ISPs Fight Against Encrypted BitTorrent Downloads 588
oglsmm writes to mention an Ars Technica article about a new product intended to detect and throttle encrypted BitTorrent traffic. When torrents first saw common use ISPs would throttle the bandwidth available to them, in order to ensure connectivity for everyone. Some clients began encrypting their data to get around this, and the company Allot Communications is now claiming their NetEnforcer product will return the advantage to the ISPs. From the article: "Certainly, increasing BitTorrent traffic is a concern for ISPs. In early 2004, torrents accounted for 35 percent of all traffic on the Internet. By the end of that year, this figure had almost doubled, and some estimate that in certain markets, such as Asia, torrent traffic uses as much as 80 percent of all bandwidth. However, BitTorrent is an extremely important tool that has many uses other than what everyone assumes it is good for, namely movie piracy."
well, it only makes sense (Score:5, Insightful)
Connections (Score:5, Insightful)
No, that's in order to continue selling people bandwidth they couldn't deliver, known to ISPs as "statistical oversubscription". Then when we want to get what we paid for, they take it away entirely. Unless you're watching the telco's own IPTV, which somehow has as much bandwidth as they need to sell it to you, for an additional charge.
Blocking competitive services to support ripoff monopoly business models is the reason telcos and other big ISPs hate Net Neutrality [eff.org].
ATT is doing the same (Score:3, Insightful)
with teh Telephone System, returning the advantage to the communication providers
by filtering the words Cocaine , Heroin, Ganja, LSD, Skunk, PCP, Speed, Crystal Meth
as they are used by people using the telephone system to conduct illegal conversations
filter my torrents and i will sue you for NOT filtering childporn
if you want to give up common carrier thats fine, but be aware YOU WILL be held to account for anything illegal i find on YOUR network
Re:well, it only makes sense (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:well, it only makes sense (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course not! How else am I going to re-sell it to some other sap.
What we need is more truth in ads. Make sure your customers know that you are not guaranteeing a given bandwith unless they pay for a clear channel or some such.
Not quite... (Score:5, Insightful)
Why sell the bandwidth then? (Score:4, Insightful)
If car manufacturers operated like ISPs, they would sell 300 horsepower cars with shoddy transmissions, then limit them to 150hp so they wouldn't have to deal with the warranty repairs.
Re:But I thought SPAM was 80% of traffic? (Score:3, Insightful)
"war"? (Score:2, Insightful)
A war? You gotta be crazy. If my ISP doesn't provide me what I'm paying for then I'm either dumping them or suing. It's that simple. There's not going to be an "war" over my ISP usage at my home or my business. I'm going to get what I pay for, or they can speak with my attorney (and yes, I do use my attorney for little stuff like this).
To the people who just have a home ISP and may not have much choice, I say: don't worry about it. Somebody will come in to provide the service eventually. Competition ensures that it'll happen. With wireless getting a little bit more useful every day, I think that we'll soon have some competition amongst ISP's again, soon.
Broadband (Score:1, Insightful)
Bittorrent will fight back. (Score:3, Insightful)
All of this could probably be pretty easily foiled by having Bittorrent mask what it's doing by sending noise once in a while to throw these tools off.
Re:well, it only makes sense (Score:1, Insightful)
Not really. What we need are some good class-action lawsuits.
Um, mirror? (Score:5, Insightful)
Would it be really hard to throw together a 1TB file store with the latest patches, demos, ISOs and the like?
That way the customers can get stuff inside the network and the ISP doesn't have to worry about upstream net usage.
OMG it's like I'm smart and all.
Tom
Re:Illegal? (Score:5, Insightful)
Isnt it illegal to read any part of encrypted data accross the internet?
Probably not, but they aren't "reading" data in any case. They're just looking at the encrypted streams and figuring out, based upon the way the traffic flows, the ports, etc. that it is bittorrent traffic. Of course engineers can just make bittorrent traffic mimic other, legitimate traffic more closely to make it impossible to distinguish between them.
