Pipes
@co.uk
| reply to NetAdmin
Re: Is this a good thing for the net?
No, the stereotypical heavy BT user is someone who compulsively downloads and seeds to curate a collection of data which in a lot of cases they don't even use in its entirety. It's a habit thing, but it's not hugely technical.
There's no reason why mass BT users need smarts to shove data around. They don't need their machines patched up to date. Hell, a lot even use Windows- go look at the stats for how many 'doze machines are patched up to date (yeah, I know Windows Update is slow and clumsy, but still).
Chances are, you average BT junky isn't running a jailed client on an OpenBSD box- they're running uTorrent, Vuze or whatever on the malware-riddled Windows PC that they use for everything. While some may accuse this view of assuming the lowest common denominator, I'd say it's more regression to the mean. |
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anothercomment
@anonymouse.org
| reply to funchords
Re: Sorry, but funchords is not correct
said by funchords  :Other than the 28 year history of the Internet? The success of Skype? How did Shareware ever get distributed? The first personal websites? Yet, while all of that was going on, server-based NNTP and email and irc also thrived (irc is an interesting example all to itself). It's always been a mix with a healthy amount of peer-to-peer going on. Not sure what your ISP technical or business involvement was with the 28 years of the Internet, but you fail to answer the business statement of "doing the ISPs a favor"
Comparing p2p with personal websites is like comparing the space shuttle with a model rocket. Even Skype bandwidth has interactive needs with not a substantial amount of bandwidth. |
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funchords
Hello
Premium,MVM
join:2001-03-11
Washington, DC
 ·Verizon Online DSL
 ·Skype
| reply to billb
said by billb :
If end to end bandwidth is paid for today by content and consumers, what happens when only one side pays 1/2 of the bill? Can you provide business analysis data which backs up your statement?
Other than the 28 year history of the Internet? The success of Skype? How did Shareware ever get distributed? The first personal websites? Yet, while all of that was going on, server-based NNTP and email and irc also thrived (irc is an interesting example all to itself). It's always been a mix with a healthy amount of peer-to-peer going on.
We do not need to pick from a menu of one single business model for a healthy Internet market. Several models can coexist successfully. It's a mistake to restrict it to one and treat the rest some kind of abuse.
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billb
@comcast.net
| reply to funchords
said by funchords :Blizzard's doing the ISPs a favor -- instead of tracking the same bits 5-7 million times across some Comcast border gateway, it gets them inside via P2P where they're distributed without any peering cost. I think you are missing a few things in this blanket statement. If end to end bandwidth is paid for today by content and consumers, what happens when only one side pays 1/2 of the bill? What about the costs to upgrade infrastructure for new upstream or exit bound traffic? What happens to backbone providers?
Can you provide business analysis data which backs up your statement? |
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espaeth
Digital Plumber
Premium,MVM
join:2001-04-21
Minneapolis, MN
·voip.ms
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 ·Comcast
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| reply to funchords
Re: Sorry, but espaeth is correct
said by funchords :Blizzard's doing the ISPs a favor -- instead of tracking the same bits 5-7 million times across some Comcast border gateway, it gets them inside via P2P where they're distributed without any peering cost. The regional peering isn't where the costs are. In fact, with Comcast's ibone infrastructure they now meet the number of geographical peering points that they can probably peer with their upstream vendors for little or no cost.
Blizzard isn't doing anyone but themselves a favor, and they sure aren't saving any ISP even a small amount of money. |
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funchords
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| reply to espaeth
said by espaeth :said by NetAdmin :I taking issue with the concept that somehow content providers are cheating the system some how, getting free bandwidth. There is no such animal. There sort of is. In the case of companies like Blizzard shifting to P2P patch distribution, they are moving the distribution burden from their infrastructure where they would pay a fair price for bandwidth to ISP networks where pricing is based on an assumed level of usage. Blizzard's doing the ISPs a favor -- instead of tracking the same bits 5-7 million times across some Comcast border gateway, it gets them inside via P2P where they're distributed without any peering cost.
