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ISPs Say P4P Negates Need for Net Neutrality Regs
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Fri Apr 11, 2008 05:11 PM
from the more-dumb-buzzword-terms dept.
from the more-dumb-buzzword-terms dept.
Donut hole hole writes "AT&T and Comcast are using recent successful P2P trials to argue to the FCC that there's no need for strong traffic management or net neutrality rules. 'Comcast's statement, filed with the FCC on April 9th, hails an announcement by P2P developer Pando Networks that its experiments with P4P technology on a wide variety of U.S. broadband networks have boosted delivery speeds by up to 235 percent. This news, Comcast vice president Kathryn A. Zachem wrote to the Commission, "provides further proof that policymakers have been right to rely on marketplace forces, rather than government regulation, to govern the evolution of Internet services."' Looks like Comcast only likes P2P technology when it can be used to serve its political and regulatory agenda."
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Your Rights Online: Enhancement To P2P Cuts Network Costs 190 comments
psycho12345 sends in an article in News.com on a study, sponsored by Verizon and Yale, finding that if P2P software is written more 'intelligently' (by localizing requests), the effect of bandwidth hogging is vastly reduced. According to the study, redoing the P2P into what they call P4P can reduce the number of 'hops' by an average of 400%. With localized P4P, less of the sharing occurs over large distances, instead making requests of nearby clients (geographically). The NYTimes covers the development from the practical standpoint of Verizon's agreement with P2P company Pando Networks, which will be involved in distributing NBC television shows next month. So the network efficiencies will accrue to legal P2P content, not to downloads from The Pirate Bay.
Submission: ISPs say P4P negates need for net neutrality regs by Anonymous Coward
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ISPs & P2P, Getting Along Without Getting Cozy 118 comments
penguin-geek writes "Researchers at Northwestern University have discovered a way to ease the tension between ISPs and P2P users. As we all know, there's been a growing tension between Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and their customers' P2P file-sharing services, and this has driven service providers to forcefully reduce P2P traffic at the expense of unhappy subscribers and the risk of government investigations. Recently, some ISPs have tried to fix the problem through partnerships with certain P2P applications. The Ono project represents an alternative solution: a software service that allows P2P clients to efficiently identify nearby peers, without requiring any kind of cozy relationship between ISPs and P2P users. Using results collected from over 150,000 users, they have found that their system locates peers along paths that have two orders of magnitude lower latency and 30% lower loss rates than those picked at random by BitTorrent, and that these high-quality paths can lead to significant improvements in transfer rates. In challenged settings where peers are overloaded in terms of available bandwidth, Ono provides a 31% average download-rate improvement; in environments with large available bandwidth, Ono increases download rates by 207% on average (and improves median rates by 883%). Ono is available as a plugin for the Azureus BitTorrent client, an open tracker and an standalone service you can integrate into any P2P system."
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p4p means (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:p4p means (Score:5, Insightful)
It's this magical idea that they'll find a way to charge more money for providing the same service without having to lose market share due to raising the prices on their customers' statements. Why not charge EVERYONE is their idea... doesn't matter who you are, or where you are on the 'Net... you can pay Comcast for "premium" service.
Not the worst idea ever, just a contender.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
The question 'can they pull it off?' the answer depends on whether or not new neutrality is in effect.
Re:p4p means (Score:4, Insightful)
The million dollar question is whether they mean all P2P traffic, or just *AA approved content. They're making a new protocol & it's their data so the ball's in their court. I can easily see them using this as an excuse to go after P2P even more.
Parent
Re:p4p means (Score:4, Insightful)
If anything this is a way to placate the FCC and congress, while appearing to embrace P2P, but only as a distribution method for their own content.
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
It got taken out because nobody was using it!
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, P4P is a buzzword for "pennies for packets."
It's this magical idea that they'll find a way to charge more money for providing the same service without having to lose market share due to raising the prices on their customers' statements. Why not charge EVERYONE is their idea... doesn't matter who you are, or where you are on the 'Net... you can pay Comcast for "premium" service.
Not the worst idea ever, just a contender.
So uh, hold it.
This is buzzwordspeek for "We don't need Net Neutrality, because breaking Net Neutrality means we don't need Net Neutrality?"
Oh my God, I've gone cross-eyed.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
If they could charge you for this they would.
What?
P4P is about adding code into P2P software that will allow the application to prioritize 'local' connections. It's about minimizing the # of hops your packets have to jump across. This generally translates into cost savings for the ISP.