Ever notice that whole lot of crap runs on port 80 these days? The reason is that ISPs and maintainers of firewalls have turned off the rest of the internet under the assumption that it will stop the traffic they don't like. Really it just squished everything into one place and made it harder to properly administer.
Espically for Linux (Score:5, Insightful)
I just don't see how else a not-for-profit group is going to get fast distribution of something that big for cheap. If you look at web hosting you find that bandwidth of that order is not at all cheap. However, BT let us all share the load a little.
I'm sure people do sue it for illegal purposes but I tell ya what, it has made getting free legal software so much easier. Gone are the days of waiting around on a slow ass FTP that seems like it's being run out of some guy's broom closet (which is probably where it is being run). I find on most Linux torrents I can get 30+mbits/sec no problem.
Re:Not quite... (Score:3, Insightful)
Obviously true, but would you actually accept that for any other commodity?
"Hey, this 'pint' of milk only has half a pint in it"
"Yeah, well you get the theoretical pint capacity but if you actually got the milk, our prices would be quite higher!"
Seems like a straightforwards case of fraud.
Two Choices (Score:5, Insightful)
2: Sue them under the DMCA for reverse-engineering and breaking the technological protection method used to protect your content.
Use either, or both, as appropriate.
Re:Has to be done (Score:5, Insightful)
No, it doesn't "have to be done". You could just advertise what you can actually deliver, and anything a customer happens to get above that is gravy. Right now, you "manage to sell" people 5Mb connections for $40 a month in the same way that the guy at the corner "manages to sell" Rolex watches for ten dollars a shot.
Re:well, it only makes sense (Score:5, Insightful)
In the eyes of the ISP, they're selling you a 3Mb pipe for burst traffic, so your email or web page loads really fast, not so that you can saturate your pipe 24/7. I'm not saying I agree with that, but that's what the ISP has priced things at. The average person uses nowhere near the bandwidth of his connection, and that allows them to charge cheaper rates by overselling.
To put this another way, if everyone saturated their pipe, they would have to charge upwards of 10x for your cable or DSL connection as they currently do.
While they are largely at fault (Score:5, Insightful)
One option people have is to just get better service. I personally went with Speakeasy. They don't block or throttle your connection in any way (they claim they don't, and I haven't detected any). You can host servers, whatever you like. However, it's more pricey than lower grade service. I drop about $130/month to get 6m/768k DSL with 8 static IPs. But, I've never had it fail to work at the highest speeds, and they are true to their word, I do a TON of upstream with those servers and I've never heard a peep out of them or seen my connection throttled at all.
Net access is just another area where you get what you pay for. Sure, I could offer people 100mbit net access for $20/month and just lay ethernet to their houses (we are assuming I had the permits here). However at that price, I couldn't guarantee 100mbits of upstream for each subscriber. Hell I'd be lucky to get 10mbits of upstream for all subscribers.
Re:Has to be done (Score:2, Insightful)
You don't. Like you just said, you lie about how much bandwidth you have available. You don't thikn people will be interested in paying for what you can really provide them with for $40, so you pretend you can provide more than you can afford to. You're a conman. A fraudster. A common crook. HTH.
Re:Connections (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Bittorrent is shit and you too are shit Zonk (Score:3, Insightful)
You are assuming that the DSL ISPs aren't throttling traffic at the higher level of their network. You are wrong in that assumption. DSL is no panacea to cable oversubscription and traffic-shaping.
Let me sum up the counter arguments (Score:4, Insightful)
"honor system"? Where is that in the ads? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:"war"? (Score:5, Insightful)
Competition? Surely, you jest. Unless, of course, you mean "Competition between two subsidized monopolies," namely the local cable company and the local telco. Some choice.