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NetAdmin
CCNA
join:2008-05-22
| reply to espaeth
said by espaeth :In the case of companies like Blizzard shifting to P2P patch distribution, they are moving the distribution burden from their infrastructure where they would pay a fair price for bandwidth to ISP networks where pricing is based on an assumed level of usage. I agree, but whose fault is it that users consume bandwidth beyond the "assumed level of usage"? Providers. Providers, and I work for one, don't make those levels of usage known to consumers. There never was a line drawn in the sand saying this is too much usage. Consumers were sold an unlimited connection, without any qualification of what unlimited meant.
The problem is that ISPs marketed their connections as one thing, knowing the network could not support it, while consumers and the applications they loved took advantage of the vaguely worded "unlimited" connection.
If application providers, like Blizzard knew the limitations of the network, they would be more inclined to stay within them. I remember when FPS games could be played over dial up quite nicely. Now some games are so poorly coded that you are required to have a broadband connection to use multiplayer functions.
Make the limits known. What is the assumed level of usage that is expected from a customer?
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espaeth
Digital Plumber
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| reply to NetAdmin
said by NetAdmin :I taking issue with the concept that somehow content providers are cheating the system some how, getting free bandwidth. There is no such animal. There sort of is. In the case of companies like Blizzard shifting to P2P patch distribution, they are moving the distribution burden from their infrastructure where they would pay a fair price for bandwidth to ISP networks where pricing is based on an assumed level of usage. |
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NetAdmin
CCNA
join:2008-05-22
| reply to espaeth
said by espaeth :If your monthly subscription fee actually covered the cost of high bandwidth usage then there would be no reason for ISPs to waste time and money on network management. I certainly won't argue against that. I've been saying for awhile now that the costs paid by subscribers are too little for the speeds they are getting. Going from $50/month for 1.5Mbps/256kbps to where we are now without a massive infrastructure upgrades seems disconnected from reality. The price war is part of the problem; current bandwidth prices are too cheap for the level of contention with in the network.
I taking issue with the concept that somehow content providers are cheating the system some how, getting free bandwidth. There is no such animal.
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espaeth
Digital Plumber
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| reply to NetAdmin
said by NetAdmin :Nobody is magically shifting costs anywhere because all the costs are paid for by everyone connected to the network. If your monthly subscription fee actually covered the cost of high bandwidth usage then there would be no reason for ISPs to waste time and money on network management.
It's like insurance -- you don't get $250,000 for $100/mo; you get coverage for very specific events with very specific exclusions. Once insurance companies have to start paying out too many claims they have to start adjusting premiums or start clamping down on coverage. We're seeing this same equilibrium being worked out in the ISP space now. |
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funchords
Hello
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Washington, DC
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| reply to FelixMc
Re: Is this a good thing for the net?
So far, the reviews of Bennett's article have been tremendously bad. The only thing he accomplished here was to earn disrespect for himself.
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swhx7
Premium
join:2006-07-23
Elbonia
·RoadRunner Cable
| reply to SuperWISP
Re: Sorry, but espaeth is correct
said by SuperWISP :It's necessarily much more expensive to deliver bandwidth to the end user via the last mile than it is to deliver it at a server farm. I know this because I'm out there every day -- on roofs, in users' homes, climbing radio towers -- to make that "last mile" link. Content providers should not be able to shift their bandwidth costs to ISPs, multiplying them in the process. See my testimony before the FCC at » www.brettglass.com/FCC/remarks.html for a detailed explanation of why.
Your whole presentation exemplifies exactly the fallacy I was pointing out. It amounts to "everyone must adapt to the existing bottleneck in the last mile, instead of the last mile being improved; if users make problems for ISPs existing business model then users must be restricted instead of ISPs changing".
Just to single out one example, you claim to believe in network neutrality, but condone the ISPs' prohibitions of servers - precisely one of the most egregious violations of network neutrality. |
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FelixMc
@ac.uk
| reply to devnuller
Re: Is this a good thing for the net?
I think this will be a shotgun blast to the foot. Mainstream support will turn and restrictive laws will be created to fight P2P.
