ISPs Experimenting With New P2P Controls 173
alphadogg points us to a NetworkWorld story about the search by ISPs for new ways to combat the web traffic issues caused by P2P applications. Among the typical suggestions of bandwidth caps and usage-based pricing, telecom panelists at a recent conference also discussed localized "cache servers," which would hold recent (legal) P2P content in order to keep clients from reaching halfway around the world for parts of a file.
"ISPs' methods for managing P2P traffic have come under intense scrutiny in recent months after the Associated Press reported last year that Comcast was actively interfering with P2P users' ability to upload files by sending TCP RST packets that informed them that their connection would have to be reset. While speakers rejected that Comcast method, some said it was time to follow the lead of Comcast and begin implementing caps for individual users who are consuming disproportionately high amounts of bandwidth."
less peering (Score:4, Interesting)
They want control but should not have it. (Score:5, Interesting)
Here's how media companies will kill the free internet we all know and love:
"Legitimate" media caches and disruption of all other P2P traffic only makes step one worse. They will continue to slow the rest to lower than their heavily filtered networks can deliver. The result will look like broadcast media does today, one big corporate billboard, instead of a free press. Part of censorship is shouting louder than others.
Yeah, I've said this before [slashdot.org]. As long as ISPs have the same story, so will I.
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You mean like what is already being discussed [wikileaks.org]?
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I have mod points, but can't seem to find 'citation needed' on the dropdown.
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Technically the caches are a very good idea.
Yes a cache would be good, but what is the problem? Mostly, it is keeping unnecessary expensive international bandwidth down.
I keep asking for a simple protocol called "local?" or similar. The idea is that you send a "local?" request to a broadcast address which your ISP would capture, and respond yes/no depending on whether the IP queried was local to your ISP.
P2P services could then utilise this protocol in prioritising which sources (clients) to download from. The idea is that you would prioritise
Legal content? (Score:2)
> which would hold recent (legal) P2P content ...
Yeah -- THAT will solve P2P congestion. (Morons)
Re:Legal content? (Score:5, Interesting)
No, but it will be a good "proof" for the argument against P2P. Akin to "See? We have caches with all the legal P2P content and yet no decline in P2P traffic. So it's proven that P2P is mainly used for illegal means".
Yes, I know it's no proof. Tell your congressman, not me.
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We have caches with all the legal P2P content and yet no decline in P2P traffic. So it's proven that P2P is mainly used for illegal means".
But how do they know what is and isn't legal content?
Since they don't have common carrier status it is illegal for them to cache all the illegal content I download.
Perhaps it's time for (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Perhaps it's time for (Score:4, Insightful)
It's a bit like having a 300hp car but only fuel for a mile.
Yay for car analogies! But this one at least works.
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A more realistic car analogy:
It's a bit like an average person having a fast car.
They drive it to work, school, shopping, and entertainment.
Most of the time it is unused, but when they are using it the extra speed is useful.
Re:Perhaps it's time for (Score:4, Interesting)
But they have to pay by the gallon for the gasoline they use.
Re:Perhaps it's time for (Score:5, Funny)
Wait, this car analogy is far too good, I can't use it on Slashdot =)
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Ok, really, do you *need* more than 50 gigs of porn a month? I get buy on only 30 gigs a month, I'm sure you can do the same.
Re:Perhaps it's time for (Score:5, Insightful)
ISP: We offer "unlimited" internet access.
Customer: Sweet! *starts downloading*
ISP: Oh, we didn't mean you should use it.
They advertise a low price and a high speed, then oversell to get that price then reduce the high speed because of it. Hmm, methinks they need more truth in advertising.
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The only thing preventing it from being full-blown bait-and-switch fraud is the excuse that they tell you up-front that it's not really unlimited (at the bottom of section 475, paragraph q3 sub-paragraph MLCXVIII clause 1111!!eleventy-one).
I say if it looks like a duck, and sounds like a duck...
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So I told them that they could go to hell and that I would be taking my internet and TV services elsewhere. At this point they began groveling at my fe
Re:Perhaps it's time for...RCN (Score:2)
We recently pleasure of telling both comcast AND verizon to f*ck off as we also have RCN in our area. Not only are they cheaper, but download speeds have are about 3x faster in some cases.
