 pstewart
Premium,VIP
join:2005-10-12
Peterborough, ON
| Change ISP's Change ISP's - simple answer if you ask me. There are LOTS of service providers offering "truly unlimited" with no transfer caps, no throttling etc. I work for one such ISP and this question comes up frequently from customers.
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Core 2 Duo 2.66GHz-500GB RAID1+2TB NAS-4GB RAM-GeForce7950GX2-SB XFi-Nexicom 5 Meg ADSL | |
|  | Shark_615
join:2006-01-17
Pickering, ON
| Re: Change ISP's said by pstewart  :Change ISP's - simple answer if you ask me. There are LOTS of service providers offering "truly unlimited" with no transfer caps, no throttling etc. I work for one such ISP and this question comes up frequently from customers. Not in Canada. Theres essentially 2 and the rest just buy bandwidth from those two.
Luckily Rogers doesn't throttle business accounts yet but it looks like Bell does. | |
| | | pstewart
Premium,VIP
join:2005-10-12
Peterborough, ON
| Re: Change ISP's said by Shark_615 :said by pstewart :Change ISP's - simple answer if you ask me. There are LOTS of service providers offering "truly unlimited" with no transfer caps, no throttling etc. I work for one such ISP and this question comes up frequently from customers. Not in Canada. Theres essentially 2 and the rest just buy bandwidth from those two. Luckily Rogers doesn't throttle business accounts yet but it looks like Bell does. Huh? We don't buy any bandwidth from "2" you are thinking of.... are you referring to ISP's who wholesale some of Bell's ADSL infrastructure? That has nothing to do with bandwidth in the sense of how you reach the Internet - only how you get to your ISP.
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Core 2 Duo 2.66GHz-500GB RAID1+2TB NAS-4GB RAM-GeForce7950GX2-SB XFi-Nexicom 5 Meg ADSL | |
| | | | Shark_615
join:2006-01-17
Pickering, ON | Re: Change ISP's Whatever at the end of the day there are 2 main providers the rest resell their shit | |
| | | | | | | | | | | pstewart
Premium,VIP
join:2005-10-12
Peterborough, ON
1 edit | Re: Change ISP's adisor - good post!
The ISP I work for has their own ADSL2+ infrastructure as well - have had it for several years in fact.
Misinformed users think there is ONLY Bell in the telephone world around Ontario/Quebec - there's well over 30 phone companies serving this region and Bell happens to be the largest and best known.. plus a number of ISP's who are not phone companies but have taken colocation space inside the telco's premise such as Colba.
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Core 2 Duo 2.66GHz-500GB RAID1+2TB NAS-4GB RAM-GeForce7950GX2-SB XFi-Nexicom 5 Meg ADSL | |
| | | | | | Shark_615
join:2006-01-17
Pickering, ON
2 edits |
Come back when that piddly little piss ant ISP services a quarter of Bell or Rogers.
Sure there maybe a few little guys around but when it comes to real networks there are only two that cover ontario and quebec as provinces not a mile around montreal. | |
| | | | | | | koreyb
join:2005-01-08
Etobicoke, ON
 ·Primus Talkbroadband
 ·TekSavvy Solutions..
| Re: Change ISP's Shark_615,
You really don't totally understand how DSL works...
DSL is setup that only the DSLAM at the Bell office is shared.. The network is totally their own for each ISP providing it.
Teksavvy as an example who serves Ontario, Quebec, Alberta and BC are a prime example.
They only share area DSLAMS, their network is their own past that, which they use Peer 1 and Cogent as the backbone, NOT BELL CANADA. Rogers has a monopoly in the cable market so you can't really say much there..
The copper network is the only "SHARED" part with DSL, unless they are a direct reseller. | |
| | 
eh wut
@videotron.ca
 from:
antdude
| said by pstewart :Change ISP's - simple answer if you ask me. There are LOTS of service providers offering "truly unlimited" with no transfer caps, no throttling etc. I work for one such ISP and this question comes up frequently from customers. Now thats a dumb post, sorry if that was rude but is was dumb.
Health care in Canada SUX in major area's. What do you think its like in remote area's?
How much competition is there in remote area's who have no doctors, nurses, specialists and health programs?
As someone who works in the health field I know that many are just starting to enjoy some of the benifits of video conferencing with health specialists for a multitude of reasons.
If this is affected this will throw back many programs people in remote area's of Quebec and Ontario are just starting to have due to lack of health care professionals.