»www.theregister.co.uk/2008/12/01···ent_udp/ |
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NetAdmin
CCNA
join:2008-05-22
| reply to espaeth
said by espaeth :Which is great if people actually update their software. Considering the number of SQL slammer packets I still see hitting my firewall to this day, forgive me if I remain skeptical that this will make a difference anytime soon. There is a significant level of difference in the sophistication of the heavy BT user and the average user with an unpatched XP Home box at home. Heavy BT users are the types of people who tend to obsessively upgrade their software to be on the bleeding edge.
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Bar Humbug2U
@ntl.com
| reply to SuperWISP
Re: Sorry, but espaeth is correct
said by SuperWISP :It's necessarily much more expensive to deliver bandwidth to the end user via the last mile than it is to deliver it at a server farm. I know this because I'm out there every day -- on roofs, in users' homes, climbing radio towers -- to make that "last mile" link. Content providers should not be able to shift their bandwidth costs to ISPs, multiplying them in the process. See my testimony before the FCC at » www.brettglass.com/FCC/remarks.html for a detailed explanation of why. interesting, taken from your text
"I founded LARIAT -- a rural telecommunications cooperative -- to bring Internet to the community. I and other interested business owners started by borrowing a bit of bandwidth from the University to build a "proof of concept" network, and then transitioned to buying our own. At the time, a T1 line cost $6,000 a month, but we pooled our money and partnered with other providers to bring the connection into my office.
The problem, once we got it there, was how to divvy it up among all the people who were paying for it. The answer turned out to be the techology upon which I'd worked here at Stanford. We bought some of the NCR radio equipment and set up a metropolitan area network spanning downtown Laramie. As far as I or anyone else can tell, this made us the world's first WISP, or wireless Internet service provider.
Fast forward to 2003. The Internet was now well known, and the growing membership of LARIAT decided that rather than being members of a cooperative, they simply wanted to buy good Internet service from a responsible local provider. So, the Board prevailed upon me and my wife -- who had served as the caretakers of the network -- to take it private. We did, and have been running LARIAT as a small, commercial ISP ever since. But after all these years, our passion for bringing people good, economical Internet service hasn't changed. And nothing can beat the sense of achievement we feel when we hook up a rural customer who couldn't get broadband before we brought it to them -- or when we set up a customer who lives in town but has decided to "cut the cord" to the telephone company or cable company and go wireless with us. We make very little per customer; our net profit is between $2.50 and $5 per customer per month. But we're not doing this to get rich. We're doing this because we love to do it.
"
so how is it that you with roots in the "telecommunications cooperative" operations and a person that took your free alocation from university bandwidth to "build a "proof of concept" network. so your not averse to taking others bandwidth as long as it innovates for YOU, BUT YOU have NOT seen fit to TURN ON MULTICATING to and from your paying end users today ?.
how is it you have not taken a very small amount of your current profits, and returned a very small amount to the free initatives in paying a few £100 per advance to the torrent java AZ/Vuse coders and related free codebases to retrofit Multicasting and a generic IP multicat tunnel for any and all P2p/torrent traffic to use TODAY, so advancing and innovating on what came before , plus then being in a position to save VAST amounts of local ,national and intercontinental bandwidth.
lets be clear on this, if it were not for the content providers (and that means eveyone that uses and contributes to thisand many other MBs etc) then there would be anyone wanting to pay for a broadband connection in the first place, we end users creat the demand, we create the content, and we pay the asking price for our connections world wide....
would you be happy for the likes of Vuse, BitTorrent, and the multitude of video P2p vendors that take our content pay for server cache and related Hardware space in every single ISPs racks, im sure you would welcome that.
but your not willing to cache the unicast torrents inside your ISP and serve them to your paying end user last mile customers if you have to buy the caching torrent kit or turn on Multicasting and pay a coder to retrofit the required code on the cheap, or even setup a simple multicast tunnel on your web side co-locations racks the for any non US users to connect to over a Multicast tunnel.
