Verizon, Comcast Say They Are P2P Friendly 158
An anonymous reader writes "Verizon and Comcast announced they will not 'block or throttle Internet traffic delivered via peer-to-peer networks' — essentially proclaiming that they are now P2P friendly. The decision came as a result of a test conducted with Verizon and Pando Networks, testing the benefits of a P2P/ISP partnership. During the test, the amount of P2P content delivered to Verizon subscribers from inside its network grew from 2 percent to 50 percent. This shows ISPs need to work with P2P companies to improve content delivery and manage traffic. Verizon also announced it will be looking at ways to use P2P technology to deploy new features on FiOS TV." Just the same, read on for one approach to mitigating likely tightening restrictions on P2P network use.
Another anonymous reader writes "RIAA/MPAA have recently been targeting torrent aggregators like PirateBay, because the aggregators are the vulnerable components of the BitTorrent protocol. A new open-source project to thwart such attacks was announced on p2p-hackers and released yesterday:
Cubit, a new open-source p2p overlay, enables the Azureus BitTorrent client to look up torrents via approximate keyword search... Cubit completely decentralizes the lookup process through an efficient, light-weight peer-to-peer overlay that can perform approximate matches. It performs searches without relying on any centralized components, and therefore is immune to legal and technical attacks targeting torrent aggregators."
Right... (Score:5, Insightful)
Even 100% is not good enough... (Score:4, Insightful)
You see, 50% is not good enough from the ISPs viewpoint: That still requires just as many bits crossing the ISP's boundry as if the content provider used UNCACHED HTTP.
In practice, many (most?) ISPs use transparent HTTP caches, so having 50% of the data stay internal is still no good, as on popular files (eg, a big youtube video), 99% of the traffic stays internal for HTTP.
Even PERFECT P2P requires at least one outbound copy for each inbound copy, so a PERFECT P2P system will require 2x the traffic crossing the border when compared with HTTP thats cached.
Oh goodie! (Score:5, Insightful)
How much extra will you be charging us for that?
Throttling - Caps (Score:5, Insightful)
So, we'll move from throttling to arbitrary caps. Maybe after XXGB your speeds are cut to 1/10th. Or maybe (like my cable company), they can just say "Well, we don't want you as a customer any more".
Explicit caps? We can complain or not subscribe if they're low- I'm for that if somebody is downloading 300GB+ per month, using my node. But the idea of "Well, you downloaded 'too much'" is just as bad as lying about throttling.
Re:Right... (Score:5, Insightful)
Fuck the 'friendly' submitter (Score:5, Insightful)
When people buy a product or service they expect it to work reasonably. It's like saying that a car that doesn't anymore explode into flames is now 'friendly'... The word he so boldly uses don't even appear on the FA. Save your spam for eggs and bacon.
I believe in actions, not words and hope more people would follow suit.
Re:The article meshes with my experience (Score:5, Insightful)
The WAN technology doesn't make that go away. There could be any number of reasons why you haven't suffered any depredation such as population density, the profile of your neighbors, etc. It could just be that neighborhood hasn't reached saturation yet.
I used to have DSL and I found my connection would degrade noticeably in the late afternoon and evening simply because we had a lot of people in the area connected with lots of kids.
The last mile is just one point of depredation. The in-home connection experience is going to get bad. I would hate to live in a city and use wireless simply because of contention on the airwaves. Hell, when I first got FiOS, I had to convince the tech that the reason for the poor performance was because the Actiontec router they provided and a neighbors were on the same channel, 6, causing contention. I moved mine to channel 11, a non-interfering channel, and wah-lah, performance problem solved.
riiight (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I'll believe it when... (Score:3, Insightful)
P2P friendly. Specific protocols not? (Score:5, Insightful)
If you read the article carefully, this is not about allowing unfettered P2P on their networks at all. They are deliberately obfuscating the issue. They leave the door open for blocking, filtering and "shaping" (ie. TCP resetting) any protocols they want. This is kind of like Verizon Wireless proudly announcing "We are radio phone call friendly" when the issue is whether to support GSM or CDMA.
