ISPs Say P4P Negates Need for Net Neutrality Regs

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."

Re:p4p means

[TubeSteak]

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 really an issue once the packets start flowing.

Comcast nowhere near neutral

[Skapare]

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.

FYI

[Anonymous Coward]

http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=487700&cid=22750764 [slashdot.org]

Re:p4p means

[Washii]

...Give azureus some network topology information & you won't need to throttle as much...

Ah, you bring up Azureus. It used to have a plug-in installed by default that was supposed to allow ISPs some caches on their own network. Would have been an interesting idea, too.

It got taken out because nobody was using it!

Re:p4p means

[doas777]

You may have hit on something there. Comcast uses a multi-tier hierarchy in their routing, like any big network.

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 have spent billions over the last decade extending and enhancing their distribution tier (to get more customers), the local network is the source of most users congestion.

so, if P4P is going to emphasize connections as close to the curb as possible, won't that increase host-to-host transmissions on the already saturated local net?