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Net Neutrality and BitTorrent - No More Throttling? 243
Umaga's Purse writes "Will ISPs still be able to throttle BitTorrent traffic now that a significant proportion of it is legit? It's a tough question, especially for ISPs like AT&T (which agreed to run a neutral network in order to gain approval for its merger with BellSouth from the FCC). It's not just a problem for AT&T, though: 'ISPs that have made no such agreements may not need to worry about BitTorrent taking over their networks, but they do need to wrestle with the issue of how to handle it now that so many legal uses of the protocol are available. Do they want to irritate their BitTorrent-using contingent, or let BitTorrent flow unhindered at the risk degrading the experience of those who don't download torrents?'"
Which portion? (Score:4, Insightful)
Says who? Not that I disagree, but it would be interesting to read a study done on the matter...
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But for the record, there were ALWAYS legit uses for BitTorrent. It's just that they're legitimate POPULAR uses now.
Re:Which portion? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Which portion? (Score:5, Informative)
But as always, it comes down to the bucks, if your ISP allows unthrottled bittorrent traffic, YOU will pay the costs in the end, by higher fees. Or possibly, your ISP goes out of business
Re:Which portion? (Score:4, Interesting)
Blizzard undeniably uses bittorrent for the wow updater, yes, but me and all of my friends would argue the "quickly". It's dog slow and unreliable. No, its not a router issue or anything, we all torrent perfectly fine elsewhere (and if we were able to load the torrent in a good client like utorrent, maybe we wouldnt have a problem with this one). In the end a lot of people just close wow's uploader and wait until its up on fileplanet/filefront/etc.
I don't know whos fault it is, but I just had to throw that in there.
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Apply that throughout the whole torrent and the net effect is a slower rate of block distribution.
Blizzard have a constant HTTP seed providing blocks, so the torrent is never in an unseeded state, and at least one primary seed has a significant amount of bandwidth!
Incidentally, I t
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I can remember countless occasions with new Quake2, CS, Diablo II patches etc that were made available on ftp servers who quickly died and noone could upgrade for a day or two until the preasure alleviates. Admittingly you dont get your 1MB/s all the time, but atleast you (and all your buddies) get the patch.
I've downloaded with the Blizzard downloader in 1 MB/s + at a number of occasions, i'm happy with what it's doing. And furthermore.. the Blizz
Re:Which portion? (Score:4, Informative)
And of course the background downloader is actually throttled by blizzard so that it doesn't eat up your connection, even if you have a dial-up modem(I suppose it should be smarter than this, but blizz didn't really want complaints). The actual downloads on the day(at least up until the last few weeks) have always been quite snappy.
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You've just made my list, pal.
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This may be a dumb question, but... (Score:4, Interesting)
So, if the tracker port number changes and the client port number changes, how is it being blocked?
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Software (Score:2)
My university uses one to block all filesharing apps. It's done because there are about 15k people living in halls and these things eat up all the bandwidth. In fact, a number of people have recently been disconnected for using p2p software when they shouldn't be (it's against T&C, besides we're on an academic network).
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Re:This may be a dumb question, but... (Score:4, Insightful)
Amen to that. In fact NO provider in the US will give you unlimited of anything but dialup and that only because it's too slow to be an issue and they don't even run the modem banks any more, they pay someone to send their users to the right places.
Comcast cable limits you to 90GB (through human intervention, not automatically.) Hughesnet satellite limits you to 350MB/4 hours. Et cetera.
Oh AND, your cellphone provider WILL terminate your service if you roam too often, which makes you unprofitable. So you're wrong about that anyway.
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Re:This may be a dumb question, but... (Score:5, Interesting)
A sensible approach to make you happy (maybe) would be to limit the amount of bandwidth at each QoS level defined. If you want to burn your 500mb/month of highest QoS on bittorrent then so be it. Make the lowest tier of QoS truly unlimited. or some scheme like that.