What comcast hasn't admitted is that they apparently throttle ALL downloads: I could only ever get about 750 KB/s when downloading large files, whereas the same files from the same sites (ftp's of linux distro ISO's from university servers) download at roughly 2400 KB/s via RCN. Ping times are basically the same. I alwa
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In Australia I think they aren't allowed to make a claim in large print that is contradicted by fine print. So they aren't allowed to say <Large Print>Unlimited*</Large Print> and then <Small Print>* Not really</Small Print>
REAL unlimited service (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm quite happy with my unlimited service. After taking one ISP's (almost) top 8MB package and quickly (within days) getting cut off for overuse, I switched to a UK ISP (entanet reseller) that offers a truly unlimited connection at 2MB, albeit for a *little* more than usual. I know they mean it, because their other packages list transfer limits like 320GB per month off peak, and this one simply says n/a under those columns. Just in case, I saved a copy of the package comparison page though.
You CAN still
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The hole in this is the huge microsoft patches and downloads (tho the largest I ever got was double digit megabytes- never gigabytes).
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Apply traffic shaping per-user, not per-service (Score:5, Insightful)
This is all we need. The problem is not that the providers aren't giving us enough bandwidth (they aren't). The problem is that they care what we spend it on.
This is no good... (Score:5, Insightful)
Ok so, my ISP (theoretically) wants to keep the data my neighbour has downloaded, incase I want to download it to.
Yet, obviously these caches will have to be legal content, which means filtering out illegal content, which means they will be tracking everything I download, and thus, can force me to 1) pay more for this, 2) notify appropriate authorities, 3) limit my interaction with the rest of the world via the internet.
Although as stated in the article/summary its supposedly "temporary" but this means that ISP will have to start gathering massive amounts of storage, inevtiably making one ISP better at this than another, and hey fuck it, lets just have one ISP... and the internet just becomes Wikipedia.
I honestly can't see any benefit to this, it seems to just end up with steralization whichever way I look at it.
Re:This is no good... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:This is no good... (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah I'm aware of that, and I agree completely, the problem is can you actually see an ISP (outside of smaller, barely making a profit, looking for clientele please join us ISPs) doing that so honestly?
That was sort of my point, in the immediate conclusion it seems like a great idea, but it gives far too much power to the ISP, or even more power to the government to control what the ISP can do.
It will make sponsored content (Windows Update, Fox News, etc) the primary purpose of the cache after awhile, it is a business after all.
People without the money to pay ISPs or Governors, or whatever to get their content approved for cache, will be on this lesser accessed, slower WWW, making it a pain to get real information or media, and since people are fundamentally lazy, they will inevitably give in, and just go with "what works, right now!"
Re:This is no good... (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd probably choose an ISP that carries the latest kernel downloads locally...
hahahahaha. You think the ISPs are going to start caching the Linux kernel? Where's the money in that? Now, if you want the latest Britney Spears video (kickbacks for promotion from the RIAA) or movie trailers (ditto from the MPAA) or game demos, you're set.
You gotta understand, to the content distribution companies, "legal P2P" = "free shit that we'll give you under the hope that you'll spend money later". Linux absolutely isn't on that list.
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The same thing applies to everyone, but maybe not quite so extremely (replace "fibre" with "peering")
Re:This is no good... (Score:4, Interesting)
It seems plausible, at least, that an ISP could deploy a 'torrent sniffer' that automatically joined the swarms of any torrents that the ISP's users were in and then started to serve only local users from its cache. It might be possible to become a tracker spoofer such that the ISP could start redirecting all requests for cached content to itself rather than out over the (expensive/bottlneck) of peered connections.
So every once in a while they have to respond to a DMCA notice and kill a cache. Its not the end of the world, eventually someone else will come along and start a new torrent for the same content anyway and the game begins again.
Unfortunately, I think the only reason ISPs are not more interested in something like that which would deliberately follow the letter of the law is that they want to make nice-nice with the MAFIAA so that they can resell MAFIAA content directly to their own subscribers. If ISPs would stick to being INTERNET service providers and stop trying to diversify into being CONTENT providers I think we would already see such automated 'blind-eye' caching mechanisms in place.
Here's a better idea (Score:2, Insightful)
Support multicast. If you build it, they will come and make a multicast P2P program on top of it, relieving your backbone connections of all the redundant connections.
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Hell even without p2p multicasting it would help, the direct competitor to illegal P2P is illegal flash streams, multicasting giving them a boost would seriously reduce P2P.
Re:Here's a better idea (Score:4, Informative)
Cable companies use the DOCSIS specifications: multicast is pretty feeble (I won't argue with you if you say "broken") in the versions of DOCSIS that are currently deployed. However, that changes in DOCSIS 3.0. It is one of the "big three" benefits in DOCSIS 3.0 (the others being channel bonding and IPv6 support). DOCSIS 3.0 will probably start being rolled out by at least some cable companies next year.
