ISP Rise Against P2P Users 574
bananaendian writes "Spencer Kelly from BBC's Click program writes about the emerging backslash against high bandwidth P2P users. Apparently it has been estimates that up to one third of internet's traffic is caused by BitTorrent file-sharing program. Especially ISPs who are leasing their bandwidth by the megabyte are more inclined to resort to 'shaping your traffic' by throttling ports, setting bandwidth limits or even classifying accounts according services used. What is your ISPs policy regarding P2P and is it fair for them to put restrictions and conditions on its use."
Re:The way I see it... (Score:5, Interesting)
Just curious, have you ever read the service contract with your ISP? I know I haven't. My guess would be that they include a paragraph to the tune of, "If the user is doing something we don't like, we can do whatever we want about it."
Re:This can be fixed (Score:2, Interesting)
My ISP is rediculous (Score:2, Interesting)
"ISPs" themselves are a perversion of the Internet (Score:1, Interesting)
How UK broadband actually works. (Score:4, Interesting)
If you don't like the service that you are getting from your ISP or Cable Company you can always switch to another ISP who offers a better service though maybe at a higher price.
Given that DSL subscribers in the UK have recently been given the choice to upgrade to an 8Mbit service at no extra cost, an all you can eat service model is not going to be sustainable as the few bandwidth hogs will saturate their connections and leech all the bandwidth. There has to be some sort of fair use policy and this differs between the ISP's
PlusNet has taken to use traffic shaping to effectively block all p2p traffic once a user had gone over a rather small usage limit. This has resulted in a large migration of users away from PlusNet and onto my ISP Nildram. Nildram do not traffic shape and they give a generous 50gig per month download limit which only applied during peak times. After 12am to 8am it's all you can eat. They also role your previous months unused allowance over to the next month.
It remains to be seen if my ISP can cope with the extra demand but the point is this is a good example of the free market and capitalism. If a provider gives bad service or poor value for money their customers will simply migrate to another provider.
It's unfortunate the people in the U.S don't have such a free market for broadband.
A simple way around this (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Just so I understand... (Score:5, Interesting)
On an ISP scale, you _never_ want to get to the point where you are using 100% of your bandwidth, because the network will slow down to a crawl. All of your customers who play online games, have Vonage, or just browse the web will immediately start complaining, because those services simply aren't usable when the network is congested. Neither car engines nor networks are designed to run at 100% load, all the time. The exact reasons may be different, but the analogy itself is spot-on.
Re:did anyone honestly fail to see this coming? (Score:1, Interesting)
One example is DVD Encryption which was cracked by a 15 year old so he can watch movies in Linux. Its going to be the same with p2p software. Users will find a way around any restrictions imposed on them.
You think bandwidth use is high now? Wait till all p2p traffic is encrypted and then overhead will be noticeable. Who knows, maybe it won't be noticeable since bandwidth lines and router technologies are constantly being updated.
I heard CISCO has already made routers capable of dealing with optics directly and not having to convert them before interpretation and redirection saving valuable time and obviously increasing bandwidth speeds. Cool...
Re:Just so I understand... (Score:2, Interesting)
Example 1: Let's say you're on X-National-DSL provider, and you're linked to 5 people on your torrent. If 4 of those hosts are behind the same peering point (your ISP), and that last one's stuck in Norway, then your ISP only pays for bits going to the Nordic fellow, everything else stays within their private network.
Example 2: Let's say you have a home network of 5 PC's on a 100mbit switch, and each of those hosts is running Bittorrent. If the data you want is on one of your roommates' PCs, you will download at full speed from the local network, hell you wouldn't even need internet access, you're just using your own bandwidth to its fullest potential. On the other hand if you're getting a file from the outside world, you have to go over the DSL modem which you pay for.
Bittorrent generates lots of traffic yes, but the only difference now is that the traffic is coming from all over the place. I don't think there's that much more file sharing going on, it's just decentralized whereas in the past things came from FTP servers and Usenet, but they used just as much aggregate bandwidth. There's no way around it, if 100 people download a 700mb ISO, there will be 70 gb uploaded and 70gb downloaded in total. The benefit of Bittorrent is that the 70gb is shared more or less equitably among the participants, instead of serving it all from one central host, which allows it to scale to thousands of clients very easily without hosing the file server.
There is one main difference with Bittorrent, which is maximizing the total bandwidth. In my previous example, if 100 people downloaded the same file from an FTP server, the combined speed of all transfers was limited by that FTP's uplink, i.e. 10mbit, and everyone got a small slice of that bandwidth so it took longer to finish the transfer. Bittorrent does the opposite, while the initial seeder might only have 10mbit available, there are 99 other peers with anywhere from 1 to 5 mbit each, yielding an aggregate swarm speed that is several times faster than the FTP host could put out. This means the ISP has to deal with more bursty traffic, which for some puny small guys might be cost-prohibitive. It's more expensive to use up 10% of a 100mbit line, than 100% of a full 10mbit line.
It all points to the flawed model of bandwidth pricing. In my opinion the carriers are artificially restricting the evolution of the network by prioritizing money over progress. A gigabit uplink doesn't cost significantly more than a 10mbit link, you just need a faster router. The only reason we don't have plentiful bandwidth for everyone, is because it's more profitable to artificially limit supply. The flaw in this model is that bandwidth is not a mercantile commodity like oil or produce, so why should it be priced that way ?
Re:No problem (Score:2, Interesting)
I wouldn't mind one bit of P2P use (or any other high-bandwidth/quasi-perpetual bandwidth activity) is choked back, but unfortunately it seems most providers do not put intelligence into it. I've been choked by my ISP before, and when I contacted them to see what was up (and get the restriction removed) I got the following:
A) Yes, sir, you've been flagged and your bandwidth throttled.
B) No, we can't tell you why.
C) No, we can't tell you what bandwidth habits trigger it.
D) Do it two more times and we can toss you on your ass.
Basically, they take a hardline and dumbass stance, IMHO, and are trying to fearmonger your bandwidth use as opposed to a more sensible regulation. There are plenty of P2P problems out there, but there still seem to be plenty of problems on the ISP side as well.
Re:did anyone honestly fail to see this coming? (Score:3, Interesting)
they can't ever filter this out, even if they could, you can always use a 'massive xorring' encryption that makes it almost impossible for them to discover what you are receiving or sending.
and since they have no proof that you are doing anything illegal in the first place (well it may seem weird that a person reads 1.2 gbytes of news daily and receives 3.2gbytes of email, but it's not illegal) there's no legal reason to limit the bandwidth that the client has paid for.
over & out.
Re:Just so I understand... (Score:2, Interesting)
Dead right. The thing is, I'd already gotten the point before the analogy. The analogy just made me weep for anyone trying to use it to understand aspects of the network issues they didn't quite have a handle on already.
The analogy helped me not at all.
Throwing in my opinion as to ways in which the analogy was flawed was probably just asking to have people respond with how my points were technically flawed more than anything else. I had a niggling feeling that people would pick on the 100% utilisation point.
The real killer for me, perhaps, was that the original poster (whose technical point was spot on, I still state!) used what could be a massively-faceted analogy (is it the mechanics we should note? is it the transport-network vs. computer network similarities? the inherent dangers to life & limb of running flat out all the time?) and unfortunately didn't state what aspects of the car analogy he was particularly pointing at.
Anyways, it was a glorified rant. I promise to close my end of the discussion on car analogies with this: Arrrgh!
Re:Argument... (Score:2, Interesting)
whining ... idiots ... sit on their compter 18 hours per day ... Get off the fucking chair and get a life
At least when I use slashdot to vent my frustrations I don't whine about being modded down for it.