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I assert this this is incredibly unrealistic, depending on the definition of "low." this is about as ludicrous as "let's do away with that silly hard drive/memory/cache thing (eg, the memory hierarchy) and 'just' ma
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Re:This may be a dumb question, but... (Score:4, Interesting)
Using QoS on bittorrent is akin to my phone company telling me what I can discuss on the phone. In the end it should only matter how much bandwidth you use.
This isn't so, in general. QoS restricts traffic by type. So throttling bittorrent and prioritizing Web traffic is more like making sure regular voice on phones has priority over text messages, where that speed is less critical. The basic idea of QoS as it was initially conceived was to insure VoIP and video conferences did not lag, at the expense of a Web page loading a little more slowly or a bittorrent downloading a bit more slowly yet. This can be misused, say by degrading service on the ports used for one type of VoIP, and not on another, when your competitor offers their service on the one you're degrading. In general, however, encrypting packets makes this less important.
What is a real concern and needs to be addressed by net neutrality legislation is assigning quality of service that is different for the same traffic type, but for a different origin. Assume everyone moves to strongly encrypted packets and network operators have no idea what is in a given packet. That still doesn't stop them from assigning higher priority to packets that originate from their own VoIP servers and low priority to packets transiting their network from an origin that hosts their competitor's VoIP service. Worse yet, it does not stop some network operator who has no relationship with anyone but peering networks from going to Google and telling them all packets originating from Google's IPs are going to be set to a a lower priority than packets coming from MSN and Yahoo, unless Google is willing to pay an extra fee, and then going and doing the same thing to MSN, then Yahoo. Net neutrality with regard to who, rather than what, is a lot more important, in my opinion, than this focus on traffic types. I fear it is being overlooked in the discussion of this topic in the news and what that bodes for the resultant litigation.
Re:This may be a dumb question, but... (Score:5, Informative)
The problem is that none of us are paying what it costs the ISPs to deliver 6Mb download. We're still paying the same prices or less for what we were paying for ISDN 10 years ago, or DSL 3 years ago. Now companies are upgrading their pipes over and over, mainly the "last mile" so they can provide as much bandwidth as possible to the users.
The problem is all this has to go through upstream "choke points" where 5000 people on 100Mbit connections to the internet all go through one or two Gigabit links (at least in our ISP, this is the case).
You can say "upgrade" if you want, but you're not paying enough. So we look at other ways to make it work. We're not rate limiting usually, just "smoothing" the traffic. If one person is using 45Mbit for a while and nothing else is going on then fine.. but rarely is that the case. Usually if it's during peak hours we want to throttle back the 45Mbit torrenter and open up the bursty traffic. The torrent guy doesn't really notice (he's probably not even sitting at his computer, and it just takes a little longer to get the file) and it keeps the web browser people and the mail sending people from complaining.
Having been on both sides of the fence several times I can say this:
If you want real bandwidth, pay for it. Sprint doesn't throttle anyone and almost never lets their pipes get oversubscribed (at least not at the edge). They're massively expensive though.
Don't want to pay for the cake but still want cake? Open an ISP that provides "true 10Mbit up and down to users, no gimmicks no rate limits no oversubscription" and market the hell out of it. Most people would say the business model would fail, but as a customer you know what you want, maybe you can make it work?
Re:This may be a dumb question, but... (Score:4, Informative)
They're charging more than enough to provide the service they promise. That's not the problem.
In Sweden I could get that 10Mb/s symmetrical connection you mention - for less than I'm paying in the US for the cheapest available ADSL connection. That's a market with far more regulatory overhead, and LESS effective subsidy as well. Here in the US we've already PAID the telecom companies, in the form of public subsidies, for end to end fiber optic across the country. The telecoms took the money and laid some dark fibre but never opened it up. They're creating artificial scarcity to keep their profit margins up.
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Re:This may be a dumb question, but... (Score:5, Interesting)
Classifying network traffic based only on the port went out the window well over 5 years ago when modern packet shapers came to the market which were able to analyze the very contents of packets and classify them based on the type of service they contained rather than the port they used.
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My two cents says that it's none of my ISPs business what my packets contain. It may be their business how much bandwidth I use -- but it shouldn't matter if that bandwidth is VoIP, bittorrent, HTTP or a VPN. 100GB is 100GB regardless of what protocol generated the traffic.