I've got a good solution.. (Score:5, Insightful)
How about they roll out the infrastructure we paid for with our tax dollars, then not apply any "controls".
you know, a proper, neutral internet that fulfills the promises they made again and again to our government officials when they were given grants, local monopolies, etc. etc.
Re:I've got a good solution.. (Score:5, Informative)
And where is the government we paid for? They should be seriously thumping these clowns over the head for even considering "combating internet traffic" which is clearly the type of traffic intended when the 1996 Telecommunication Act [fcc.gov] was passed and the deregulation started.
Section 706 paragraph (c) line 1 states:
The key here being enables users to originate and receive high-quality voice, data, graphics, and video, thats right, originate AND receive. Somebody clue these dolts in to the fact the internet is not TV 2.0.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with the way subscribers are utilizing their ISPs, this is exactly as it was envisioned by the authors of the 1996 Act. Imagine that, government officials having better vision for the future of technological advancement in telecommunications than the people running the companies. I can tell you why, the problem is also the clueless bean counters and MBAs could care less about technology, innovations, etc. and would demand a monthly fee just cause if they could get away with it. These people should be running illegal whore houses and extortion rackets, not technology corporations.
If our government doesn't step in and force these bozos to provide the service they advertise and were given deregulation perks for then we may need to step in and explain that they don't own our back yards through which they run their damned cables, I deserve a tariff since its my land they're hauling all those bits through.
It's a business not charity (Score:3, Interesting)
These issues are complex, but going by the article summary I'm not sure we're all on the same page.
It sounded (to me) like they're looking for ways to maintain internet traffic, but help alleviate some of the costs of that traffic by using caches. Just because you pledge to allow certain levels of users access, it doesn't mean you have to provide them with that functionality in the MOST expensive way possible.
If they want to brain storm on ways to improve the means, I say have at it.
Also I see nothing wrong
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It stopped being a "business" as soon as they accepted tax payer money. IMO they are free to do as they please as soon as they give the money back.
The funny thing about telcos and cable companies is they are de facto monopolies that are allowed by the FCC and DoJ. Its about a socialistic as you can get other than the fact these companies are publicly traded.
ORIGINATE *AND* RECEIVE??? (Score:2)
So by that I have the legal right to run a server and I can tell my ISP to fuck off and die?
alt.binaries (Score:5, Insightful)
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You are wrong on the privacy laws.
(in dutch) http://zoeken.rechtspraak.nl/resultpage.aspx?snelzoeken=true&searchtype=ljn&ljn=AY6903&u_ljn=AY6903 [rechtspraak.nl]
Any provider has to give up the customers address info IF there is no doubt that customer is doing something illegal. Like in this case uploading torrents to a dutch torrent site and seeding them
No thanks (Score:2)
1 - sort of defeats the purpose
2 - id rather them not know what i'm getting, be it legal or not.
total bandwidth used, not downloaded (Score:4, Interesting)
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Curious, how do you know you have downloaded (and/or uploaded) 12GBs?
I mean I doubt you grab the calculator everytime you download a file, or a webpage is finished loading... They could even be inserting corrupt packets, and including that in the 12GB total, or what about ICMP, Ping, DNS's lookups... surely thats included aswell, which is probably in at least the 10's probably the hundreds of MB's after 12GB's...
"no no, see this graph? says there it was 12 GBs"
Ive always gone for the DL/UL limited ISP's cau
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My ISP tells it somewhere on the web interface for my account settings. Moreover, the web interface to your ADSL modem probably also shows it somewhere, at least since the last reboot.
Re:total bandwidth used, not downloaded (Score:4, Insightful)
My ISP tells it somewhere on the web interface for my account settings. Moreover, the web interface to your ADSL modem probably also shows it somewhere, at least since the last reboot.
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Shit man, I hate bandwidth caps too, but do you treat the electric company meterman with such disdain? I just have to trust the dial on the meter, I don't add up all my appliance use for the month.
Also on a computer it is trivial to log your total Upstream/downstream usage for the month.
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the electric company is subject to strict state regulation as a monopoly.
the telecoms providing the internet are still referred to as "the free market".
one involves oversight and accountability, the other does not : /
when net neutrality laws get passed, this difference should vanish.
Re:total bandwidth used, not downloaded (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, the ISP usually has a meter, but like Plasmacutter said, you trust it based on what?