As Lily Tomlin's telephone operator character liked to say, "We're the telephone company. We don't care. We don't have to."
compare to land (Score:2, Insightful)
If I buy say 25 acres of land, and I sell 1 acre parcels of this land, normally valued at 1,000 dollars per acre to 50 people at 750 dollars per acre (to give a good deal and sell my land), in the hope that they don't use it all, how long do I have before I go to jail, and how much of a jackass am I for counting on the fact that no one will try to use thier full acre?
Re:well, it only makes sense (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Has to be done (Score:5, Insightful)
I know it sounds insenitive, but it really needs to be said: "It's not my job to make sure your business model turns a profit."
Your the one in control. You write-up the contract any way you wish, and the customers' only choice is to accept or refuse. If you aren't able to provide 5Mbit connections, then clearly make it a point in your contract that you're limiting them to a maximum ammount of throughput, or something similar.
Honor your contracts, don't complain that you can't. Making contracts "on the margin," so to speak, gets lots of people thrown in prison all the time, when things don't go their way.
What's more... singling out bittorrent, or P2P in general, is insane. The same things can be done with http, ftp, etc. If you're going to restrict traffic, at least do it in a sane way, which applies to ALL the bits, and doesn't unfairly penalize one protocol/technology over another.
Reality check (Score:4, Insightful)
OK, here you go:
Dear customer/potential customer,
At present, you pay a flat rate for your broadband, but the costs we incur in supplying your service increase with usage. If you are up/downloading 10x as much as most customers because of your heavy broadband use, then you are costing us more than those others. With a flat pricing model, that cost is being passed on to all of our customers equally. We don't believe this is fair to the vast majority of our customers, most of whom don't make such heavy use and simply want an always-on connection with a reasonable download speed.
In recognition of this, we are giving our customers the option to decide between two alternative pricing schemes. One of these will be introduced within the next six months, at which point we will stop offering our existing flat-rate service.
For option (a), we have a tiered approach. Light users can have a max 512Kb/s connection and a monthly bandwidth cap of 1GB, for $5/month. This package is suitable for most people who use the Internet primarily for e-mail, web browsing/e-shopping, and Usenet newsgroups. Medium users can have a max 2MB/s connection and a monthly bandwidth cap of 4GB, for $15/month. This package is suitable for most people who make somewhat heavier use, such as on-line gamers or those who download occasional multimedia content. Heavy users can have a max 8MB/s connection and no monthly bandwidth cap, for $200/month. This is the only appropriate standard home user package suitable for those who run continuous, high-traffic services such as peer-to-peer file sharing or web servers linked from Slashdot articles.
For option (b), we will simply charge a fixed fee per megabyte up/downloaded, keeping the total income we receive across our entire customer base constant. We expect this to result in a cost reduction for light users of up to 90%, little change for medium users, and a tenfold increase in charges to heavy users.
Please select the option you prefer and we will go with the majority vote. For those who require guaranteed download speeds and no bandwidth cap, the same leased line services we offer to businesses are also available to private customers, with prices starting at only $1,000/month (installation charges apply).
Kind regards,
Your ISP
Re:well, it only makes sense (Score:3, Insightful)
In other words, I know full well my provider could start throttling and it would be OK because that's what I agreed with. I also know that my provider is not throttle happy.
Re:well, it only makes sense (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a shame their ads and the terms in the contract THEY wrote-up doesn't have any mention of this inconvenient little fact...
It also allows them to charge MORE EXPENSIVE rates, as the people using almost no bandwidth are being charged far in excess of what they need. If ISPs would just offer cheaper, lower-speed packages (perhaps with high-speed burst), there would be NO PROBLEM.
When your business model is a problem, you don't start violating your contracts to maintain that model.
Re:compare to land (Score:5, Insightful)
uh... how about we ban analogies completely from /. Who's with me?!!
In the meantime, I will point out that the flaw with this particular analogy is comparing a service (broadband) to a physical object (an acre of land). You can oversell a service, but it doesn't work with physical objects. People tend to want to get their hands on a physical object and it becomes apparent very quickly that it's been oversold. Most of the time, users will be surfing the web or checking email. They won't be using their full bandwidth. When they do occasionally use their full bandwidth, most likely it will be available.