Agreed, but net neutrality is about something more important than the type of traffic, it is the source of traffic. Large network operators have an interest in throttling traffic types, especially if they offer a VoIP service using one
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The pattern is clear, encrypted, decrypted, port randomized, "common" port, etc.. If you think "encryption" is magically protecting you then you're deluding yourself.
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Classifying network traffic based only on the port went out the window well over 5 years ago when modern packet shapers came to the market which were able to analyze the very contents of packets and classify them based on the type of service they contained rather than the port they used.
This is true to some degree, but only for smaller links. Even random sampling of packets within larger links in order to analyze the traffic is really, really expensive. For the most part traffic engineering and shaping w
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So my packets are being subjected to automatic warrantless searches at domestic subnet border crossings?
"Your protocols, please."
Re:This may be a dumb question, but... (Score:5, Interesting)
there are a number of ways, from deep packet inspection (studying packets and throttling those that appear BT-ish) to just cutting the uplink speed for a naughty subscriber. i think i my ISP may have done that to me already, judging by my ratios.
i do my own traffic shaping in my house with a linksys router running openwrt [openwrt.org] and x-wrt [x-wrt.org]. i do all my BT stuff from a vmware machine dedicated to all things BT (a win2k workstation running uTorrent [utorrent.com]) and i told the QOS config to file all traffic to and from his internal IP as bulk. i also use QOS to give priority to all traffic to and from my VOIP telephone adapter.
in case you are not a linksys firmware freak... putting openwrt on your router is like upgrading your PC to openBSD. loading x-wrt on your openwrt router is like installing KDE on your openBSD machine.
the result is BT can leech and seed 24x7x365, the humans in the house can surf and game unimpeeded and phone calls suffer no jitter from MMORPGS or BT.
i feel sort of like a hypocrite for being a net neutrality fanboy and using QOS inside my firewall... but at least i can trust myself to not degrade my access in favor of my own proprietary offerings.
some may say i am a little too trusting, but i have known me for a long time... i think we can trust eachother.
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i feel sort of like a hypocrite for being a net neutrality fanboy and using QOS inside my firewall...
I see no disconnect there. The key difference is you're making the decision based upon your needs and your traffic. You're not having the decisions forced on you based on back-room extortion fees paid to your ISP by unrelated 3rd parties.
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It's kind of a catch-22. If you don't upload you're labeled "selfish" by the torrent network and shut down. If you do upload, the pattern is immediately visible to your ISP, and you can be singled out fo
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Thats easy as pie. They put a clause about you not being able to offer services to the Internet in the AUP then look to see who had the most upload traffic over the last month and look into their connection a little closer then normal. You fire up a bittorrent client and start sending out files and come home to find your net connection cut.
Did I miss something? (Score:4, Interesting)
On what, exactly, are you basing this assumption that "a significant proportion" of BitTorrent traffic is legitimate?
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On what, exactly, are you basing this assumption that "a significant proportion" of BitTorrent traffic is legitimate?
If you are actually interested in an answer, take Blizzard for example. They use BitTorrent technology to push updates for World of Warcraft which would normally be cost and logistically prohibitive to do. Also take into account that many smaller companies/sites/individuals which host their own multimedia content (e.g. freeware games, independent films, indie music) but don't have unlimited funds/bandwidth will often make their content available by torrent. Indeed, it's about the only option that makes sen
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Backwards (Score:3, Informative)
On the other hand, they do have a right to make their networks perform as efficiently as possible for their customers, and for the good of the web in general. The problem is that there's a fine line between the two.
For those wondering how ISPs filter bittorrent traffic... it's called layer 7 (or applicatio
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Am I a minority here?
Personally, I want my bittorent shaped. There are so many variables with a torrent, and I cap my upload and download speeds myself so that my other network stuff is still responsive. When I d/l a 1 gig+ download, I don't expect it to be instantanious, but I do expect my web pages to be pretty much instantanious when I'm downloading a torrent or not.