And yes, most Modems, and also Routers have some sort of tracking... my modem doesn't however (Motorola SB5101), only various statistics about the signal/frequency/channels/Hz/etc...
And my router (D-Link EBR-2310) has WAN and LAN packet count, however does not say anything about the size of the packets.
Granted both are cheap pieces of shit, but so are most for home use...
And your OS can track it to some degree aswell, but what if you restart and forgot to write the last amount down?
But, I was just saying, how do you know that what you have sent and received is only what was necessary? it could easily be fudged intentionally, inadvertently by poor hardware, etc, or by miscalculations on any one of those steps. It's not accurate enough to really base a service on, at least not so strictly 12 GBs Maximum, it's like charging telephone calls per syllable, it would be an approximation because of different languages, accents, etc.
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Yeah, the ISP usually has a meter, but like Plasmacutter said, you trust it based on what?
I'd wager it's based on observing that after downloading a linux ISO and some web surfing the meter showed 700-some MB more the day after. I had usage caps, and was not trusting them implicitly, but, well, they seemed honest enough.
And a few months later the monopolist ISP was forced to drop the caps and offer real unlimited services. Forced by government-induced free market situation (mandatory copper sharing for a set price) and customers flocking to competitors' services en masse. That was over a year
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Curious, how do you know you have downloaded (and/or uploaded) 12GBs?
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theres only one isp in a town of 100k?
sounds like you need to read up and start the second one ;)
and who says p2p control is necessary? (Score:4, Insightful)
how about we also have http controls, and mms controls, and...
oh wait those are not being continuously vilified by the MAFIAA, who also own the news.
This actually isn't as bad as it looks... (Score:3, Interesting)
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Answer me one question before applauding the idea: How are they going to discriminate between legal and illegal content without looking at what you're downloading?
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They don't need to discriminate between "legal and illegal" any more than they do now for HTTP caches, which is not at all.
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They can't. Even if they know for sure what you are downloading, they have no way of knowing whether or not you have the permission of the copyright owner to download it. They are saying "legal" to avoid a pre-emptive attack by the RIAA. When the cache is installed, it will turn out that it doesn't discriminate, and they hope the RIAA won't be
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Agreed. It would probably be hard for the content "owners" to know whether a particular piece of content had in fact been cached, and even if they could prove it, common carrier status would probably apply to the ISP. I'm naturally cautious about the motivations of corporations, but some people here are being overly paranoid IMO.
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If they had done that in the first place they wouldn't be in this mess.
The Next NNTP? (Score:2)
I don't see a whole lot of difference in legality between this and hosting newsgroup messages. Legit reasons for both.
ISPs can cache illegal content (Score:5, Informative)
I don't know why people keep getting hung up on legal vs. illegal content; the law clearly says that ISPs have no copyright liability for their caches:
http://www.bitlaw.com/source/17usc/512.html [bitlaw.com]
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They better deliver what they promise. (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm told I get 10 MBPS. As far as I'm concerned, that means 10 MPBS 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, for as long as I pay my bill. Any effort to throttle that back and I sue for false advertising.
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Please go ahead. We have just bought immunity. MWhaaaaa!!!
Re:They better deliver what they promise.DID YOU M (Score:2)
Wow would I like to be on a system like that!!!
Or did you possibly mean: 10 M b PS?
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If they're selling him "up to 10 Mbps", then that means he should get to use "up to 10 Mbps" whenever he likes, via any application or protocol, as long as he's paying his bill.
"Up to 10 Mbps" only means "we don't guarantee there will be 10 Mbps available for you to use", not "you have to limit yourself to under 10 Mbps" or "we will artificially limit you to under 10 Mbps". If there's 10 Mbps or more available, then you get to use the full 10; if there's less, then you get to use whatever bandwidth is avail
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The problem comes in with things like cable-delivered services, where a number of customers are essentially sharing a "party line". If one customer is using the 10MBPS fully, others don't get much at all.
Why is that a "problem"? Situations like that are exactly why the connection is described as up to 10 Mbps.
The question is, is the ISP (cable company) justified in cutting back on what each customer can use in order to be certain that the limited bandwidth is distributed "fairly" among all the people that the cable company chooses to put on the same circuit.
Yes, as long as they do it honestly and without discriminating against any application or protocol.
That is, if offering customers "up to 10 Mbps" results in too much bandwidth usage, then they should offer "up to 6 Mbps" or "up to 2 Mbps" instead. They can even use something like Comcast's PowerBoost to raise the cap for quick bursts, so web surfing and email won't be affected.