If they wanted to charge for it, they could code it themselves and license the technology out... and nobody would use it, because the ISPs are the main beneficiaries. What do I care if my bittorrent packets are coming from Germany or from my neighbor? Ping times aren't
Re:p4p means (Score:5, Insightful)
P4P is a major privacy killer. based on what I see at the P4P workgroup page [pandonetworks.com], P4P is not a protocol or code that will be inject into existing P2P apps, it is a network management technique and toolkit that the ISPs can use to control existing and future P2P traffic, presumably without knowledge or consent from any of the peers. In fact here is one of the project objectives:
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Not to mention the privacy implications, the lack of an opt-out, or the fact that this doesn't work if things aren't hosted in your area, right?
You have to know quite a bit to magically route things local.
Given comcast's track record, why would you ever assume they turned over a new leaf? That's like thinking that Microsoft has a real open-source offering because they made a new announcement to be more open-source fri
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That is definitely some magic right there.
Remind me again where an OC96/etc line would have a reason to care whether its intra-network or not.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
The goal of a routing pattern like the one they describe however is to keep traffic local to a users distribution tier network (your neighborhood essentially), so that it traverses the hierarchy only as high as it must. that frees up bandwidth on the trunk lines upstream and the backbone connections, which may be kinda expensive.
the problem with this idea however, is that while the providers
Re: (Score:2)
I
Re:p4p means (Score:4, Interesting)
Speak for yourself! From where I'm at, microsoft.com resolves to a porn tracker and most
Parent
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You mean a patchwork off-net like FidoNet? [wikipedia.org]
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But wouldn't the civilian nets you refer to be just as subject to said law enforcement?
Re: (Score:2)
Faith in the power of the almighty politicians to "save us" from life itself, is running short. After that, if people have learned to be autonomous and not expect handouts stolen from others, life should get much nicer. Of course, I'm banking on people learning to respect property and to live up to their promises.
Heh... yeah, I know, at least I don't believe in the Easter Bunny anymore
I remember this from long ago. (Score:2, Insightful)
Satellite phones. When you made a call it was always long distance and always billed both ways. At hideous rates.
Hey, whatever happened to the ubiquitous satellite phone anyway? That didn't seem to come about. It's like they all died out from competition or something.
Really? (Score:3, Insightful)
(*) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
That ISPs have found some technological work around does nothing to change the fact that they'd rather screw around with the network than build more infrastructure.
Fundamentally, either Net Neutrality is a good idea or it isn't.
The specific circumstances are only tangently relevant.
Can the Gov't regulate? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Can the Gov't regulate? (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re:Can the Gov't regulate? (Score:4, Insightful)
I really don't trust utilities providers. I've seen enough to know that my state's utility regulatory commission does a good job balancing the needs of the providers with the needs of the public.
I really don't want regulation of the internet, but when I think about it, it's the content of the internet that I want unregulated, not the means by which corporate titans mangle my clickstream.
In the long run, I see NN as the only way to keep the telco's and the mafiaa from destroying the internet I love, and sucking money out of my pocket in the process.
Parent
In other news... (Score:3, Insightful)
NOTHING to do with Peer to Peer (Score:5, Insightful)
This has nothing to do with any file sharing technology. Nothing. They want the government, and those BASTARD consumers, to believe that "marketplace forces, rather than government regulation" prevailed and solved the problem.
Well the REAL problem was ISP's selling unlimited bandwidth contracts. Right there is the heart of the issue, one they don't want to talk about. They advertise impressive speeds (throughput) and unlimited "internet" which is basically no limitation on the amount of data you could transfer in a given month.
If that is true, which legally they should be held to AT LEAST the unlimited transfers, then P2P is irrelevant isn't it? Sure it has its problems, but none of that is the consumer's fault. They are using their "unlimited" connections in a "unlimited" way.
So now they cannot deliver on those "impressive" speeds since they were overselling their real capacity in the first place.
To put it another way.... It would be like an Airline company saying you could fly as far as you want up to 3 times a month for $99 dollars a month. They screw up getting greedy and all of the sudden they can't actually deliver 3 times a month since all the flights are constantly full.
No, don't buy this fairy tale from Comcast. The consumers are all entitled, BY CONTRACT no less, to do what they are doing.
