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."
lol, moustrap, mouse (Score:5, Funny)
Re:lol, moustrap, mouse (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:lol, moustrap, mouse (Score:5, Insightful)
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You'll also find that most of them have clauses in there to deal with "abuse" of the service or network, and "abuse" is how THEY define it, not you.
To them, "abuse" could be you running Torrents 24x7 and saturating their network.
Don't kid yourself, the contract you entered into is written
Re:lol, moustrap, mouse (Score:5, Funny)
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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
well, it only makes sense (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:well, it only makes sense (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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.
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Even hosting websites, email, an ET server, and dns I still don't max out my connection even half the time
Re:well, it only makes sense (Score:4, Informative)
I've heard this before, and I'm not sure I buy it. Let's say 3 Mb/s costs $60/month. I see that Cisco's 12000 series router [cisco.com] go from 2.5 Gbps to 10 Gbps. Assuming that Cisco is being honest about their bandwidth capabilities (e.g. not lying through their teeth like a broadband service provider), that means that a single low-end Cisco 12000 series router can service about 800 customers (assuming that each one actually saturates the pipe 24 hours a day, 7 days a week), each paying $60/month, which equates to $50,000/month in revenue. Now, Cisco doesn't tell you how much these things cost (or even hint at how much), but lets say one router costs a (ridiculous) million dollars. In well under two years, the provider will have recouped the cost of the router itself. Even if the router lasts only a measly year after that, the provider clears an additional $800,000 on their initial investment to cover paying the admin staff (over three years, probably $600,000), power bills, rent, etc. That's pretty close to break even, if the router cost $1,000,000 and only lasted three years (somebody around here has to know what they cost and how long they last - I'll bet it's a rosier picture than I've painted). So I figure $60/month must cover the actual costs they'd incur if we all used the bandwidth we pay for (which would be almost impossible, even for a die-hard torrent user) - I find it impossible to beleive that they'd need to charge $600/month to turn a profit.
Re:well, it only makes sense (Score:4, Informative)
It's not that ridiculous. In fact, I'd say you're low-balling the cost by quite a bit. And if you want to have redundancy (no one likes having their service disrupted for days while you're waiting for a replacement card), you can start doubling that automatically. Not only that, but you're not accounting for the cost of doing anything with those connections. A local ISP has to buy service from one or more of the Tier 1/2s. Oddly enough, purchasing an OC-192 (that's that 10 Gbps pipe) isn't exactly cheap. Considering most of the world's backbones consist of OC-48s and OC-192s, and considering that the backbone providers don't want to oversaturate their own lines, they charge the local guys a heck of a lot for that OC-192. No local ISP could ever afford to purchase an OC-192 just for 800 users, and no backbone provider could ever support it as well.
The pricing worked rather well when people were only downloading relatively small files periodically. As long as traffic is bursty, that is. It's when people start downloading large files (like movies) constantly where everything goes awry. If you honestly expect to use that cable providers 5 Mbps down, 1 Mbps up service at $60/mo, when they in turn have to purchase 4 T1 circuits at ~$500/mo to support you, you deserve the crappy service you get. If you want to push that much traffic constantly, buy the T1s yourself.
Problem isn't the price, it's advertising (Score:3, Informative)
Whether the backbone pr
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 aggr
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2. the ISP provides them on their local network.
3. The ISP doesn't have to pay their tier-1 provider for the bandwidth, because it's all on their local net.
4. PROFIT!
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.
Re:compare to land (Score:4, Informative)
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: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:compare to land (Score:4, Informative)
Okay...
They also provide, for a fixed monthly fee, unlimited access to the telephone network.
Hardly. They offer very limited access to the telephone network--you can make and receive phone calls with a limited finite set of optional features such as caller-id and voicemail. They offer unlimited use of that application within, well, limits, including geographical toll boundries and pay-per-use products such as directory assistance and three-way calling.
IP networks offer an ever-expanding variety of access, limited only by the contractual terms of service that each customer agrees to at the time of purchase. In practice, those terms are most often loosely enforced, if at all, and usually only in response to some operational problem caused by a violation. New network applications are developed and widely adopted as time passes.
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.
Actually, telephony capacity is engineered to some threshold of dropped calls per 100 at the network's "busy hour". This threshold is either dictated by regulatory bodies or is left to the telco. Either way, few--if any--telcos build to "zero drops per 100 at busy hour".
Telephony networks are a smidge easier to engineer from a capacity perspective because there's fewer variables to address. A PSTN/TDM phone call takes a discrete unit of bandwidth per call, either 56K or 64K depending on the underlying transport technology. The only variables are start time and duration. Erlang modeling, based on queue theory, addresses this quite well; it isolates start time by normalizing duration to 3600 seconds/call and provides useful, realistic measurements.
IP networks, though, have difficult to model traffic flows with packets of varying size, varying latency from node to node--and from packet to packet within the flow all transmitted at different start times and with different durations. This is only exacerbated by the variety of applications on the network. Variables are nearly impossible to isolate (practically) and capacity planning is more reliant on utilization trend analysis rather than proactive modeling.