Verizon's senior technologist talks about "working with P2P companies", which is radically different than allowing anyone to write a P2P networking app that does (fill in the blank.) Then goes on to say that work needs to be done on P2P DRM.
All in all, the tone of the article seems to confirm that the fight for network neutrality is far from over.
It doesn't matter (Score:4, Insightful)
In the final analysis, protecting aggregators won't matter unless we get genuine 'net neutrality. The ISPs will switch to a 'whitelist' of content providers. In other words, if you want your content delivered, you will pay, become a 'partner', host ISP banner ads or whatever. All others will grovel with the lowest QoS. This sidesteps accusations of throttling 'undesirable' services. Everyone gets throttled and will have to pay to get out of jail.
I don't think the big ISPs have anything special against P2P services (that they don't have against anyone else). They just want to extract money out of them. With big players like Google, Yahoo, and MSN, that's easy to do. There's advertising revenue that can be quantified and the ISPs can skim off of. P2P just happens to be a big enough consumer of bandwidth that the ISPs would like them to pay to play as well.
Re:Right... (Score:2, Insightful)
Cynicism. When referring to large corporations, cynicism has rarely steered me wrong--though I'm glad to hear your experience with Verizon has been so positive.
Re:Right... (Score:5, Insightful)
But you are talking about recent stuff.
Why...
1) It's over priced.
2) It's stupidly easy to download.
3) Most were unable to purchase them anyway (so they know morally that the artists lost nothing from them).
4) Many were going to skip the commercials (effectively "stealing" the TV shows) anyway.
5) In many cases, the legit version is harder to use/less user friendly than the pirated copy.
6) Entertainment executives and big artists are stupidly overpaid ($1 billion for Rowling!?!?) so people have no sense of injury or sympathy for them.
7) It's so corporate/cold that people feel no connection or empathy with the creators (and humans have always taken advantage of/ killed people not in their "monkey tribe".
8) It's hard to get it legally (you go to best buy.. you look at the racks, it's out of stock) while it's there on five torrent sites on line. You want to see it in the theatres or on TV but it won't be shown in your area until next year (Battlestar Galactica-- I torrented all of it before it came on SF in the USA).
Re:Right... (Score:3, Insightful)
None of those stories that you told suggest that they are deliberately throttling those connections. Verizon provisions your line at the fastest speed that their tools/wire database indicate that your loop will support (unless you pay for a slower tier). If there are problems with the local loop or (more likely) the inside wiring at your house, then the modem won't be able to sync up at this speed and will fall back to slower ones and generally not work very well at all.
That has nothing to do with throttling p2p connections ala Comcast. It has everything to do with a physical layer problem, either on the outside plant or the inside wiring in your house. Either way it wasn't something that they did to you on purpose.
Just because he's your next door neighbor doesn't mean that his loop takes the same path back to the CO that yours does. It might -- it might also go in the opposite direction down the street and take a completely different path back. And even if it takes the same path it might be a different wire gage than the one you are on. "Loop length" isn't the literal length of the wire -- it's a measurement based on capacitance. A thicker wire gage in the local loop generally translates into being able to provide DSL services further out.
I don't buy that. The 768kbps is a value tier -- that's not the minimum that they promise. If you sign up for the 1.5/384 service and can't get it then you can back out of that contract in the first month. You can do the same if they promise 3.0/768 at time of order and can't deliver it.
Regardless, I'll grant you that it's a PITA to deal with them to get these types of problems fixed, particularly if you aren't fluent in their lingo. Luckily it seems that you had another option. My choices are between Verizon DSL (which always delivers my promised speed and never goes down) or Roadrunner (which bogs down during peak hours and may start metering traffic soon). There's no CLEC providers of DSL for residential customers around here. No WISPs that are still in business either.
I've had several fights with Verizon that I already outlined to get services setup properly. But I'll stand by my claim that once you do manage to get it all configured and working that it's pretty much rock-solid. In four years I haven't seen my residential DSL account go down once. It was even still running during the floods last year when my whole town (including the CO) had no power for five days. I hooked my modem up to a UPS and surfed with my laptop -- worked the whole time. Time Warner couldn't say that -- their internet and phone customers were SOL the entire time.