telephone companies which would be subsidized under Free Press' plan would be the only providers left standing... total duopoly. Robert Atkinson of ITIF has much more sensible ideas; see http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-d-atkinson-phd/the-right-broadband-stimu_b_152884.html for his proposal (which really deserves a Slashdot article of its own).
There are more than 4,000 independent, wireless ISPs in the United States. None of them requires you to have a phone line or cable to hook up. And many serve areas where there's no other broadband. See http://www.wispdirectory.com/.
ACAP, BMI, and SESAC all impose fees upon venues where music is played (and also radio stations), and then distribute the royalties to artists. Why wouldn't the same thing work for music downloads? I can't see any reason why not. Even if the distribution wasn't perfectly accurate or some people paid a little more or less than they really should, it seems to me that overall it'd be pretty fair. And it'd sure be worth it to get rid of all the wrangling, deception, piracy, lawsuits, and everything else! Internet radio might even flourish again.
uTP was explicitly stated -- by its developers -- to be an end run around providers' reasonable network management practices, and Richard is absolutely correct when he notes that it could cause severe network problems. In fact, Ricard understates the case, because he neglects to mention one extremely important point. By switching to UDP, BitTorrent will not only compete with VoIP and some video and audio applications but also with DNS. This could well be catastrophic, because DNS (domain name service), as ISPs know all too well, is a "critical path" protocol in virtually every application. If DNS is slow, EVERYTHING ELSE that users do will also be slow. Remember, most network applications, including Web browsers, have to stop and wait -- unable to do anything else -- until they resolve one or more domain names. So, they'll hang frustratingly if DNS packets are dropped due to congestion. And what underlying transport protocol does DNS use by default? UDP. (It can use TCP as well; however, it does so if, and only if, it has a lot of data to transfer. And TCP, due to its complex handshaking and "slow start" flow control, is much less efficient and much slower.) So, what we're talking about is not just congestion but sand in the gears of the entire Internet. Also, because uTP does not conform to any explicit congestion management protocol that could detect congestion BEFORE packets are dropped, the only way it would be able to detect congestion in the network would be after packets were dropped. Which means that by the time it did anything -- IF it did anything -- to mitigate the congestion it caused, it already would have damaged the network. Finally, do you actually trust P2Pers -- who already, in the vast majority of cases, are brazenly engaging in illegal activity -- to be courteous to anyone? There's no honor among thieves, folks. YMMV, but personally I wouldn't want to be on the same cable segment with someone using this new version of BitTorrent.
It seems to me that this system is based on a false premise: that throttling or blocking of BitTorrent traffic means that something is wrong. In fact, the ISP could be doing P2P mitigation, which improves the overall performance of the network by preventing kiddies who are doing illegal downloads via BitTorrent from degrading legitimate users' performance.
Incidentally, the moderation of this comment demonstrates the fact that some, but not all, of the software community has gotten wise to the agenda behind the GPL. One moderator moderated it up as "Insightful" (perhaps noting the history that I covered and the actual harm that the GPL is causing). Then, another -- probably someone who has been swept into the misleading ideology that was written into the GPL -- moderated it down as a "Troll." We see this conflict within the community all the time, but the balance is shifting. As more and more companies that have based their business plans on GPLed software fail, it will be increasingly difficult for people to delude themselves into believing that the GPL is a positive thing for programmers or for companies.
The intent of the GPL -- which is, arguably, not "open source" software because it fails to meet the non-discrimination requirement of the "Open Source Definition" -- is, indeed, to cause a race to zero. Richard Stallman specifically said this when he authored the GPL: his goal in creating the license was to extinguish programmers' chances of making a living via what he called "proprietary" software. (The correct term is "commercial" software; the word "proprietary" actually has a different meaning.) He hoped that programmers -- not being businesspeople -- would be naive about the economics of software, and could be duped by rhetoric into dooming their own profession. They haven't completely doomed it, but they certainly have done great damage to it. Fortunately, they are beginning to realize the ruse that has been perpetrated upon them. The GPL and other viral, confiscatory licenses do their damage because they discriminate against programmers (the reason why they do not conform to the Open Source Definition). Anyone else can use the software as he or she sees fit without giving anything up, except for programmers -- who must give up the right to their incremental improvements. Since incremental improvements to the technology are precisely what programmers are rewarded for, forcing them to give away this valuable work reduces its market value to zero and prevents them from being successful in business. Why, then, does the "opensource.org" Web site claim that the GPL is an "Open Source" license? Primarily because the founders of "opensource.org" had financial and personal interests in GPLed software -- Linux in particular. They therefore ignored their own definition, on purpose, and added the GPL to their list of "approved" licenses. But it shouldn't be there. Other licenses on the list, such as the BSD license, do conform to the definition and are also much more favorable to programmers because they allow programmers to retain the rights to their incremental modifications and thereby to be rewarded for the advancements they contribute to the technology.