If P4P ends up vastly increasing the efficiency of the consumer communications going across their network, then that is GREAT for anyone that owns a part of Comcast. More profit margin returning.
It DOES not mean it should be an end to Net Neutrality or government regulation of their sneaky little asses....
Seconded (Score:5, Insightful)
Cable subscribers, forget what it says in the small print. You signed a contract that said "unlimited" in BOLD print. So it should have been unlimited. And if they did not have the money, as they claimed -- even after charging those outrageous rates -- to make them unlimited, they should have stopped advertising the accounts as "unlimited"!!!
This is not genius-level material. They defrauded consumers. Without regulation, they will continue to do the same.
Parent
Re:NOTHING to do with Peer to Peer (Score:5, Insightful)
The difference, though, is that the mortgage creditors got in over their head in bad loans because of people that didn't know what they were doing (jumping into an ARM that they wouldn't be able to handle later). The ISPs got in over their head by people that *knew* what they were doing (internet users making the most of their unlimited connections). Now that more and more people can do the same thing with easily accessible tools, the ISPs are up shit creek.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
As for, "the people that lose are the ones that want more bandwidth than they're willing to pay for", those are the FREELOADERS.
Are They Regulated or Not? (Score:4, Insightful)
Just make up your mind about being regulated or not. If you want to take tax payer money, then you're going to be regulated. If you don't want to be regulated, you can't have tax payer money.
Minor correction (Score:5, Insightful)
and anything you built with taxpayer money is open to all.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Comcast nowhere near neutral (Score:2, Informative)
I called Comcast today to find out if they are still non-neutral. I was informed that they still do not support Linux. While Linux and BSD can be made to work on Comcast easily enough today, how do we know that this level of access will continue? They could change things tomorrow and break the ability of Linux and BSD to access the internet.
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Re: (Score:2)
Re:Comcast nowhere near neutral (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
The sky is falling! (Score:2)
Tit for Tat (Score:2)
The only solution.
Muddying clear water is what this is. (Score:2)
What is needed is to lay down lots of fiber where none exists. PERIOD! How complicated is that? We need more and more throughput and lower and lower latencies. The only goal is for every home to have fiber.
Not Wimax, not powerlines, not 812.n or any other unreliable, slow crap. Those are only temporary bandaids and should only be used as such or to complement fiber. All data that can travel through fiber should do so.
Fucking cocksuckers and
Waves hand... (Score:2)
Waves hand...
These aren't the P-number-P's you're looking for. We can go about our business.
Re: (Score:2)
I have a shovel you can borrow. Call me when you're done.
Oh, you're not going to do it yourself? Then who is going to install and maintain all that fiber? Surely you don't want the government to do it? The government (local, state, or federal) can't pave fucking roads without massive waste and lots of outright fraud, and you want them to run a high-tech infrastructure?
Maybe we can have convicted hackers and meth dealers build and maintain it as part of their community service.
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Don't be an idiot. It doesn't matter who does it as long as it's done. Companies, government, as long as joe schmoe gets his cheap fast fiber.
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$1500 per household for deployment x 100 million US residences = ~150 BILLION DOLLARS in captial expenditure.
Pre-emtive "insightful" comment from pinko college kid living of Daddy's money: "That's way less than we've spent in Iraq..."
...which only illustrates this: If we ask the governement to build out this network, it will cost about $1 Trillion with all the overage, delays, and waste. I'd rather take over another oil-rich country for that sort of investment.
What they really mean is.... (Score:2)
400% - someone explain the math to me (Score:5, Interesting)
I read this,
"According to the study, redoing the P2P into what they call P4P can reduce the number of 'hops' by an average of 400%."
and am confused. Surely reducing a number by 100% brings it to zero. What does reducing a number by 400% mean?
10 becomes -30?
Re: (Score:2)
Pay for Play (Score:2)
Seems entirely appropriate that Comcast would claim that the hookers they sent to congress and the FCC are enough to take are of any problems.
Doesn't pass the sniff test (Score:2)
It's not working. It should be entertaining to see what kind of BS they come up with next...
Market forces my foot (Score:2)
Ok, lets pretend that p4p is benign...
Even if that is true, It was not market forces that brought it about.
Comcast could clearly see they were about to be regulated... It was the fear of legislation, not market forces that made them adapt.
Re:Where are our rights? (Score:5, Funny)
However, I have heard good things about P3.11P for Workgroups, so I might try that one out.
Parent