Or does the cable company really have an obligation to make more bandwidth available by cutting down on the number of subscribers per "line"?
Their only obligation
Comcast is a little cry baby (Score:3, Insightful)
The pipe out of the DSLAM (Score:2)
Let's see how this works... (Score:5, Insightful)
2. Significantly reduce performance of content with "unknown" legal status.
3. Result: legal content gets preferential treatment so legal downloading performs better.
4. Non-"neutral" treatment completely justified by the war against contraband.
5. Hit content providers for kickbacks, those that don't pay get their content treated as "unknown" legal status.
6. PROFIT!
p2p creates cost shifting (Score:4, Interesting)
P2P shifts costs of distribution from central servers and spreads the load out among the downloaders. This is *helpful*, and it is more equitable given that the marginal costs of data copying is near zero - pushing the price of downloaded content lower and lower.
The pricing seems like such a non issue. The elephant in the room is that companies like Comcast are making a killing, taking a ton of money selling services that largely go unused. many service businesses over sell their capacity to ensure high usage rates, but broadband has taken it to an absolute extreme.
The obvious and easy solution is for providers of cable and DSL services to price their offerings according to usage, and when it comes to bandwidth, the accurate solution is 95% billing: you use a ton of bandwidth, the customer gets charged more. They don't really want to do this though - they make a lot more money buying in bulk and selling little access services for much higher rates than the bandwidth used.
One huge upside of changing the pricing system for home Internet to 95% billing is that you don't have to go metering and capping bandwidth to homes. People could get an *extremely* fast connection, but if they utilize it fully 24/7 then they get billed a high rate. This is not that complex a concept to implement technically.
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Where the ISP's are Wrong! (Score:3, Interesting)
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If a restaurant offers an all you can eat buffet, then everybody hits one particular dish, it prevents people from getting to the other dishes, and causes congestion on the one dish every body wants.
Surely it is up to the provider to try and organise demand to improve the traffic. Either that or get the users to change their habits (good luck with that).
Too many users using p2p is not the issue, traffic congestion is. Notice how they want to s
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Comcast: Not that bad (Score:2, Informative)
I have Comcast, and I've never experienced any traffic shaping or throttling.
Their policy, now that it's no longer P2P specific, seems sane.
Two conditions have to be met for them to throttle your traffic:
1) You have to be one of their heavy heavy users. By heavy, I mean torrenting 24/7.
2) The network has to be congested at that moment.
If granny next door can't check her email because you're downloading/uploading pron all day every day, they reserve the right to throttle back your connection until the conges
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I have yet to hear of comcast throttling anywhere that the users have other viable options for their internet service.
Ever video conference? (Score:2)
at the 2 minute mark of using iChat for a video conference, my bandwidth from Comcast in Houston gets throttled to less than dial-up speeds, effectively making iChat useless.
After dealing with that for a few months I finally tracked down a preference in iChat to limit bandwidth useage, and if I set it to 100 kbps the throttling doesn't occur, but then 4-way video calls don't work well.
Comcast is the only broadband choice where I live. I have Verizon for my phone service, but they don't offer DSL or FiOS in
What the user expects (Score:2)
If Comcast advertises 6Mbps I expect 6Mbps or an equal share of the remaining available bandwidth I can receive at any moment.
They have the pipe and customers are bidding on that share of pipe. Inevitably that pipe is going to get clogged just like our California freeways during rush hour. If I'm paying $60 a month I expect my own freaking lane.
I believe communication companies need incentive to upgrade their bandwidth. If they want people to pay for more bandwidth they should have to expand their network i
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"If I'm paying $60 a month I expect my own freaking lane."
You shouldn't have this expectation, because that's not what you're paying for. If you want a committed 1.5 Mbps (a T1) that costs (for example) $360/month. This gives you guaranteed 1.5 Mbps with a 99.99% SLA. That bandwidth is reserved for your exclusive use, and you can pump data through it 24/7.
What you're paying $30/month for is cheap, shared bandwidth with no guarantees. The reason that it costs so much less is that your ISP isn't reserving cap
The Fraud of the Cable Companies (Score:5, Insightful)
Tell me Comcast: Just how did your cable suddenly get better once you start charging me 2X to 5X as much as before?
They're just a bunch of fsking liars!
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Well, they obviously hire an Adeptus Mechanicus to bless the cables and appease the machine god, duh.
And if you think that's silly, offer a better explanation.