Yes Bell is directly involved in some of these health programs so they are very much aware. | |
| | | | | robertfl
Premium
join:2005-10-10
Mary Esther, FL | Re: Change ISP's Soon, all of the ISP's will do this. What if you can't change ISPs? Welcome to 1984.
If it's going to be this annoying I'll go back to dial up.
-Rob | |
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | Nuts
join:2006-04-27
Forest, OH | Re: Change Ip Sending of medical images across the internet is already happening. It happens every hour of every day. | |
| | | | | liquid0h
join:2003-02-03
Fort Walton Beach, FL
| I don't think it's illegal if there isn't any personal identifiable info on it.
I wouldn't mind if he shared it with colleagues as long as it didn't have my SSN or full name on it. If anything, having multiple docs look at it has definately gotta be better than one. | |
| | |
FactChecker
@cox.net
| Re: Change ISP's said by supergirl :Sending MRI scans on Bittorrent? Gee, now that's smart. How many privacy violations is that? None, if all personally identifiable information is removed, and in the case of scientific research in the medical field, almost all of it is removed.
Red herring. | |
| | 
antdude
A Ninja Ant
Premium,VIP
join:2001-03-25
| said by pstewart :Change ISP's - simple answer if you ask me. There are LOTS of service providers offering "truly unlimited" with no transfer caps, no throttling etc. I work for one such ISP and this question comes up frequently from customers. It's either for go back to dial-up (3 KB/sec at most) or stay with cable modem service. DSL (20K ft.) and FIOS are not available. Or get satellite service, but you know how expensive and slow that i especially for downloading and gaming (3D FPS mostly). | |
| 
KeepOnRockin
Music Lover Forever
Premium
join:2002-11-08
Beaverton, OR
 ·Comcast
| Double-Edged Sword Once again, ISP "BitTorrent throttling" is a incorrectly applied "blanket solution" to a bigger issue.
As I've said in the past, "blanket solutions" are rarely the best course of action. There ARE legitimate uses for the BitTorrent technology (such as open-source and, as mentioned above, scientific development).
If ISPs want to "play copyright cops", then they need to implement filters based on individual content being transferred via BitTorrent and not just throttle all torrent traffic. | |
| | backness
join:2005-07-08
K2P OW2 | Re: Double-Edged Sword and once an isp starts to tell me what i can and can't get. I cancel | |
| | 
Monster Rain
Premium
join:2002-08-03
USA
| said by KeepOnRockin :If ISPs want to "play copyright cops", then they need to implement filters based on individual content being transferred via BitTorrent and not just throttle all torrent traffic. When it comes to throttling, it has nothing to do with copyrights.
said by pstewart :Change ISP's - simple answer if you ask me. There are LOTS of service providers offering "truly unlimited" with no transfer caps, no throttling etc. I work for one such ISP and this question comes up frequently from customers. Many of the ISPs implementing these policies do 50-60Gigs per second, of traffic, at peak usage times to their upstream providers. It's a lot easier to mange traffic at the mom and pop level ISPs when all you have is a DS3 or a few GE links you hand off to ATT for example. | |
| |
Dirty Harry
@bell.ca
| Bell Sympatico says now it wants to be a cop in Canada, those liars and hypocrites need to first remove the beam in their own eyes.. Besides it is not against the Canadian laws, as clarified too by a Queen's court judge, to download anything off the net onto one's home personal computer for one's personal use.. so whose law is Bell enforcing.. the one for their own for own advantage and not even the Government's of Canada's laws, for the INTERNET is not regulated by the government of Canada still..
Bell Sympatico undeniably had wrongfully broken the terms of my unlimited download, high speed Internet contract agreement and wrongfully also refused to return my moneys for their breach of contract as well, plus more. For a contract to be legally enforceable, not only do all the parties to the contract have to get something in return, but they the guilty party they must also suffer a detriment.
"Money hungry, clearly greedy Bell Sympatico was willing for years now to even post false advertising promises Canada wide to all of the potential customers equally promising a high, reliable, stable high speed Internet system Canada wide even knowing before that they could and would not be able to do so. Experts can and have already testified that it was, and is still impossible for Bell to live up to all of it's past promises related here. But still Bell Sympatico, knowingly, wrongfully specifically did not provide the truthful information as to their actual inability to keep their promises to their potential customers beforehand when they signed into a contractual agreement. Who would be so stupid to go into their contract then if the knew the truth?"
