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...
Correct me if I'm wrong... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:This may be a dumb question, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
More to the point, I can set my BitTorrent client (Azureus) to encrypt all traffic. Currently I have it set to default to encryption and fallback to plaintext -- but it would be a simple matter to reject unencrypted connections.
Throttling traffic is stupid. Build your network to support the load or stop selling "unlimited" service. My cell phone provider doesn't get to decide who I can talk or what I can talk about. Why should my ISP?
It's obvious (Score:5, Insightful)
Most users don't download torrents.
Mutually Exclusive? (Score:2, Insightful)
So, high/low speed BitTorrents are not likely to be protected by Network Neutrality laws. They are not mutually exclusive.
Re:This may be a dumb question, but... (Score:3, Insightful)
But your cell phone provider can degrade the quality of your call just a little bit to free up space, you just don't notice that much.
Only on CDMA networks. On GSM using the TDMA air interface there's a finite number of slots. If I get one then it's mine to use as I see fit and you can't kick me off it.
That said, the point I wanted to make was that perhaps the problem lies in selling as "unlimited" a finite resource. In the end it shouldn't matter if I use 100GB of bittorrent or 100GB of VPN to my office. If they don't have the capacity to be selling it as unlimited then perhaps they shouldn't be selling it as unlimited.
I for one would rather be limited to a sane amount of traffic per month and have full speed downloads for my uses of bittorrent then have my usage degraded by a QoS scheme that thinks my neighbors packets are more important because they aren't bittorrent (even though he may use more bandwidth then me in the end).
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=
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.
Re:This may be a dumb question, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Hence why my bittorrent client supports encryption. 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.
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.
Here's an idea (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:This may be a dumb question, but... (Score:3, Insightful)
Comcast cable limits you to 90GB (through human intervention, not automatically.) Hughesnet satellite limits you to 350MB/4 hours. Et cetera.
And that I have another problem with. They shouldn't be able to advertise it as unlimited and use some fine print in the contract to restrict how much you can use. Be up front about it!
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.
That's a different animal and I think my example is still valid. 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.
I just downloaded a 350 meg torrent last night. I left it running to bring it up to 1:1 ratio. Used 700 megs of bandwidth. Tell me, was that 700 megs of bandwidth any better or worse for them then if I had done a straight 700 meg download from kernel.org? Stop looking at the protocol and start looking at the raw bandwidth usage. It's none of your business what protocols I use.
Just my $0.02.
Re:This may be a dumb question, but... (Score:3, Insightful)
but you also allow Throttling Bittorrent traffic? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:This may be a dumb question, but... (Score:2, Insightful)
I don't buy that argument [bricklin.com]. He claims that QoS becomes useless when the Internet Pipes are completely full, likening it to emergency vehicles on the road. However, QoS allows packet reording between streams, so there's no notion of "I can't get through because something's obstructing me". QoS really shines at maximum capacity, because the higher capacity results in more prioritizations necessary.
Bricklin's second argument about buying more infrastructure instead of applying QoS is a bit of a tangent, as well. Maybe for a huge company like AT&T there's dark fiber sitting around providing a scarce resource, but all of the ISPs that aren't mega-corporations have to choose between paying big bucks for the bandwidth or applying QoS essentially for free. Besides, there's no reason that a company can't just do both. There's no mutual exclusitivity.