...seriously, who's with me?!!
Re:compare to land (Score:5, Insightful)
A better analogy (and a car-related one at that) is an actual highway.
You build a 4 lane private tollway between two specific points. You promise high speeds for toll access. Then you oversell access.
The thing in question here is sentence 2: "promise high speeds." What does that mean? Clearly we can quantify that.
And guess what? In our ISP service contracts, we've quantified it, too. It's fairly simple; either
a)charge me bit-for-bit and quit throttling
b) up everyone's price until you're not overselling any more because of lower demand
c) offer tiered pricing for higher bandwidth users. That's great for me; I don't mind slower speeds, so I can save me some dough.
You're REALLY gonna be up shit's creek (Score:3, Insightful)
IPTV is set to evolve soon, too, to where a Comcast user in Los Angeles can subscribe to a provider streaming from Texas. Episodes of TV shows can be seen online now, and whole libraries are going to be coming online.
Bittorrent's just a big shark in a really really big ocean of bandwidth problems about to hit you like a tsunami.
The backbone will get stronger or new markets won't emerge. Apparently in this day and age, the market has right of way.
Re:Stunned...but not (Score:3, Insightful)
Waitaminute, you're saying this like it's a bad thing or ironic or something. This is the way it should be. If the ISPs would store things on their own network (whether it's a Squid cache or a Usenet spool doesn't matter) that would be fucking awesome. Then they only pay once to move it over their expensive pipes (and likewise, only slow down the backbones once), and it doesn't matter how many of their customers download it, because that part is essentially "free." The internet as a whole would benefit.
Every ISP should have a news server and web cache, and encourage their users to use them. It's not like disk space is expensive. It doesn't need to be reliable, either. Use a bunch of the cheapest Maxtors you can find, and RAID0 'em. Or just make it all swap and serve out of a 64-bit-address-space tmpfs. ;-)
Likewise, it would be neat if bittorrent or Gnutella or something like it, would peer with users on earby networks first, instead of just anyone. If a bunch of an ISP's users are all passing lots of packets to each other the the ISP has little reason to throttle. I'm kind of surprised that I haven't heard of ISPs working on this, because they (moreso than the users) are the ones who would most benefit from it.
Re:well, it only makes sense (Score:3, Insightful)
Classification of traffic with QoS allows bandwidth utilization to be maximized without degrading interactive / non-bulk traffic. The number of ISP's that actually IMPLEMENT QoS (especially on peering links) is near zero at the moment which would need to change. Now that torrent and other bulk traffic is as high as it is, they need to make these changes. Hell - savvy users have been asking for QoS for YEARS already!
Re:Has to be done (Score:1, Insightful)
Switch to a "pay per play" model ($X / byte) if you want to get rid of the 20% of your customers who consume 80% of your bandwitdh.
Guess why you'll NEVER do it? Under the new system, the average "non-abusing" customer pays $10 / month, while the average "abuser" pays $160 / month.
($10 * 80%) + ($160 * 20%) = ($40 * 100%)
Abusing the network becomes cost prohibitive, so you'll quickly lose those customers. In the end, you're left with:
($10 * 80%) + ($0 * 20%) = ($40 * 20%)
20% of your original revenues. You don't make margin on bandwidth that isn't being used.
MOD PARENT UP (Score:4, Insightful)
Exactly. And of course the ISP apologists chime in with the "bad analogy--you can get in trouble for overselling goods, but not services" nonsense. Of course, what they are overlooking is that it isn't somehow "less of a crime" to oversell a service, it's just harder to get caught.
The hollowed principle that the ISPs were relying on was the ancient "but I didn't think I'd get caught" defense.
If somebody takes money from people for X, be it a good or a service, and then blocks them from getting what they paid for in order to resell it to others, they are committing fraud. Period.