I have now clearly, undeniably now many times stated to all, in detail in writing as well now, firstly to Bell Sympatico that Bell Sympatico undeniably had wrongfully in the last few years they had immorally broken the terms of my unlimited download, comparative high speed Internet contract agreement and they wrongfully, unacceptably also had refused to return my moneys for their breach of contract as well. There is clear evidence that they have wrongfully also done that also to a significant amount of other Bell Sympatico Internet customers too. They Bell Sympatico had also unacceptably, illegally misled many of their customers, me included, they had lied to me and to many others, and they had also used a false and unacceptable bait and switch business practice as well.The bait and switch tactic is clearly now considered a consumer crime under the federal and provincial laws. Bell lures customers with promises of low cost, unlimited downloads, high speed system or and then the falsely tries to switch them to a higher cost contract basically for the same services or less even. Bell Sympatico has also perpetuated numerous other deceptive business practices like blaming the customers, their computer, software falsely for the reasons of the slow Internet speeds.On the Internet Bell Sympatico has been acknowledged by many customers for the unacceptably poor customer support service too.
When I had accepted their Internet services Bell Sympatico had in our joint contract clearly promised me a unlimited download capability, a comparative steady, reliable, continuous high speed Internet service, and they next had clearly not done so. The system they supplied me generally was not a comparative high speed system, and they Bell Sympatico had even wrongfully capped my downloads speed as well. Bell Sympatico needs to go back to school and learn the basic definition of a valid, legally binding contract it seems too.One of the perverse statement often made by Bell in response to their not keeping the original promised terms, agreement to me was that Bell Sympatico could, can make changes to our contract, without my prior approval when the situation does not benefit Bell, Bell Sympatico or any other Bell, Bell Sympatico customers. This is false and legally is a clear breach of their contact agreement, obligation, tome. I have no contract ties to any other groups or persons only with bell and they had to, have to fulfill their promises to me of a comparative, high speed, unlimited downloads service.
CONTRACT - definition- an clear fixed agreement with specific terms between two or more persons or entities, between two or more competent parties in which a specific, fixed offer is made and accepted, and each party specifically benefits. The agreement can be formal, informal, written, oral or just plain understood. The agreement in which there is a promise to do something in return for a specific, fixed valuable benefit known as consideration. There must be a good and valid consideration, motive or inducement to make the promise upon which a party is charged, for this is of the very essence of a contract under seal and must exist, although the contract be reduced to writing. It is an agreement between two or more persons, concerning something to be, done, whereby both parties are next equally bound to each other to respect the fixed contract terms. Also there must be also the reciprocal or mutual assent of two or more persons competent to contract or for any subsequent changes to the contract. Every agreement ought to be so certain and complete, that each party may have an action upon it; and the agreement would be incomplete if either party withheld his assent to any of its terms. The agreement must, in general, be obligatory on both parties, or it initially binds neither
Breach- If one party fails to provide the promised benefit to the other, or makes changes to the contract without the other party's prior consent there is an unacceptable breach of contract, the one party clearly thus had failed to perform as required under a valid agreement with the other party.
Let me state clearly that Bell Sympatico my Internet service provider had also knowingly breached our contract by using rather substandard existing equipment when they had supplied me my high speed system and as a result they had wrongfully failed were unable to meet the promised contract agreement. They had breached my contract even knowing beforehand, subsequently too that their equipment would not be able to meet the promised terms of the contract. Next they Bell Sympatico in their wrongful response they immorally, unacceptably had tried also to confuse and deceive the marketplace, in their online Internet forums, in their letters to me. their phone calls. Bell Sympatico also immorally, wrongfully they resorted to misusing the federal communications law to harass and intimidate, or try and have customers silenced who dared to state the truth or to choose alternate products. Given the past, written undeniable, witnessed proof from me that even their technical; personnel, their managers, their sales force operates in a corporate culture where executive management choose to knowingly engage in illegal business practices, this is also is not acceptable... I clearly did not receive their full promised services, obligations, help, but next was even sent a couple of "form letters" stating that I basically cannot make a complaint or change for any reason and this is clearly stated on their web site. I rightfully do find it hard to believe that they can ever continue even to defraud any other unsuspecting customers in such a manner now and then hide behind the generic disclaimer they post on their web site.