Susan Crawford doesn't "get" the Internet. It was intentionally designed NOT to be a "utility," but rather a loosely federated collection of independent networks bound together by a common protocol. In fact, its original designers made much of the fact that it was to be very different from the Bell System -- in other words, not a public utility with big monopolies and regulators (who would then be subject to "regulatory capture"). No one could "own" the entire Internet, but anyone could own a piece of it -- and impose acceptable use policies for that piece as he or she saw fit (just as the universities and companies that were first on the Internet did at the beginning and still do today).
But Crawford isn't a technologist; she's a lawyer. And lawyers are ensured of full employment by regulation, because they can make millions representing clients before regulatory bodies, interpreting regulations, filing lawsuits based on regulation, etc. -- and so, naturally enough, they are biased toward it, even if it's very bad for the public.
The regulation that Crawford favors (and she has argued for it by making false statements to Congress) would be horrible for the Internet. It would ensure that no independent ISP could survive; everyone would HAVE to get Internet from a telephone company or a cable company. You couldn't pay more for more bandwidth if you needed it (even though it's natural, because more bandwidth costs the provider more money)... somehow, that's not egalitarian enough. Crawford isn't a realist; she's a lobbyists. And woe betide us if we give lobbyists control of our country....
Interesting how the message above was moderated into invisibility because it mentioned some inconvenient truths.
It's not true that ISPs "can't handle" P2P; it's just that it dumps huge costs on them. They have to prohibit it and/or charge more if it's done.
You can bet that the same lobbyists who went after Comcast at the FCC would be all over them -- again -- if they charged P2P users more, even though that's a fair thing to do. But if one does charge P2P users more, there's the matter of how to do this. Should all connections be metered by the bit? Users overwhelmingly do not want this, and it seems unfair to do it just because a few other folks are bandwidth hogs. The other alternative is to have two rates: one for a connection on which P2P is prohibited and blocked and a higher one for a connection which allows P2P. This is what my own ISP does, in fact. We prohibit P2P on residential class connections but not on business class connections. The rate we charge for business class connections allows for the possibility that it will be saturated 100% of the time, and is sufficient to let us break even if that happens. But will the lobbyists come after us next?
If an application abuses the network, it is reasonable to target it. P2P, in particular, is used to shift the costs of distributing content from the content provider to an ISP. And because bandwidth is more expensive at the edge of the network than at a server farm, the cost is not only shifted but multiplied. ISPs have the right to stop costs from being dumped upon them, and therefore have the right to throttle, block, and/or prohibit P2P. If they can't, your bill will have to go up, because the ISP has to at least break even to keep providing you with service.
This is not only a non-technical argument, but a fallacious one. No ISP offers "unlimited" bandwidth or throughput, and all have terms of service which limit what you can do with it. And this is a good thing. You shouldn't be allowed to degrade others' service or hog bandwidth. If your ISP does so, then it's being negligent.
The use of RST packets to administratively terminate connections goes back more than 15 years. I know, because my ISP has been doing it for that long -- as have many, many others. (The WebSense software has also been doing it for nearly that long.) It's a reasonable and in fact common practice. We started doing it back in the days of dialup... specifically to protect dialup users' privacy. When a dialup user hangs up, it's possible for the next caller on the same line to receive packets, containing private information, intended for the previous caller. So, we set our systems up to send RST packets to anything that was communicating with a dialup user at the time of a hangup. We still do it to this day, and the open source software that does it (it's called Slirp, developed at the University of Canberra in Australia) is still popular.
As for being "protocol-agnostic:" As I have mentioned in another posting, the word "agnostic" means "without knowledge" -- or, to put it another way, "dumb." The more intelligent your bandwidth control mechanism, the better it can handle certain bad actors -- including BitTorrent, which tries to exploit a vulnerability in TCP to seize priority over other applications, including time critical ones.
Apparently, the reason why the EFF got involved in this affair is that its Chairman, one Brad Templeton, happens to be on the Board of Directors of BitTorrent, Inc. IMHO, it is embarrassing and a direct conflict of interest for Brad to make the EFF act in his personal financial interest. They should fire him as Chairman. If they do not, it again shows their lack of ethics in that they are willing to tolerate this direct and blatant conflict of interest.