"BBC's "iPlayer" P2P software is causing a similar effect. While the BBC is not a for-profit entity" true but we end users in the UK have PAYED the cost of the production and delivery of the content, the very content your US end users want to also see and use their payed for ISP connections to get it.
the BB havbe and are still running the multicast peering to ISPs that are willing to turn ON multicating to and fromthe end users, alas the worlds ISP dont want to give the end users that multicat ability.
simply put the Multicast video and torrent/P2p fromthe like of the BBC are available, the working Multicast codebases are are there and available, and all the worlds ISPs router and ralated kit have multicast capabilitys as a generic use, BUT YOU as the ISP owner have turned it all off the the end users, your not after innovating or helping the conoperatives of today and tomorrow,your just looking after your self and will move on to other things if you can t make your cashflow THE EASY antiquated unicast IP way.
shame someinnovation, take whats already available and help this really old and underused Multicast grow, as the OWNER of the ISP and make available Multicast tunnels for the UK BBC and users to use on your local ISP network and related peered kit around the world, and tell us about it so we can use it...... |
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imMute
@umn.edu
1 edit | reply to devnuller
Re: Is this a good thing for the net?
You guys can argue about whether or not one method causes more congestion than another or whether or not throttling is legal, moral, ethical, whatever.
*I* however, use what is quite possibly the best ISP in the USA - think of it as the antithesis of Comcast. They run the internet, cable, and phones for about a dozen residential cities in this south eastern area of South Dakota. The largest city is Brandon, at a population of over 6000. Three years ago, the admins at Alliance realized that their current copper network was going to become overwhelmed with the new HD channels, and people wanting more and more bandwidth to the internet.
At this point they had two choices:
1) Throttle everyone's internet connection, RST p2p connections, and other asshattery.
2) Spend $$$ to upgrade
Guess which is cheaper? #1 Guess which one they picked? #2
That's right, they spent $4 _million_ and 2 years upgrading all of Brandon to a fiber based network. First thing they did was replace their copper "backbones". What did I see resulting from this? My peak DSL download speed doubled from 200 KB/s to 400 KB/s and my bill stayed the same. When they finally got fiber run to the home (and yes, the fiber terminates in the Demarcation Point or the Network Interface Box on the back of my house) I had the option of picking 3, 10, or 15 megabit service. This fiber network also runs the cable television and phone lines. I currently have the 15 megabit, and utorrent peaks out just under 2MB/s
My bill has hardly changed in years and the quality of service has done nothing but go up.
Moral of the story? To ISPs: Shut up about the "costs of upgrading" and other bull like that. Upgrade your damned networks. If a little ISP in South Dakota has the ability to run enough fiber *to the home* to eventually give us all 1 TB/s bandwidth, you can sure as hell follow suit. |
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espaeth
Digital Plumber
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Minneapolis, MN
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| reply to NetAdmin
said by NetAdmin :I would like to point out that more BT clients are now setting defaults that eliminate this issue. Most BT clients will shutdown the transfer once the user has reached an Upload to Download ratio of greater than or equal to 1. Users have to manually change that option to seed indefinitely. Which is great if people actually update their software. Considering the number of SQL slammer packets I still see hitting my firewall to this day, forgive me if I remain skeptical that this will make a difference anytime soon. |
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NetAdmin
CCNA
join:2008-05-22
| reply to espaeth
said by espaeth :You start a standard upload of that 400MB video to Grandma Ginny, walk away, and once your transfer finishes there is no more traffic on the network. Using a P2P application, on the other hand, will keep putting bits on the network for as long as you let the application run. Little Timmy queues up some MP3s to download in the morning before he goes to school -- even though the transfer will probably finish in the first 30-45 minutes, the P2P app will keep uploading to other P2P clients the entire time he's away at school, or even longer if he leaves the client running after he gets home. I would like to point out that more BT clients are now setting defaults that eliminate this issue. Most BT clients will shutdown the transfer once the user has reached an Upload to Download ratio of greater than or equal to 1. Users have to manually change that option to seed indefinitely.
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There is no such thing as too much vacation, but I would wager that there is such a thing as too little. |
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NetAdmin
CCNA
join:2008-05-22
| reply to a333
said by a333 :The throttling of particular packets by itself violates the principles of TCP. No, it violates the End-to-end design principle. TCP is designed is such a way that it works VERY well QoS schemes.
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There is no such thing as too much vacation, but I would wager that there is such a thing as too little. |
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