And for this they Bell Sympatico should without doubt or prejudice be now fully prosecuted under the law, even by all of the federal justice Ministers. I and all abused Canadians have a full right to demand this from all Ministers, all levels of governments now too
*Bait and switch tactics involve the advertisement of a product, services on television or such other mass media at a low price. Upon visiting the premises of the retailer, or them accepting the advertised contract the consumer next finds that the seller is unable to fully meet the promises made, for the services, product advertised. Instead the seller diverts the attention of the consumer and tries to sell the consumer another high priced service, products. Their false trick of the seller was, is to draw the consumer using the low price advertisements as "bait" and "switch" over to other high priced products. This practice has been even too common among car dealers, electronics retailers and furniture sellers, even the Internet suppliers now too, etc. It is clearly considered unlawful to "bait and switch" and it is categorize also under fraud. Sadly companies often engage in unfair trade transactions to capitalize on consumer's ignorance, vulnerability, and their price consciousness too.
As the Ontario law society had wrote back to me even twice now and said their lawyers are allowed to lie even to the Queen's courts judges to defend their clients, it is up to the judge to determine if the lawyer has lied or not, and most judges wrongfully never even bother to do so it seems.. this too much lying really sounds like too many of the people working at Bell now that I have dealt with all this year too.
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bylo
Premium
join:2004-05-04
Waterloo, ON
| Re: Business Class Service said by priller :Of course, some ISP is going to make the ridicules argument that, if he's working from home, he needs to be on a business class service plan. Nope. As ridiculous that that argument would be they can't even use it. According to one of the Bell apologists on the referenced thread, "it appears that Nexxia [Bell's business Internet division] are throttling business coneections[sic] too"
And BTW Bell is throttling more than just P2P traffic, whether they know it or not. | |
| 
major marco
Res Firma Mitescere Nescit
Premium
join:2003-02-13
Stepford, CA
clubs: | Clearly NN Needs to be Passed Now Just more evidence to add to the NN argument in favor of passing this much needed law. | |
| | GhostDoggy
join:2005-05-11
Duluth, GA | Re: Clearly NN Needs to be Passed Now My lobbyist can kick your lobbyist's ar$e.  | |
| 
telcolackey
The Truth? You can't handle the truth
join:2007-04-06
Death Valley, CA
| Who's cheap? "He explains that, as a neurocognitive researcher who sometimes works from home, he regularly uses torrenting to send large image files (such as MRI scans) back and forth with co-workers."
Perhaps his company should be paying for a server in their infrastructure to house and transmit MRIs rather than expecting the ISP to be their hosting infrastructure. MRI's are extremely expensive as well as a profitable business. I think they can muster up a few $$ vs. cheaping out on a p2p infrastructure. | |
| | 
N O Y B
St. John 3.16
join:2005-12-15
Forest Grove, OR | Re: Who's cheap?
Sounds like the company he is working for may have a security issue they need to deal with. And posibly a privacy issue as well.
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bylo
Premium
join:2004-05-04
Waterloo, ON
| said by telcolackey :Perhaps his company should be paying for a server... MRI's are extremely expensive as well as a profitable business. What company, what business, what profit are you referring to?
He says, "I do neurocognitive research at one of Montreal's finer research institutions..."
That sounds like a university or hospital. (Unlike in the US) neither would be a for-profit business. | |
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bylo
Premium
join:2004-05-04
Waterloo, ON
| Re: Who's cheap? said by Adam20 :If he is using his internet connection for work purposes he should subscribe to a Business account to avoid such problems. As I posted upthread, "According to one of the Bell apologists on the referenced thread, "it appears that Nexxia [Bell's business Internet division] are throttling business coneections[sic] too"."
One of the unintentional consequences of Bell's obsessive secrecy over which service offerings are getting throttled, who's getting throttled, what's getting throttled and how they're throttling us is that it inevitably leads to rumours and speculation. Some may be well be false but there's no way to know because Bell won't comment officially. Until they do, I'll continue to assume that (a) they're throttling more than just residential customers and (b) they're throttling more than just P2P filesharing usage. | |
| | | |
bellTrollsGalore
@videotron.ca
| said by Adam20 :If he is using his internet connection for work purposes he should subscribe to a Business account to avoid such problems. Can you show me the Bell web page that says there is no throttling or cap on business accounts?
Can you show me where it even states there is throttling and caps on unlimited accounts?
Can you show me what application in total are affected?
Can you show me that their intrusive doesn't affect anything else at all?
As a Bell employee you should have some back up info to support what you say. | |
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Adam20
Premium
join:2007-07-19
Sarnia, ON | Re: Who's cheap? Did I state that he should subscribe to a business account with Bell?
Didn't think so.
Furthermore do not try and put words into my mouth, piss off, and have a nice day:) | |
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bylo
Premium
join:2004-05-04
Waterloo, ON
| What "throttling" really means at Bell Sympatico One more thing that people should understand about Bell's throttling: We don't mean the word as in "to regulate the speed of (an engine) with a throttle" but rather as in "to stop the breath of by compressing the throat; strangle."