--MarkusQ
Re:compare to land (Score:4, Insightful)
Hmm. Can I find one.
It's about sharing something.
Okay.. here we go. I'll use a riding lawnmower analogy.
The ISP's leases use of a riding lawnmower for a year $1,000. The leasing company agrees that up to 5 days a year, they can use two lawnmowers without extra charge and three lawnmowers for $10 per day.
They sell 50 people the right to use a lawnmower for $25 each (pocketing a nice $250 profit).
They reasonably expect that people are going to mow about 2 hours a day once every 2 weeks- some will mow for 2 hours a day every week and some will mow for 2 hours a day once a month. Given 365 days a year, there should rarely be a line for the lawnmower. And when there is they have a bit of extra capacity.
Now- someone figures out that the lawnmower can be used to drive to work with while their car is in the shop.
Someone else figures out that they can run a small busines mowing people's lawns with it.
Another person borrows it and then loans it out to his 5 best friends to mow their lawns with too.
The business model that was going to work doesn't work any more. Because every day people are using 7 lawnmowers all day. The ISP is now paying $60 per day over what they thought they would pay. The rules have changed.
---
Don't get me wrong- I torrent things too. I know at some point they are going to charge per megabyte (or gigabyte) downloaded. This is a very temporary window where they did not know how people would use their services. Server accounts have always taken bandwidth into account.
I expect in the next few years that we will see things like "4 gigs a month and then $1.00 per 10 gigs a month" and then the ISP's will compete on price. These will get higher as bandwidth grows (USA is pathetic at 9mbps when Japan/korea/etc. have something like 100mpbs).
Smarter caching could prevent a lot of this.
Re:compare to land (Score:4, Insightful)
That does not alter the validity of parent's analogy. Consider a car mechanic, who being a similar jackass, sells you a coupon for "tire change in 10 minutes - guaranteed!" (clearly a "service"), obviously hoping that all of his customers ... err ... marks, will not show up at the same time. But if they do, he is in the same boat the ISP is: he sold something he could not deliver, i.e. he lied, cheated, and ripped the consumer off.
Sometimes analogies do work, because Internet is not some new magical, never before experienced thing from the perspective of mercantile trade. It simply fits into the ages old criterion of "service", rules of which have been long established as are all the different ways thieves and con-men have tried to abuse those rules.
Re:lol, moustrap, mouse (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:compare to land (Score:5, Insightful)
This made me realize that there is even a better way of visualisng the problem: think traditional telephone companies. They also provide, for a fixed monthly fee, unlimited access to the telephone network. If they operated on the same principle as the ISPs, you would get nothing but busy signals if more then 0.1% of people decided to call each other. Furthermore, if their response to the problem was like that of the ISPs, you would see people's calls being monitored and those made by teenagers would be terminated prematurely, because they make the system too busy for Grandma to call her grandkids. In other words: total nonsense. Instead the telcos of old did the only sane thing: expanded the switching capability until the odds of the system reaching its capacity were so small as not to impede its normal use.
ISPs simply believe that no sane rules apply to them because they operate in this magical, fantastic, cosmic, new wonder medium of Internet. Its time someone hit them with a sizeable clue bat and made their noses contact the firm ground of common sense, violently.
Re:well, it only makes sense (Score:5, Insightful)
Oversubscription is a fact of life. Buy a plane ticket and you have a chance of being bumped because the flight was oversold. Buy a movie ticket and you have a chance of being barred because they hit capacity. Many businesses oversell because they cannot guarantee every sale will actually be used. If they didn't oversell, planes might fly much less than full, movie theaters might play to almost emoty houses, and while that isn't the rule, it happens more often without overselling and that is seen as a loss.
