ISPs Throttling BitTorrent Traffic, Study Finds 228
hypnosec writes "A new report by an open source internet measurement platform, Measurement Lab, sheds light onto throttling of and restriction on BitTorrent traffic by ISPs (Internet Service Providers) across the globe. The report by Measurement Lab reveals that hundreds of ISPs across the globe are involved in the throttling of peer-to-peer traffic, and specifically BitTorrent traffic. The Glasnost application run by the platform helps in detecting whether ISPs shape traffic. Tests can be carried out to check whether the throttling or blocking is carried out 'on email, HTTP or SSH transfer, Flash video, and P2P apps including BitTorrent, eMule and Gnutella.' Going by country, United States has actually seen a drop in throttling compared to what it was back in 2010. Throttling in the U.S. is worst for Cox at 6 per cent and best for Comcast, Verizon, AT&T and others at around 3 per cent. The United Kingdom is seeing a rise in traffic shaping and BT is the worst at 65 per cent. Virgin Media throttles around 22 per cent of the traffic while the least is O2 at 2 per cent. More figures can be found here."
Re:Good (Score:5, Insightful)
"Chronic torrenters use the bandwidth they purchased. The ISPs greedy oversubscribing of their bandwidth shouldn't affect my typical internet usage that we pay the same amount of money for."
Fixed that for you.
Re:Good (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Good (Score:5, Insightful)
If you would like to pay for dedicated bandwidth, you can definitely do so, however you are taking advantage of the cost of the pipe being spread among many people with the expectation they won't all max it out at once. Just a hint, your measily 60 bucks a month doesn't come close to covering a dedicated 50 mbps pipe, it doesn't even come close to a dedicated 1.5 mbps pipe.
Just keep sticking it to the man though.
I will use what I buy (Score:3, Insightful)
If I buy a hamburger and fries with a coke at BK, the chuckle-heads behind the counter don't come out and take back ten fries and half the burger.
If I buy a tank of gas the pump guy doesn't follow me around with a hose and siphon back a couple gallons
When I use water the city doesn't ask me to pay for 5 hundred gallons and then say I can only use 4 hundred gallons because 5 hundred would just be too much
When I buy cable TV no one stops me from watching TV 24/7 because I might use too much.
On my land-line I can make non-stop phone calls to Guam and ask the operator there to connect me to Paris and from there to my next-door neighbor and no one complains that I am tying up a line.
If I buy anything else in the entire world no one says boo if I use it all up or even how I use it as long as I don't ACTIVELY stop other people from using it.
God damn it, if you sell me something and I use it, don't come back and say i can't use it because you didn't plan ahead. Get some more bandwidth or cut my rates.
This is BS! These idiots are just shills for the RIAA and co. No other business in the world works like this.
BT is crap (Score:4, Insightful)
Avoid them like the plague.
Re:Good (Score:2, Insightful)
Then the ISP should not sell it as if it does.
Re:Good (Score:5, Insightful)
High bandwidth users encourage infrastructure investment which gets you the speeds you have today. You could have made the same argument about MP3s back in the 56K days, and if it prevailed then we'd all still be on dialup speeds.
We should all pay the same for the same access to the network, and we should all use as much of it as we need. If the network isn't sufficient for that, we should all invest in a faster network.
Re:Good (Score:4, Insightful)
why would fibre becoming standard change the thing at all? you see the same argument applies when you're on 64kbit connection and so is everyone else. it does so on 1mbit, it does so on 10mbit and will apply on 100mbit too.
"something in place" could only be not overselling your bandwidth. if they don't want to do that they could start advertising and contracting it as being base speed of say 0.5mbit/s and a burst speed of 10mbit/s for max of one hour.
Re:Good (Score:5, Insightful)
They don't, they sell speeds "up to".
Re:Good (Score:5, Insightful)
You dont go to an all you can eat buffet and have 1 burger and fries right?? unlimited should be unlimited
File under "No shit Sherlock" (Score:5, Insightful)
Name another industry in which you pay for an advertised service and then get far far less.
Would you buy a computer that claims 8GB of ram but you could only utilize 3?
Would you buy a camera that claimed it could take 1000 pictures but only could store 100 maximum?
Would you buy a car that advertised 200 HP but could only output 50 HP?
Would you buy a 3 bedroom house that only has 1.5 bedrooms?
Would you buy a food product with printed 350g on the container but the contents only weigh 180g?
Would you pay for a meal if it claimed it would come with sides that you never received?
Would you buy a gallon of gas if you only got a pint?
Would you buy a 24 pack of beer if you only got 16?
So in what FREAKIN reality is it acceptable for ISP's to charge you for an advertised speed and then offer you something far less then that on average.
Re:Good (Score:5, Insightful)
Come on. These ISP are throttling (buying technologies to limit bandwidth in both directions) rather than spending to increase their bandwidth (building out their infrastructure). If the did that they'd be satisfying customers and not restricting everyone. People that torrent and use a lot of bandwidth are doing so because that's what they bought, and they deserve to be able to use it. Because these ISPs sold you a bill of goods that stated your bandwidth is X amount and then set it up to share in your neighborhood, then turned around and started throttling you, doesn't make the torrenter the bad guy.
