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| Richard's article actually understates the problem I see that we have some ISP bashers here. Have any of you ever thought that maybe -- just maybe -- ISPs manage traffic and restrict P2P because it is necessary to provide reasonable quality of service to their customers?
The fact is that uTP was explicitly stated -- by its developers -- to be an end run around providers' reasonable network management practices, and Richard is absolutely correct when he notes that it could cause severe network problems.
In fact, Richard understates the case, because he neglects to mention one extremely important point. By switching to UDP, BitTorrent will not only compete with VoIP and some video and audio applications but also with DNS.
This could well be catastrophic, because DNS (domain name service), as ISPs know all too well, is a "critical path" protocol in virtually every application. If DNS is slow, EVERYTHING ELSE that users do will also be slow. Remember, most network applications, including Web browsers, have to stop and wait -- unable to do anything else -- until they resolve one or more domain names. So, they'll hang frustratingly if DNS packets are dropped due to congestion. And what underlying transport protocol does DNS use by default? UDP. (It can use TCP as well; however, it does so if, and only if, it has a lot of data to transfer. And TCP, due to its complex handshaking and "slow start" flow control, is much less efficient and much slower.)
So, what we're talking about is not just congestion but sand in the gears of the entire Internet.
Also, because uTP does not conform to any explicit congestion management protocol that could detect congestion BEFORE packets are dropped, the only way it would be able to detect congestion in the network would be after packets were dropped. Which means that by the time it did anything -- IF it did anything -- to mitigate the congestion it caused, it already would have damaged the network.
Finally, do you actually trust downloaders -- who already, in the vast majority of cases, are brazenly engaging in illegal activity -- to be courteous to anyone? There's no honor among thieves, folks. | | |
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| said by SuperWISP:This could well be catastrophic, because DNS (domain name service), as ISPs know all too well, is a "critical path" protocol in virtually every application. If DNS is slow, EVERYTHING ELSE that users do will also be slow. Of course you could prioritize port 53 traffic, so that it wasn't so slow. Since you're already using tcp for zone transfers anyway, why not use tcp to carry all your dns traffic?
Or you could just raise the priority of udp packets as the need arises.
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Pv8man
join:2008-07-24
Hammond, IN | reply to SuperWISP
Maybe so, but at least we the people have a little leverage against the distribution discrimination. | |
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