DSL is oversold as well. Most providers have far less than a single OC3 backhaul (usually a single DS3) feeding their DSLAM farm and aggregate bandwidth usage potential far in excess of that. They gamble that not everyone will be on at all hours. I've seen extra DS3 circuits laid in when some customers insisted like schmucks that they should have the right to utilize their pipes to maximum around the clock but it is rare. More often, the company has to obey the laws of economics and cannot lay in another $10K a month connection just because one or two people are hogs. More over, the contract fine print doesn't allow for that kind of usage.
There is such a thing as being a good neighbor and not being a pr*ck. THROTTLE YOURSELF. Set the limits on your P2P clients well below your max, ESPECIALLY UPSTREAM. Don't be a fool and bring your downstream to 98% utilization and then complain to your ISP that mail is timing out. Don't be a childish tool and insist that you are supposed to get unlimited bandwidth. You aren't and the fine print says so. It IS supposed to be burstable. Furthermore, they CANNOT guarantee EVER reaching that maximum speed beyond the first IP hop after you and in the case of DSL there may be a dozen Frame Relay or ATM links underlying it.
Me, I throttle my P2P, I don't run it 24/7/365 but only when I need to get something, and by being good my ISP doesn't whack me for overutilization. I'm paying for a 15Mbpsx2Mbps line and with multipart downloads have many times kicked my aggregate downstream usage to 16.5Mbps and average 14.6Mbps. But I don't do it every waking second. Looking at my firewall graph, my usage is just the bursty sort the average target user's should be.
Re:compare to land (Score:5, Insightful)
The key word being refund. Also, airlines have many other reasons for bumping flights, such as weather and what not. In other words, while they can be sleazy, the level of their machinations is insignificant to what the crooks, otherwise known as the ISPs, are up to.
Re:well, it only makes sense (Score:2, Insightful)
The prblem with that is that it is unfair and absurd. Airlines should never oversell tickets because if they sell all tickets they have made a full plane's profit. If they really want to avoid flying with empty seats, they can sell standby tickets. The same goes with a movie theatre. Oversubscribing (instead of standby) is unreasonable.
Re:compare to land (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What fight? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:lol, moustrap, mouse (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah. Too bad those "important" uses only account for 5% of the total traffic.
Okay, now a while back when ISPs first started throttling traffic the big workaround was encryption. Now it seems that encryption isn't a silver bullet either. Other sources have indicated that pattern analysis would catch attempts to emulate other protocols, such as secure VPN connections.
So is the war over? Or is everyone going to focus on other ways to outsmart the system?
Re:compare to land (Score:3, Insightful)
Trouble is, as I explained to the other poster above, that in case of the Internet, unlike the telephone network, the bulk of normal usage is non-local. A huge number of sites being accessed by Australians is overseas, in USA primarily. Google, Yahoo, MSN, Blogger, MySpace, etc and so on. While some of those companies can have local "beachheads" with some sort of caching and data replication capabilities, and while the ISPs can cache some contents, this is only a very partial remedy because of the highly dynamic nature of the content of those sites. Also ISPs can get in legal hot water for caching, running afoul various wacko laws, such as anti-"piracy" or anti-"hate"-speech ones.
Again, the only way ouy of this jam is for ISPs to do what they were supposed to do in the first place: invest in the backbone infrastructure until it is capable of handling the bandwith they sold to their customers.
Re:compare to land (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:compare to land (Score:3, Insightful)
They sell 50 people the right to use a lawnmower for $25 each (pocketing a nice $250 profit)... The business model that was going to work doesn't work any more. Because every day people are using 7 lawnmowers all day. The ISP is now paying $60 per day over what they thought they would pay. The rules have changed.
You're forgetting one thing. The government bought the company the lawnmowers in the first place with people's tax dollars, after the company promised to supply enough lawn mowers for everyone, which they failed to do and pocketed the cash. The US government paid hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies to ISPs who promised reliable, cheap, high-speed access to the home, just like they have in Europe and Asia.
Cost is in buying transit (Score:3, Insightful)
The cost of you saturating your pipe would really not be in the upgrades necessary to the local infrastructure (at the subnet level), it would be in the additional cost to their ISP (assumedly one of the Tier-1 providers).