Bell advertises "up to" 7Mb/s speeds. After PPPoE overhead that's more like 600kB/s. When a customer's line is throttled, their total Bit Torrent throughput drops to under 30kB/s. That's an "up to" 95% reduction in throughput.
If Bell's objective is to clip bandwidth at peak periods so as to delay adding more capacity, then there's no need to start off with such draconian measures. Surely a 25% or 50% reduction would suffice. What they're doing is punitive and they're apparently doing it indiscriminately to all users. | |
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N O Y B
St. John 3.16
join:2005-12-15
Forest Grove, OR
1 edit | Bell Sympatico TOS & AUP
Does Bell Sympatico TOS & AUP allow residential customers to operate servers? If not then bit torrents are a violation so those of you who are complaining really have no case unless you step up to a business class service permitting operation of servers.
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See 21 replies to this post | |
KrK
Heavy Artillery For The Little Guy
Premium
join:2000-01-17
Tulsa, OK
·AT&T Yahoo
·AT&T DSL Service
·Cox HSI
1 edit | Copyright issue is a smokescreen-- red herring Using the Copyright issue is a smokescreen to the agenda of bandwidth management, or more appropriately, PROFIT maximization.
The idea is simple: Use the whipping posts of Piracy and Pornography to get the public to accept these new policies and practices, which, simply put, are designed to sell you services but not actually PROVIDE them. To promise you everything, but deliver nothing.
IE, it's a way to regulate and control bandwidth and to keep users bandwidth usage down, so that bandwidth costs will be artificially low, and upgrades and upscaling of network infrastructure will not be needed or at least greatly slowed down in being needed. This is nothing more then a pure money move... maximizing profits by charging consumers full rate but not having to provide what they pay for.
If there was true competition and choices in the market, this would never fly as the consumers would abandon gimpy and lamed out providers who hobble and cripple connections... voting with the wallets by leaving... However, in these market conditions, the big players know you really don't have many options, and they know people will have to tolerate more crap like this... still they aren't in a hurry for the knowledge to become widespread because they don't want their other main rival to gain at their expense. They want their main competitors to ALSO adopt such lame management policies so they can go back to non-competing. | |
| |
sympa
@videotron.ca
| Who has the guts? It should also be noted that Videotron in Quebec has a class action against it for doing LESS than what Bell is pulling here.
The Union des consommateurs is trying to get a class-action lawsuit going against the company for false advertising and breach of contract.
»www.consommateur.qc.ca/union/cod···rsId=847
and
»Class Action Lawsuit Against Videotron
If successful, such a suit would set a huge precedent for telecom companies changing the terms of their contracts.
It will take a Quebec Sympatico user to bring this up in the Prov of Quebec, unless someone from Ontario has money to do it.
As for the copyright and piracy issue. ITS A NON-ISSUE. Last time this went to court it was tossed out since people here in Canada pay a levy on blank media and the courts said downloading from p2p or IRC or whatever is legal. So lets not even try and bring piracy or copyright into this issue. But if you must, stick with the facts that it is legal to download. | |
|
duck liver
@comcast.net | stop working from home dumbass or better yet set up an ftp connection at your work. that way everyone has access to these image files. | |
| |
antdude
A Ninja Ant
Premium,VIP
join:2001-03-25 | Re: stop working from home dumbass said by duck liver :
or better yet set up an ftp connection at your work. that way everyone has access to these image files.
Regular FTP is insecured. Use encryption with it. | |
| crrp6501
Premium
join:2007-08-28
Nepean, ON
| ISPs Are Misleading The Public Hey there,
I see a lot of people discussing the legalities of whether or not the doctor should be sending MRI scan via Bit Torrent protocols. I would recommend to those people to stay on topic and actually discuss the correct issue: Why are ISP's throttling a service we paid for?
I don't give a hoot about the possible legalities involved with the DR. It is absolutely irrelevant to this conversation.
Why is the Dr. unable to send large medical files via BitTorrent on a service plan he's paid for under which, there is no mention of 'throttling' internet services to preserve 'network integrity'. This is the problem. ISP's that throttle your bandwidth assume you are a criminal without corroboration and are therefore liable, in my opinion, to lawsuits claiming false advertising.
As a workaround, if there is an alternate DSL provider serving your area (Teksavvy, maybe), give them a call and see what their service is like. I made the switch, and not because I'm doing something illegal, but because I am being presumed guilty for a 'crime' I haven't committed by an overzealous, paranoid and incompetent organization (Bell Sypatico).