As an example, the network I help operate sells ISP service over DSL lines provided by a local carrier. We have a meager 300 or so customers that have DSL products that range from 384K down to 3M down. Let's normalize all of them to 1M to make the math straightforward. We pay our upstream providers about $30/M each month for connectivity. So you would have me pay ($30/M x 300M)==$9000 per month to support those customers. That's more than I currently charge agreggated across the whole group for DSL service.
Now, in reality, what is the actual average utilization for those 300 customers? Three megabits per second on average for the whole group. And that's just the amount on the direct circuit from the local carrier--not the amount from those customers that use my upstreams. Around 14% of their traffic goes to other customers on my network, so only 2.6M or so actually goes upstream. That's around $75/M monthly on average for upstream. Now I can afford to charge what I do, and still provide email, personal webpages, news, DNS, etc, plus staff 3 tiers of support. BTW, peak utilization for these customers doesn't exceed 5M 99.999% of the time.
Also in reality, I also have thousands of T1 (1.5 Mbps), dozens of DS3 (45 Mbps), six OC3 (155 Mbps) customers and 14 GigE (1000 Mbps) customers. My peak daily upstream utilization is around 800 Mbps for all customers combined. It's never spiked above 924 Mbps, including DoS attacks.
I price and operate my services according to that reality, not magic or fantasy. If you feel that means I lack common sense, then I submit that common sense...isn't.
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:compare to land (Score:5, Interesting)
Rather than fighting bittorrent, an ISP like Comcast could just put a cap on the traffic that you could send through to other networks (and publish what the limits are, in terms of burst versus constant throughput, etc.), and then give you your full unthrottled connection to other Comcast subscribers, because this really doesn't cost them anything. Their network ought to be capable of letting someone basically saturate their connection from one node to another node on the same subnet, and with some intelligent caching, they could keep a lot of the BT traffic here.
If they set up the incentive structure correctly, they could probably reduce the load at critical points on their network due to BT traffic, while giving end-users (both heavy downloaders and "burst" users) a better overall experience. They would also eliminate the incentive to obfuscute BT traffic and end the cat-and-mouse game that seems inevitable under the current system.
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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-
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Oh no no no! ISPs tried that. The people got up in arms because they're paying a premium rate (ha!) for their "broadband" connection, then when they find out they have to pay when they monopolize the service (3% of users using 80% of the bandwidth, f
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:compare to land (Score:5, Funny)
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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.
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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, w
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.
Re:well, it only makes sense (Score:5, Informative)
The price is formulated on the basis that you do not use it.
I agree with you - this is fraud and there is only one way to fix this.
The problem will go away immediately if ISPs turn off flat pricing and users start to pay for bandwidth used. Even better - if they start charging a differential/tiered pricing depending on the type of traffic. There is no rocket science here. The gear currently on the market is supposed to be able to do it (does it do it is a different matter).
The business models is well known and this is the way the Internet used to operate all the way up to the end of the 1990-es (especially in the slower peripheral parts). This was abandoned when the incumbent telcos entered the access market in the end of the 1990-es. They went after scale and port densities which resulted in bandwidth accounting features being abandoned across most of the equipment. Cisco broke all of its accounting by introducing CEF, other vendors were not any different.
Over the last 5-6 years most of the features crept back due to demand by business users so technologically the gear is in the same (or better) shape as before the telcos entered the market as far as accounting is concerned. In addition to that new gear from Ellacoya, P-cube and such can do things the old systems were not capable of.
All it will take to get this working now will be people who know how to formulate a viable product and tie this up all the way into billing, CRM and relevant backend systems. Unfortunately there are not that many people left capable of doing it in most ISPs so they prefer the BIG STICK(tm) or the "magic vendor silver bullet". It is easier. It does not require investment. It does not require thinking. It does not require competence. Sad, but true - this reflects the state of the industry.
It is rotten, it sucks and it hates its customers.
Re:well, it only makes sense (Score:5, Informative)
I work for an ISP. Yes, we oversubscribe. It's the way the business works. We only see problems when many people use their bandwidth *at the same time*.
Moving more data total does not cost any more many than for the electricity to move it. What costs more money is having more available bandwidth so that more can be moved at one time.
We get our bandwith from first-tier providers. They do not charge us by the amount we transfer, but they charge us for the speed of the port. They don't care how much we transfer in total, they only care how much they use at once. We do likewise for our customers, with the exception that we oversubscribe.
Oversubscribing doesn't cause problems as long as there's enough available bandwidth out and the hardware to handle it. Some people expect dedicated bandwidth, and for them there are the options of lower speeds or more money.
I want to see oversubscription come to an end, but I don't see it happening. The dropping price of bandwidth and network equipment is primarily driven by increasing customer demand for higher speeds rather than by an increased number of customers. Unless prices drop as customer demand for higher speed remains static (or at least grows slower than the prices drop), dedicated bandwidth at today's consumer-appropriate speeds and prices isn't going to happen.