The switches at the head-ends of the local cable "exchanges" (whatever they call exchanges in cable parlance) are probably more than capable of pushing 5-6 Mb/s per customer, continuously. Where it gets problematic is as you start aggregating that kind of traffic through the network. If an exchange serves 500 customers, and each of them want to pull 5 Mb continuously, then you're talking about a 2.5 Gb backhaul; if you have an actual connection to the Internet for every 5 local exchanges, that means you'd need to buy a 12.5 Gb/s x 24/7 pipe from the Tier 1 provider. To do that, you're talking Real Money.
What I suspect the problem is, and why you can't use all the bandwidth that Comcast advertises to you, is because Comcast only itself buys a fraction of the connection to the global net that it would need, in order to provide that level of service.
The bottleneck probably isn't down at the local level, it's up where Comcast's network meets the rest of the Internet; they're not peering, they have to buy transit from another provider, thus they have an incentive to try and discourage people from using too much traffic.
The best solution to this, IMO, would be to have two separate limits on traffic, one limit (say, 128kb/s continuously, or an equivalent amount of burst traffic, maxed at 6Mb/s) for packets that actually need to transit to the global net, and another limit for packets that never leave Comcast's copper (6Mb/s continuously). This could be expressed either as a distinct amount of transfer per month, or as rates.
Using those figures just for an example (128kb/s continuous global, 6Mb/s continuous local), you'd be able to push approximately 40GB per month onto the public net, and 1.9TB per month on the Comcast network. (I think I did my math correctly...)
Re:lol, moustrap, mouse (Score:5, Insightful)
Does this mean... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:compare to land (Score:4, Insightful)
The unlimited access is for the bulk, most common, practical part of the service. All of the other features are optional and non-essential to the basic function of the telephone network. The "limits" are such that they do not interfere in any conceivable practical use of the system, even going as far as including many 24/7 dialup connections to Internet.
The geographical area restrictions are for the far less common usage, and historically originate from the fact that various telephone companies used to be restricted only to the sets of wires within their corresponding geographical areas, thus nessecitating peering agreements and fees/contracts associated with those. At least that was the original excuse.
And this mumbo-jumbo has any bearing on the topic of discussion how precisely?
And despite of all these mighty efforts at obfuscation, you still did not manage to hide the fact that the telephone networks are required to sustain a reasonable level of service, even at a peak hour, sufficent to allow a vast majority of calls to be serviced, and the remainder merely with a small delay. And all of that without the need of snooping on conversations and terminating those deemed "unfairly" using the system.
Total hogwash. They are both packet switching networks. The only unit of capacity that has any bearing on both is full-size data packets switched per second. Additionally, PSTN systems suffer from added complexities of having to sample, encode, and decode analog voice data, which pure data networks do not have to deal with.
Right, and a broadband connection takes a discrete unit of bandwith per connection, either 1mb/s, 5mb/s or 100mb/s depending on the underlying transport technology. The fact that it can take less is as relevant to the discussion as the fact that the PSTN connection can take less then 56k when silence is being transmitted. According to your genius reasoning, the PSTN network should be designed to handle mostly silence and croak when all of the people start "unfairly" chit-chatting at the same time.
All of which meant dick when people use faxes, dial-up connections, and what not. Face it, the only analysis feasible is practical masurement of the network usage and expanding it to meet capacity. Demanding that people start calling
Re:lol, broadband, junkie (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Two Choices (Score:3, Insightful)
And that is the right kind of throttling. ISPs should not care what is in the packets. If I have been using more than my share of bandwidth, throttle me. However, don't peek at my packets and decide that some of my traffic is worth less than the other. The ISP may give me x bandwidth for bulk traffic and y bandwidth for priority traffic, but it isn't the job of ISP to decide what traffic is bulk and what is priority.
That is what net neutrality is really about.