OK, this is somewhat of a network techie/geeky thing, but you can hog the network even if your bandwidth is capped. This is due to a flaw in TCP, which does very weak, per-flow congestion avoidance. Suppose one user is running a single download at X bits per second. A second has 100 streams going, each with 1/100th of the bandwidth (or X/100). Which one gets priority if the network gets congested? The second -- by a factor of 100! BitTorrent, which is used for downloads that are not time critical, seizes priority over other traffic such as VoIP, which really needs real time performance. What's more, the streams for which it seizes priority use large packets because they are downloads. The large packets, in turn, create jitter, which really messes up VoIP. The same is true for gaming. So, ISPs are doing the right thing when they throttle BitTorrent and keep it from opening up too many streams. And if they recognize that the thing that's hogging the bandwidth is BitTorrent, they can do so gracefully. They can undo the attempt to seize priority and mete out the bandwidth appropriately. If they are forced to be "protocol agnostic" (the word "agnostic" means "without knowledge;" in other words, their bandwidth limiter is not able to recognize exactly what's causing the problem), they can't use a strategy that's carefully tailored to the problem. So, the networking management can't be as good, and all users suffer. That's what the Sandvine appliance does. It "prunes" the number of streams started by BitTorrent down to a manageable level. It doesn't stop it altogether, but it keeps it from interfering with others by exploiting a vulnerability in the protocol.
Mod the message above as "Funny!" The EFF is most assuredly not trustworthy. Only a few years ago, the EFF had the ability to halt passage of CALEA, a law which allows wiretapping of not only regular telephone calls but also of VoIP and Internet traffic. Guess what? It told the Senator who was holding up the bill -- Malcolm Wallop -- to go ahead and let it pass. And now we're stuck with a law that requires every ISP to be able to tap your Internet connection without you being able to detect it -- not even with tools like the "Swizzlestick" program described in this article.
EFF also pushed for the FCC to implement "network neutrality" rules, which let bandwidth hogs take over ISPs' networks and slow down your service. Those same rules, which were just put into force on Friday, August 1, 2008 (though the FCC has not published them yet), are likely to force ISPs to begin charging by the bit and charging higher prices. They're also likely to put competitive ISPs out of business, leaving you stuck with a choice of at most two providers: the telephone company and cable company.
Way to go, EFF! Tap our communications, raise our prices, and limit our choices! Surely we can trust your software on our machines.... Not!
Cell phone networks were, naturally enough, designed to carry phone calls. They can do a limited amount of Internet as an extra feature, but could easily be saturated by it. The government hasn't given them enough radio spectrum to carry megabits, constantly, for even a few customers per cell site. Would you rather have kiddies downloading porn and illegal copies of music, or have your 911 calls get through in emergencies?
Comcast was throttling based on behavior, not content. (And it was doing something very reasonable. BitTorrent is a bad actor; its purpose is to hog bandwidth.) It's the FCC, on the other hand, that has proposed blocking content. (See the link about sanitized public Internet above.)
By this I do not mean that corporations should always be trusted, but in this case Comcast appears to be far more trustworthy than government.
As an ISP myself, I can tell you that we often pay quite a lot for Internet bandwidth. In my area, the wholesale price is currently $100 per megabit per second per month. Or more. I know some other ISPs who are paying up to $500 per Mbps per month. Why? Because the major backbone providers -- like Cogent -- only offer connections in "NFL cities." And if you are not close to one of those cities, you must have your data backhauled by a telephone company -- which will often charge you several times as much to take your data 50 miles as the backbone provider will charge to get it to the rest of the world. And don't think that the cable providers and cell phone companies always fare better. Cable systems in small and rural cities often pay similarly high prices for bandwidth.
If you really did install fiber for a living, you know that while fiber does by most of America, but doesn't stop. And you very often can't get the owners to let you on, for love or money. I live in a city of 28,000 people -- the technology capital of my state and the home of the sole campus of its state University. Yet, not a single backbone provider has a point of presence here. Try calling them for service, and they tell you that they will only sell it to you through the local telephone monopoly (in this case, Qwest) at huge prices. Ask them to connect to you directly, bypassing the phone company, and they'll laugh in your face.
Want to bring broadband to America at reasonable prices? This issue -- which is called "special access," not "network neutrality" -- is the one you should be on board with. A proceeding regarding it has been stalled at the FCC for years, and Congress has no legislation pending to address it.
So, before you throw stones at condemn ISPs like myself (it has been my mission to provide the most reasonably priced bandwidth I can to customers for 16 years!), learn the facts.
I'm no "shill" for McDowell. However, I do have a very high opinion of him and strongly agree with his stance against regulating the Internet. He doesn't have much chance of chairing the FCC for political reasons (McCain would have to win the November election, and I'm convinced that Obama will win by a landslide). But frankly, he deserves to.
Have you stopped beating your wife yet? Troll.