Happy hunting for an ISP with integrity. | |
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See 6 replies to this post | |
torch8
Network Technician
Premium
join:2007-11-25
Champaign, IL
·Insight Communicat..
|  The QoS Conflict
Over the years, I've found that many users have come to believe that QoS implementations are punishment for having downloaded too much too fast from too many places--as if the providers were trying to force-feed them some bitter-tasting medicine for the users' own good, under the guise of "tough love," and all the while nursing some deluded marketing agenda that would allow for up-sell opportunities just in time for turn, next fiscal year. Preposterous.
Forgive me if my frustration carries too loudly: how many of you have ever had to work on a shared-bandwidth, stub network without QoS output policies? The answer, whether you know it or not, is "very few." Any shared bandwidth network without QoS is doomed to failure before the leased line even lands. Without some kind of traffic shaping in place, one user could potentially peg the whole pipeline for as long as they'd like.
When any ISP installs upgraded bandwidth, they do so knowing full well that what they've done has had no net effect: no significant decrease in infrastructure congestion and latency; no significant increase in transfer rates; nothing. You can go from 2 T1's to a DS3 to an OC-3 and, no matter what you do, you'll never be able to maintain a large enough pipeline to handle your users without losing enormous sums of money--yes, that's what everything comes down to, but I'm not finished yet, so settle down.
Consider: Let's say you pay $60 per month for Internet service provided by way of a DOCSIS infrastructure (cable modem). Unfortunately for your provider, (just imagine having real paper bills like this in your mailbox each month; I never cease to be amazed when I see these) the OC3 they provide for you costs between forty-five and fifty thousand dollars ($45-50,000) per month. At $45,000 for the circuit and $60 per user, they'll need 750 users to break even on the cost of the circuit, notwithstanding equipment, HR, and administrative costs. What's more, if you divide the total bandwidth (148.608 Mbps) by the number of users required to pay off the circuit, you'll find that the bandwidth per user comes to 198.144 Kbps--that's total combined bandwidth, upstream and downstream. Do you see where this is heading?
In today's competitive market, you simply won't find a single provider who hasn't "oversold" there upstream provided bandwidth. The best any provider can do is control congestion, limit downtime, and shape traffic. It's this latter concept I'd like to touch on next.
What are the most often seen types of traffic on the Internet today? HTTP is the big one, obviously. Then we have things like HTTPS, FTP, telnet, SSH, GRE and PPTP--all the professional stuff. There's an enormous amount of virus and zombie traffic that tends to go unnoticed, but what else? Games--all kinds of games. VoIP is pretty serious business, too. And there are all kinds of streaming data for near real-time multimedia, as well.
There all kinds of traffic out there, most of which are relatively easy to identify; some are not. Some need more bandwidth; some, lower latency. Whatever the need may be for a particular application, each type of traffic generally only uses a surprisingly small portion of the total available bandwidth. What's more, since most traffic is not especially time-sensitive, and, almost always, the most time-sensitive traffic is the sort that the user will only have one instance of at any given point in time (ever try running a conference call, a video seminar, and a Skype conversation all at the same time? Ever been tempted to try? :-D), many packets can be delayed (queued) for a substantial period of time (a few hundred milliseconds, sometimes) before the user will even begin to notice degraded service. Therefore, ensuring that each of these types of traffic takes up no more bandwidth than is required to get the job done in reasonably good time while making certain that time-sensitive traffic continues to be dequeued the most frequently and the soonest makes perfect sense. Why wouldn't we want to classify all of this traffic and see that it all gets where it needs to be, on time? Without properly configured QoS policies in place, one person's massive FTP download could compromise someone else's significantly smaller, but significantly more time-sensitive VoIP conversation. Keeping everything "separate" and distinct allows for remarkably improved service--not the other way around.
Now, this all sounds great, but there's really just one major catch, and it's not getting any easier to deal with. When attempting to classify and re-prioritize traffic, there's one particular kind of traffic that tends to ruin all the well implemented QoS that someone probably spent hundreds of hours to make work; it just so happens to be peer-to-peer.
First of all, peer-to-peer traffic has to be classified at layer 7, meaning that whichever device is trying to figure out how to manage it, that device has to pick apart the entire packet, determine what kind of data is at the core, and send the whole thing on--hopefully--to the correct class of service queue. This is already a fairly CPU and memory intensive task.