I wouldn't have a problem with that, if... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Of course, she might have been pulling my leg. Can anyone confirm or deny this?
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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!
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
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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.
Let me sum up the counter arguments (Score:4, Insightful)
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He used a little "k"
768 kilobits != 6 megabit
Many other uses (Score:5, Funny)
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Many uses other than Movie Piracy (Score:5, Informative)
- Game Demos
- Software updates / upgrades
- Free / Legal Videos
Re:Many uses other than Movie Piracy (Score:5, Informative)
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Well maybe if you didnt have so many movie downloads going on you would have some bandwidth left
Re:Many uses other than Movie Piracy (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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].
Not quite... (Score:5, Insightful)
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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.
Re:Not quite... (Score:5, Interesting)
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Not from Shaw Cable in Western Canada. I had their 'Business' package and still had unencrypted torrent traffic throttled, negating the speed increase. Although they denied throtteling it, my speed went from 80k/s max on *every* stream, to 500k/s one some streams (encrypted)
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: (Score:3, Insightful)
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
They're not filtering content (Score:3, Informative)
Steganography? (Score:2)
Not a good idea (Score:2)
But I thought SPAM was 80% of traffic? (Score:5, Funny)
Wow, stunning efficiency, or bad statistics.
Re:But I thought SPAM was 80% of traffic? (Score:5, Funny)
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Or at least thats how I have heard it works, not positive.
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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.
"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
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."
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:Bittorrent will fight back. (Score:4, Interesting)
This is actually a common feature in many cryptosystems which serves to prevent a successful cryptanalysis via "cribs" or short passages of known plaintext within the cipher text, especially at known location such as the start of the message (the Germans made this mistake with their Enigma traffic during WWII for example with standard message headers on their daily weather reports to the U-Boat flotillas). If the protocol were modified to introduce random segments of padding (i.e. junk) into the packets then cryptanalysis via cribbing would most probably be rendered impractical.
In the mean time... (Score:2)
In the mean time i wonder if Allot Communication's "traffic management device" can withstand DDoSing.
They sure as hell are going to piss alot of people off with their scumware.
Illegal? (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
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
Stunned...but not (Score:4, Interesting)
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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
I have plenty of legit BT uses. (Score:2)
2. Maiet's "Gunz" which INSTALLS or UPDATES as it downloads data via Bittorrent
3. Bittorrent is used to transfer many of the game demos found on legitimate sites
4. I use it personally to share things I make and OWN.
In short, the ISPs are about to shoot themselves in the foot, again. Except this time, I think if I sue, I'm going to ask them in court "Whatever happened to that infrastructure upgrade that was supposed to come from 200 billion of our tax dollars?"
Has to be done (Score:5, Informative)
The thing is, bandwidth isn't cheap. People bitch that ISPs "oversubscribe", and that we can't really deliver our advertised bandwidth to everyone all of the time. This is true, but how do you think we manage to sell people 5Mb connections for $40/month? Do you know how much 5Mb of bandwidth costs and ISP? It's a lot more than $40. In the market I'm in, we pay THOUSANDS of dollars for that much bandwidth.
The real problem is that bandwidth is too expensive in this country, thanks to the likes of AT&T and MCI and all the other big players. They've got tons of unused fiber lying around, and it costs them next-to-nothing to use it, but it still costs the end-user (in this case, the ISP) a hell of a lot of cash.
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.
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I suggest you shop around then, 'cause I can buy 100Mbps of transit for just under $3000 a month.
Look at the complaints here on Slashdot.
Most of them are complaining about ISPs lying about the service they sell.
If you can't accommodate bit torrent that's OK, just sell an honest service plan that doesn't appeal to people using bit torrent, but does appeal
Re:Has to be done (Score:5, Informative)
The levels of oversubscription on some ISP's are just insane my previous cable company had a 512kbs cap per user (90 homes per channel not over subscribed) and had problem providing that to there head end at peak times. ISP's are going to 100x ratios and investing mroe in help desk and fixes than just getting more bandwith.
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.
What new ATT SBC does (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
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And, in the end, the ISP doesn't care if they're BitTorrent packets or not. If you're filling your inbound pipe for d
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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 bul
Token Bucket (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't get why ISP don't apply this to their customers, it would be perfect, or am I missing something?
ISPs oversell bandwidth to consumers: If they sell you 1 MB/s then they might have 1 MB/s for every 50 customers they serve. Now with a token bucket that fills at a rate of 10 to 30 KB/s, depending on demand, and has a capacity of perhaps 1 GB normal users would generally have full speed almost all the time, while heavy users would be limited to the bucket fill rate, unless they save up some tokens.
Furthermore it's a standaard traffic shaping algorithm, so I would guess the ISP's equipment could easily handle this.
What am I missing?
Re:Question (Score:5, Interesting)
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"Fist".
Up you ass.
About elbow deep.
(let's see, will this one be modded: Troll? Flamebait? Off-Topic? The suspense is KILLING ME!)
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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.
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
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