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Of course it doesn't get better. The problem they are having isn't with expensive bandwidth, because face it bandwidth isn't that expensive compared to what they are charging for it.
What they are having trouble with is clogged up last mile bandwidth because of an aging infrastructure where people share the last mile. As they can only support so much usage on each shared part, and the average usage by ordinary average users is rising, their only option is to either create a real last mile network (yeah right
Unlimited should mean unlimited (Score:2, Insightful)
If the network is congested I expect an equal share of the available bandwidth. Actually, I should get a share of the available bandwidth that is proportionate to my max bandwidth. For example, in
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If the network is congested I expect an equal share of the available bandwidth. Actually, I should get a share of the available bandwidth that is proportionate to my max bandwidth. For example, in a congested network I should get four times as much bandwidth as the person paying for 1mbps connection.
That's fine inside your ISPs network, what about the rest of the internet. How do you prioritise traffic between ISPs. Sounds like the opposite of net neutrality.
People seem to forget that when the network is congested, they are part of the problem. You don't complain to Ford if your 150 mph car gets stuck on the freeway in a jam.
Comca$t..... (Score:2)
"While speakers rejected that Comcast method, some said it was time to follow the lead of Comcast and begin implementing caps for individual users who are consuming disproportionately high amounts of bandwidth."
-GOD FUCKING FORBID we use the bandwidth we purchased.
Some content doesn't WANT to be cached! (Score:2, Insightful)
If I'm serving up ad-supported content I don't want my content cached unless I can count the viewers so I can bill my advertisers.
If I'm serving up restricted-access content I definitely don't want it cached unless it can be done in a secure way.
If I'm serving up content subject to change I don't want it cached unless I can guarentee some level of up-to-dateness.
Having said that...
It's in the interest of "big content" to cooperate with "big pipe" to improve the customer experience. Happy customers are more
Poor wording (Score:2)
The first line of this article could easily be reworded "alphadogg points us to a NetworkWorld story about the search by ISPs for new ways to stop rendering the service for which their customers pay."
dumbest fucking idea ever. (Score:2)
caching so called "legal p2p content" regionally is supposed to alleviate the web traffic crunch?
How about not throttling my HTTP streams you douchebag comcast?
I'm downloading my revision3 shows and some porn at the same time and all of a sudden, I can't load google?
try caching web content regionally. Oh wait, that's a stupid idea also.
their plan here is to say, ok you can legally download all of this content from local p2p servers. Anyone not using our servers is downloading illegally.
At that point, it's
Why don't they just put valve on your pipe? (Score:5, Funny)
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The answer is to charnge per gig. (Score:3, Insightful)
1) Set a price ($1 a gig, minimum $50 a month).
2) Allow competition from providers in your area.
3) Observe the speed/bandwidth increase since it is being paid for.
4) Then observe the price drop as competition brings it down.
Without competition, you can't have this and will exceed your bandwidth eventually.
What is this about? (Score:2)
It isn't about bandwidth. The ISPs have no equivalent problem with movies and other large content from Amazon, iTunes, Netflix and TV over internet. These usages are way huger than P2P traffic. But those bandwidth users are sanctioned and about control of what you see, how you see and under what conditions.
It isn't about efficiency. P2P technologies for downloads properly done are much more efficient.
It isn't about pirating. If it was they wouldn't be threatening an entire type of internet technology.
Is wireless mesh the future? (Score:2)
If, as seems likely, the ISPs, supported by governments and organitions like the RIAA, strangle the net as we known it - what can we do?
I have a mesh router, and so do a couple of my neighbours. We have them on our roofs. We share our iTunes libraries and other stuff over them. They're fast - very fast. Of course, we're reliant on our ISPs for email and WAN access, but if *enough* people did what we were doing, what could happen? A cultural shift would certainly be needed, but if we could re-create the free
contract (Score:2)
It's time that everyone who is about to get into a contract with an ISP tells them directly upfront: I am going to be a heavy P2P user. You will take this into account right now and will either turn me down as a customer or offer to me some form of service that will support my activity and I want it in writing in my contract that I can actually USE all of my bandwidth and capacity and you will NOT interfere with my usage. I want it in my contract signed by you.
That is what should be done, either they will
Re: (Score:2)
Incentive?
Today I sold something on eBay without scamming the buyer.
Where is my reward whats my incentive to NOT commit fraud?
If I don't get anything more than the fair and agreed price I'm going to take the buyers money and not bother delivering the product. That'll show them.
~Dan