Second, even when using a device capable of easily performing layer 7 packet analysis, you still need to tell that device how to distinguish between this program's data and that of others. Unfortunately, there's no easy way to identify what program such data belongs to. What's more, this has been made far more difficult by the relatively recent introduction of encryption software, made specifically to obfuscate peer-to-peer transfers. Worst of all, many peer-to-peer programs allow and encourage the use of other popular ports for sharing, such as HTTP's port 80, to transmit data. With these kinds of challenges to successfully identifying peer-to-peer traffic, it's no small wonder that even layer 7 identification for QoS has begun to fail.
Nevertheless, the point is not that ISP's would be better able to re-classify traffic if everyone would just stop encrypting it and running it over port 443 as HTTPS. People are complaining specifically about the successful identification of traffic. Otherwise, such traffic would never have been re-prioritized in the first place. No, the real issue here is how peer-to-peer utilizes bandwidth. No other type of traffic grows to fill all available bandwidth the way peer-to-peer does. No other type of traffic pummels asymmetrically allocated, upstream bandwidth the way peer-to-peer does. Whenever I see aggregate WAN interface graphs pegging with ridiculously high egress traffic, you know what I do? I go directly to the list IP's with the highest usage for the site, pull up the traffic graph for the top user, and compare the user graph to the site graph. Care to guess what I see, nine times out of ten? Two nearly identical graphs: the user has almost always used up all available bandwidth.
I understand how it may seem unfair to limit peer-to-peer traffic so, but it's also unfair to allow over 99% of your customers to suffer while someone downloads the entire first season of House. Again, this doesn't mean anyone is trying to punish you. It simply means that your ISP is willing to take the initiative to make attempts, however feeble, to make all of the pieces fit. If any of you has a better idea of how to do things, write up an RFC and push for standardization and support; you can come back and give me the finger five years from now. I've seen some people here point fingers at so-called "apologists," contemptuously decrying their lack of virtue--I don't plan on apologizing any time soon.
Never one to end these things on a sour note, I hope someone finds my insight to be enlightening. If anyone has any questions, I'll do my best to answer and clarify. Otherwise, feel free to carry on with the pointless bickering.
Regards. | |
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N O Y B
St. John 3.16
join:2005-12-15
Forest Grove, OR
| Re: The QoS Conflict
Well that is all very interesting and informative. Though I have doubts an ISP could legally justify the practice of denying customers full use of the bandwidth they purchased just because they oversold and thus can not deliver that which was contracted too.
I think the ISPs have two aces up there sleeve though with regard to traffic shaping bit torrent traffic. 1) Bit torrents being servers which is clear violation of residential TOS. 2) Providing the service to third parties (those whose content is being hosted and served) which is also clear violation of residential TOS.
Granted that TOS violation may not be the real reason for the BT traffic shaping actions. But I think TOS violation would end up being the legal argument if pursued by customers.
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| | | torch8
Network Technician
Premium
join:2007-11-25
Champaign, IL
·Insight Communicat..
| Re: The QoS Conflict Again, you have referred to the necessary and beneficial use of QoS as a means of denial of service. As I have already pointed out, this is simply not the case. Therefore, no legal action could rightly be pursued. I'll say it again: this is not denial of service.
Even if a provider were denying services by preventing certain types of incoming traffic, this is their perrogative: the equipment is their own; the money used to maintain said equipment is their own; the human resources used to perform home installations is their own. When you agree to pay for their provided service, it does not become yours--you just get to use it for the duration of your agreement. Consider: if I rent out my apartment, the lessee doesn't own it, and I would almost certainly put verbiage in the lease that allowed me to make changes to the property with limited notice. Such provisions are a part of any similar contract. And if you don't care for the restrictions imposed by a provider, change providers.
I don't know what verbiage is contained in your user service agreement, but legal bounds have always been convoluted with respect to technology. Finding tech saavy people in the legislative and judicial branches is difficult, at best. If more legal professionals had a technical background, many matters related to digital copyright infringement and criminal computing would be handled a great deal more competently--but I digress.
Type-of-service clauses, at least beyond the definitions provided in the service agreement, are only a matter of semantics, and if you feel you have a valid grievance, then you should have no problem handling the matter in court. If three appeals later, you find that your case is dead in the water, you may simply have to concede that you're attempting to change the provider's company policy rather than correct the company's alleged malevolent intent. | |
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N O Y B
St. John 3.16
join:2005-12-15
Forest Grove, OR
| Re: The QoS Conflict
No I did not refer to use of QoS as a means of DOS. However in any practical sense with regard to BTs DOS is in fact the end result.