Am I a minority?
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Neither. (Score:3, Informative)
Neither. Instead, focus on upgrading the infrastructure and giving people more bandwidth, the US is already behind pretty much the rest of the world. . .
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Or they get together with the bittorrent people and work out a way they can run a caching server so they aren't fetching the same thing 5000 times from outside their network and wasting bandwidth.
I there had been some sort of push for decent caching or multicast support in the first place it's possible bittorrent would never have happened. If they're having infrastructure problems now, they only have their own lack of foresight to blame.
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So, basically the only reason my DSL connection is $110/mo instead of $10/mo is the local telephone company? I had no idea that the margins were so stupidly high. This makes a couple of business ideas I have even more likely to be good ideas.
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The ISPs are ticked off that users are actually using the bandwidth that they pay for. If they didn't sell so far over capacity, this wouldn't be an issue at all. I understand that BitTorrent can bring routers to thei
Correct me if I'm wrong... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Correct me if I'm wrong... (Score:5, Informative)
You are correct. Whoever asked this question clearly does not understand what network neutrality is about. To put it in terms that the person asking the question can understand: It is not about preventing degradation of BT, but rather about ensuring that BT can connect to all trackers with equally degraded quality. :-)
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And I don't blame them, as no one else really seems to agree on what the phrase "network neutrality" is supposed to mean, or even how it should be capitalized.
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Have you read the bill? I have read two different versions of bills, but I haven't seen the one as currently submitted, but it as quite clear in the net neutrality bills I read that blocking or slowing a service (like BT) would be illegal. If you think that is because someone doesn't understand what net neutrality is about, then you should talk to the legislators.
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Trade off (Score:4, Interesting)
I guess the tricky part is at teh beginning when too big of a change may trigger a mass exodus. If they slowly start throttling it down and don't see much change in their business then they can keep that up until it becomes a problem.
Personally I think if/when ISPs do this they could avoid a lot of hassles by explaining it to people up front, in plain English, instead of burying their right to throttle your "unlimited" bandwidth in a cryptic and massive Acceptable Use Policy.
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OTH though you begin to get a pretty good feel for what's going to work and what's not after you use it for a while. As an example, I've noticed a lot of BT aggregation sites are starting to show stats on seeders v. leachers, availability, avg. speed, etc. If things look good on "stats" but you're slow then you can infer a bit there. Granted this applies to those who know how to use BT (E.g. know when they're firewalled or not).
Another indic
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If you really want to be sure you have the best connection you'd need to do some empirical studies (or let some technology publication know that you'd be interested in subscribing or viewing their ads if they did one). This has the added benefit of working regardless
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Are you going to jump on some DSL lovin? Crap, no service in the area.
Satilite? Possibly no coverage in the area and 500-1500ms ping is rather high.
I really doubt they're worried about it. In many (most?) markets there's simply nothing to emigrate to.
It's obvious (Score:5, Insightful)
Most users don't download torrents.
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True. But most people download something, say, over port 80 or 443, and once you use TLS/SSL, packet inspection can't tell whether you are talking to your bank's secure website or a Bitorrent proxy via SSL.
This, by the way, is an argument for configuring business networks where port 80 & 443 are blocked outbound, and all the client machines have to go through a proxy machine, which can at least track the destination, and let you look for excessive usage via proxy-l
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Of course, this won't work if a user installs their own browser (in that case, the user would see a popup window saying the cert isn't valid).
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Put in other words.. (Score:4, Interesting)
Why do they have to stop? (Score:2)
Throttling BT downloads generally falls as a quality of service/defense of network integrity issue to rather than a censorship for profit issue.
Remember this one? (Score:3, Interesting)
If Robert X. Cringely is right, then Google has indeed calculated well.
Mutually Exclusive? (Score:2, Insightful)
For everyone wondering about the hard numbers... (Score:2)
The easy solution: (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe if you could actually deliver what you charge for (or only charge for what you can deliver), people wouldn't get so easily pissed about "degraded" service.