What does it take to get you guys to understand: They sold you bandwidth, then limited you by sharing that same connection with those in your neighborhood, when you started using it by downloading via torrents they began throttling you because others in your neighborhood couldn't use the bandwidth they sold them, then they capped your usage. Seriously, that's a massive bait and switch. These guys should be held legally liable.
Comcast should not be throttling anything. That was part of their agreement to buy NBC Universal.
It is not the torrenters, it is the ISPs not advancing their technologies and building it out, rather they want to soak up the big bucks by ever increasing the cost of the services that they hobbled (as per above). Look at what Google did: $70.00 (+ $300 connection fee) and you get a gigabit upload and download without caps. Given time we should see more of Google's offerings in other cities. Comcast, et al, you are on notice. And let's not forget what almost every other country in the world has done by offering massive increases in bandwidth and no caps.
Re:Good (Score:5, Insightful)
"Just a hint, your measily 60 bucks a month doesn't come close to covering a dedicated 50 mbps pipe, it doesn't even come close to a dedicated 1.5 mbps pipe."
Nonsense, at least here in the U.S. While it might be catching up (hard to say for sure), compared to most "first tier" countries the U.S. has averaged significantly lower bandwidth at much higher cost. Mainly due to insufficient competition.
Bandwidth for ISPs gets cheaper by they year, as they have continued to steadily raise their monthly rates.
They can afford it.
Re:Good (Score:5, Insightful)
Then as long as my torrenting doesn't increase your speeds above the "up to" number you're buying from your ISP, you can STFU, you're getting what you're paying for. If my torrenting ever causes your speeds to exceed your purchased "up to" rate, then you can complain about it.
Wait, what? Why are you defending that practice?
Re:I will use what I buy (Score:4, Insightful)
How about the food industry?
The average profit margin for most businesses in the US is around 5.5%. The average profit margin for a grocery store is about 0.8%. They also don't charge you taxes, and due to the small margins, most of the people who pick the food and package it are illegal immigrants working for less than minimum wage. It's back breaking work, you're in the sun all day, and your skin is regularly cut up from constantly reaching into bushes, etc., to rip the food from the plant, who has had thousands of years to develop defense strategies to keep animals from doing just that.
As to medical insurance and pharmaceutical companies, you can thank your government for that -- they handed them a monopoly on a silver platter and give them large private police forces to travel worldwide attacking and imprisoning whomever threatens the profit margin. ISPs also have a government-mandated monopoly, thanks to exclusive contracts negotiated with municipalities that guarantee they're the only provider in an area. In other parts of the world, pills you pay hundreds of dollars for cost pennies, and internet flows freely from giant pipes, fed to you all day long by beautiful women.
Your government is the sole party to blame for this state of affairs.
Re:Good (Score:2, Insightful)
Why should "unlimited be unlimited" and does any ISP ever explicitly state it's "unlimited?" Most major carrier and cableco ISPs have bandwidth caps so by definition there's no such thing as unlimited.
What you're paying for is a very cheap, shared, commodity pipe to your ISP. Beyond that it's a crap shoot. Hopefully they have multiple 10-40gig uplinks to the major carriers, private peering with the largest video web sites (Netflix, Youtube, etc.), and possibly caching to make the "average user" happy that they're "getting what they paid for." Most of the major cable/telco ISPs have this kind of infrastructure to support their broadband users so if you "only" get 5-10 meg downloads sometime instead of 50, that's not a bad deal, really.
If you understood anything at all about the costs and economics associated with bringing 50/25 to your door step for how little you pay for it you'd never again feel the indignant and petulant sense of entitlement you feel now about what you think you "should" be getting from the ISP. As someone who worked for several years in the dialup ISP business I got a major whiff of that entitlement and it's quite unappealing.
Re:Good (Score:2, Insightful)
What about the simple fact that the internet is fundamentally designed to be oversubscribed ? I'm not just talking about the consumer to lex level. But lexes to central sites. Central sites between one another. Central sites to other isps (especially once one moves long distance) ?
Think about it. What is the mathematical implication of a non-oversubscribed internet ? Ah simple, that every host can satisfy the maximum possible request that can come in. What is that maximum possible request ? Well, what comes in if every other host on the internet fills it's bandwith sending to your station, and receiving the same amount of data (symmetric) or 10x more (assymetric).
Obviously that means that an internet that actually delivers "what is advertised" can only have 2 computers on it in the symmetric case, and is not possible at all for any number of computers in the assymetric case.
And if the isp does not get to treat packets special, then you're mandating by law that one customer can destroy the experience of all other customers (well, ont one, but the smallest number of customers that can fill any backbone connection, usually 100 or at most 1000 customers). Given bittorrent's popularity, it's very simple : if you have low latency on your internet connections, if skype is actually usable on your connection, your isp is not running a neutral network. If they weren't, bittorrent would fill the pipes and the buffers of all devices in the chain, creating huge delays and packet loss, and because the vast majority of tcp connections would be bittorrent connections, it would receive 99%+ of the available bandwidth.
Would you really want to be on such an isp ?