In the case of BTs it is my understanding it is not incoming traffic that is being shaped, but rather outgoing traffic from the distributed BT distribution servers (other residential customers of various ISPs). And yes it is the ISPs prerogative to do so. But not because they have oversold the service and therefore can not meet their commitment to the customers. But because of the customers violating the TOS, in the case of BTs.
TOS refers to Terms of Service not Type of Service.
I do not have a grievance. I have simply been pointing out to those who are complaining about BT traffic shaping that unless they can prove BT are not servers and they are not providing their ISP service to a third party then they have not a case, because their ISP can legally justify BT traffic shaping on those TOS basis alone. Regardless if that is the ISPs actual motivation for the BT traffic shaping or not.
So for those who wish to stop ISPs from engaging in BT traffic shaping I believe they will have to at a minimum overcome those two TOS items first to even have a chance. Regardless of the ISPs motive or purpose for the traffic shaping.
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| | | | | torch8
Network Technician
Premium
join:2007-11-25
Champaign, IL
·Insight Communicat..
| Re: The QoS Conflict
For the benefit of others who may wish to add to this, I'll list the key points of my argument as put forth in my previous posts:
1) QoS is not a denial of service. By this, I am not referring to a DDoS attack. Instead, I am referring to any action by the ISP to unjustly refuse service or any part thereof. I mention this specifically because you seem to believe that ISP's are, in fact, denying customer's their purchased service: "...I have doubts an ISP could legally justify the practice of denying customers full use of the bandwidth..." Even the initial article for this thread subjectively cites moral reasons for why ISP's try to limit peer-to-peer traffic in the first place--a low blow, indeed. For the last time, QoS is a way of providing more/better service--not restricting it. There is no justification required for taking measures to provide the best possible service.
2) No ISP is trying to sleight its users. Customers are what make ISP's run. They aren't about to do something so foolish as deliberately causing grief for their customers. No ISP need ever "confess" to traffic manipulation; it's merely best practices to implement it.
3) The term "oversold" with respect to bandwidth is a misleading term. As I pointed out, it is virtually impossible to do anything but "oversell" bandwidth, due to the challenges of meeting any leased line's ROI. An ISP might purchase a massive circuit now when there are only ten users on the network, but this may simply be because they don't expect to fully regain their investment until several years from now.
4) Peer-to-peer network usage is an inherently troublesome protocol when introduced on a shared-bandwidth network. Such traffic can easily bring virtually an leased-line to its knees, and, without any kind of traffic manipulation, other users are left in the cold, forced into bandwidth use on a first come, first served basis. On top of this, when more and more users endeavor to deliberately obfuscate this kind of traffic, it becomes less and less manageable. The fact that peer-to-peer traffic is the first to go when traffic shaping kicks in should serve as a huge hint that nothing else runs well under it. Bypassing limiting just breaks the provided service even more, the gestalt of which is worse service for all.
Thanks for taking the time to respond, NOYBNOYB. I hope the exchange will prove to be informative for others that happen upon this topic. | |
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N O Y B
St. John 3.16
join:2005-12-15
Forest Grove, OR
4 edits | Re: The QoS Conflict
No I have not misunderstood. I believe it is you who are misunderstanding.
1) No one as far as I recall reading is claiming that QoS is DOS. Just that with regard to bit torrents it is for all practical purposes DOS since it does in fact prevent practical use of bit torrents. Interesting that it seems to have little to no impact on other high bandwidth consumption outgoing traffic.
2) I have never said nor inferred that ISPs are trying to sleight their users, but that they are simply enforcing their residential TOS that some others here seem to believe they have the right to violate.
3) The term "oversold" was your choice, now you say it is misleading. As for being virtually impossible to do anything but "oversell" bandwidth is completely false. The power companies do not "oversell" but yet they do not have capacity to provide the total load their customers could theoretically draw. Same applies for ISPs. They do not have to have the capacity to provide the total bandwidth all their customers could theoretically consume if they all max out their service at the same time in order to not be "oversold". To not be "oversold" ISPs just need to have capacity to handle what their customers actually consume, not the max their customers could theoretically consume.
4) This is not about peer-to-peer. It is about traffic shaping that has great deal of negative impact on usability of bit torrents, to the point of effectively rendering them useless, or in the term you like DOS. Contrary to the opinion of some here bit torrents are not peer-to-peer, they are client-server and a violation of most ISP TOS for residential customers.
Likewise I hope others will find the dialog informative.
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BitTorrent Throttling Affects Scientific Development
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