=Smidge=
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Don't sell me 2mbps upstream if you're just going to cut me off if I actually use it. Either guarantee that I'll have that speed any time all the time, or guarantee some slower rate that you can guarantee and lower my bill accordingly.
=Smidge=
Weird definition of Neutrality (Score:2)
All the net neutrality stuff I saw was aimed at keeping companies from discriminating based upon the source of traffic, not the type. What does it matter if you throttle or shape or prioritize bittorrent traffic (or traffic on any given port) so long as you apply it equally to all traffic in your network. The idea is to keep network operators from extorting some customers or degrading some service offered by a competitor. So long as they treat all bittorrent traffic the same how are they not being neutral?
Value added (Score:5, Insightful)
All without doing anything squinky: just identify which torrents are hot, add one of their own. It's what BitTorrent does, after all.
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My (possibly completely incorrect) impression of the problem ISPs have with BitTorrent is that it uses a lot of upload bandwidth at the last mile. Caching the data won't really help with that.
As I understand it, most ISPs have tons of bandwidth within their own network, but have much less bandwidth on the last mile. Essentially the last mile might be a 50Mbsp down/10Mbps up link shared among 20 customers. (Like 57% of all statistics, those numbers were made up.) So they might sell the connection as a
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Here's an idea (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Here's an idea (Score:5, Interesting)
How about before the ISPs even think of throttling down BitTorrent or any other type of traffic - they make even a casual effort to throttle back the 95% of email that is spam?
Why? Spam doesn't take up a significantly large portion of internet traffic and is a lot harder to separate out of the mix, than bittorrent. Even zombies performing DDoS attacks don't generally make up much of the overall internet traffic, although the spikes they create are problematic.
In reality, a number of large network operators don't want network neutrality. They want the opportunity to offer services and make sure competitors are unable to compete. They want to shake down companies individually by threatening to degrade their service and not their competitor's. They care about money; no hypocrisy there.
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I do realize that the amount of bandwidth for spam is much smaller than for bittorrent considering a lot of torrents are movies or large programs. However, I've seen some articles (and my spam folder contents) that indicate some spam is starting to move towards image-only in an attmept to get around filters, so there's a good chance spam bandwidth will increase. Also while it may be h
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Regards
It's a benefit to them (Score:2)
Cache? (Score:2)
Bandwidth Limiting (Score:2)
We've been footing the bill since the dawn of the Internet and for them to limit our bandwidth as if their job involves somehow ensuring that _we as internet users_ don't break the law - is totally ludicrous.
There should be a law in effect that says NO ISP can sell band
Re:Bandwidth Limiting (Score:4, Interesting)
I agree. Either give me exactly what I paid for (even if you have to adjust the price upwards), or advertise the REAL bandwidth (ie average connection speed), not some made up maximum theoretical speed if you're the only one on at 4:45 am. Overselling the service = selling something you don't have. That's tantamount to fraud if you advertise something you have no intention of providing.
Allocation strategies for ISPs: do Torrents lose? (Score:2)
1. For pay -- the more the customer pays, the faster the service
2. For cost -- the more costly the customer, the slower the service
3. For QOS -- the more time-critical the service/customer, the faster the service
4. "Fairness" -- equal bandwidth to everyone (throttle the hogs)
I suspect that Torrents lose with all four strategies.
Encrypted torrent traffic (Score:2)
I do work occasionally for some local isp's (Score:4, Informative)
Skynet (Score:3, Funny)
Got it wrong (Score:3, Informative)
..but thinking makes it so. (Score:2)
Just shows how absurd the whole "neutrality" is (Score:2)
You want politically controlled net services, you hate "big companies" and "cartel power"? Go to China, there the politician decide what the net looks like and how it works. And if China would pull the impossible and implement democ
but you also allow Throttling Bittorrent traffic? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:...and where is the torrent slowing down the ne (Score:2)
You're crazy.
No kidding. Back in the day it was easy to notice slowdowns. You could almost feel them if you had, you know, a couple telnets open to various places, and maybe an irc. These days the internet is such a big hairy mofo with so many paths that it has a much greater tendency to route around problems. You lose a few packets, your application (or your kern