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)
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Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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Agreed on movies, though, which is why I don't do it.
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The piracy is another debate entirely.
Another point is that what your using that bandwidth for isn't Verizon's business, it could be gigs of Linux disto's, it could be steaming video, or it could be warez and piracy. It is between you and the copyright holder, and/or law enforcement, not between you and your ISP.
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).
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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.
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Prepare to be schooled.
I have 1.5Mbps DSL provisioned through Covad with Earthlink. My top download speed is right around advertised (~200KB/s, 1.5Mbps)
At the time I started my contract in 2001, I had just got done a 1.5 year battle with Verizon because they were charging me for the service on a dsl contract, but it had never worked. When I say "never worked" I mean not a single packet crossed their switch on my co
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There's your answer--you're not doing it right.
Try and do that in a month or two instead of a year and I'll bet you get their attention...
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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.
Re:Even 100% is not good enough... (Score:5, Informative)
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Hell you could do the same thing for other non-P2P services that ISPs typically don't like customers using. Turn every account into a hosting agreement with various limitations.
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On the other hand, if the ISPs were to remain neutral and simply torrent what their customer requests regardless of legality - and argue that they're transferring the bits as a technical matter and not in a copying/distribution manner - then this would at least make it easier for th
Re:Even 100% is not good enough... (Score:4, Informative)
Confirmed today: Comcast, Verizon (DSL + FiOS), Time Warner, and Speakeasy.
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Verizon FIOS does not cache (Score:2)
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Oh goodie! (Score:5, Insightful)
How much extra will you be charging us for that?
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Tested this morning with http://broadband.mpi-sws.mpg.de/transparency/bttest.php [mpi-sws.mpg.de]
Still multiple resets. Yes, torrents do complete, but much more slowly than on my neighbors ASDL which has half the speed rating of my comcast connection.
So they lie.
I'll believe it when... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:I'll believe it when... (Score:5, Informative)
I rarely get good torrent speeds unless I'm dealing with a highly transacted image. Like a new release of ubuntu.
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Now ignoring the fact that yes, the state of broadband in the U.S. sucks and 6 mbps being "good" is unfortunate, SpeedBoost is actually a nifty thing.
I had Comcast (Chicago area) and actually didn'
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You're forgetting to add on the cost of your time spent playing WoW though and the subsequent wounds from your lover.
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That's not really fair; funny, but not fair. The "short bump" has a throughput that is higher than the speed you are paying for, and then it gets throttled back to the speed defined in your SLA. Comcast is guilty of many other shady practices, let's stick with those instead of resorting to slander and negative spin, shall we?
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Comcast (Score:1)
Bell Canada needs to fix their practices as well (Score:1)
Re:Bell Canada needs to fix their practices as wel (Score:3, Informative)
My ISP (Teksavvy) emailed me a couple hours ago saying apparently most of the Teksavvy staff is taking the day off to go to the rally so please only call in with tech support questions if it's really important.
That's pretty cool if you ask me.
- Andrew.
Mod Parent Up! (Score:2)
Bell even throttled Cranky Geeks to 30 KB/s on me. The throttling is horrible, and the way they are doing it, you can't easily switch to a competitor. They throttle the competitor's connections too!
Tip: If you release and reacquire the PPPoE connection, it appears to temporarily fool the throttling software.
Additional tips would be appreciated.
Cubit (Score:3)
And looking at the current batch of lawsuits, I'd say now is the time to start supporting Cubit in all the major clients (I'm thinking particularly of KTorrent...) So please work on it if you have the skills, and bug people who do if you don't (that would be me).
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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.
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" you have exceeded the limits" so i politely explained there were no limits when i signed up, it was explicitly unlimited, ad even tho the published AUP still says unlimited, but if there was now a limit id comply."
But they didn't have a limit, just kept repeating that i exceeded one even tho they couldn't tell me what
Lies! (Score:2)
Lying bastards.
The article meshes with my experience (Score:5, Informative)
It has been my experience that in some ways DSL is superior to cable. I remember when cable first came out everyone who got it thought it was great. Then their neighbor got it, and their other neighbor got it, and suddenly it became obvious that the entire neighborhood was on one shared pipe and a single bandwidth hog could ruin it for everyone. It doesn't seem like much has changed in the last decade. With DSL you can count on getting the bandwidth that you pay for but the peak available bandwidth isn't as high as cable. On cable you might get some really high peak speeds, but the cable networks haven't been designed to sustain high transfer rates for long periods of time.
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.
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If it were only so simple. At some point, all your DSL connections are aggregated somewhere and that aggregation point becomes the bottleneck.
True in principle, but anecdotal reports (like the GP) consistently indicate that users do better with a point-to-point link to a switch at the CO than with a single LAN segment shared by the whole neighborhood.
Remember, cable modem service was piggy-backed on the existing cable TV network. I've read accounts on Slashdot of cable companies provisioning just one (or maybe two) SDTV (AKA 6 MHz) channels per LAN segment for cable modem.
Users used to be limited by 56Kb/s modems, and that constrained the conten
Re:The article meshes with my experience (Score:5, Informative)
It's voilà [wiktionary.org], damnit!
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Words change. [westvalley.edu]
Get over it.
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Except it isn't a change in usage that I'm complaining about. In fact, he's using the word exactly the way it's traditionally used! The problem is that he has no fucking clue how to spell it, probably because he's only ever heard it said, not seen it written.
Now, if you really want me to be pedantic about usage, we'll take a look at your sig:
"To do so" refers back to "leave out," so you're saying that you'
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I am curious as to why you think I would want you to be really pedantic about usage. Is it sarcasm? Is it a thinly vieled threat? The profanity in the sentence previous suggests hostility, but for what end? What is the message you are trying to send?
My previous point remains; words change. Maybe not in France, where the language police have called for a national lockdown of their national language, but since this is english, I thin
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If it were only so simple. At some point, all your DSL connections are aggregated somewhere and that aggregation point becomes the bottleneck.
Yes, all ISPs have that very same bottleneck and it's typically extremely large. The coaxial cable running through many residential neighborhoods quickly reaches saturation similar to that of an old 10Base2 Thinnet network where if a small handful of computers are using lots of bandwidth at once the collision rate goes up and the available bandwidth to all homes in that segment (typically hundreds, if not thousands) find saturated links and slowed browsing.
However the "bottleneck" at the ISP level - the
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In fact, they even lowered my rate, mid-contract when they changed there rates overall. Most places have a disclaimer saying new prices aren't for current customers.
So I don't understand where the hate for Verizon comes from.
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Technical support is alright. They had some provisioning problems with their 3mb lines for a while. The initial provision was for 1.
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How much of that do you think has to do with the union culture in the telcos? Could it have something to do with the combination of being unable to get rid of positions and being unable to fire inefficient people?
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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.
riiight (Score:5, Insightful)
Hmmm... (Score:3, Interesting)
Interestingly enough, this Team Fortress issues seems to have resolved itself in the last week and a half. I imagine this is due to a Team Fortress update, as I did not update the firmware in my router-- but this is an extreme coincidence.
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I ahve Verizon and don't have any of those problem you mention. Did you contact support?
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I had the problem too and stopped playing TF2 shortly there-after. I don't know if/when they actually fixed it since I just don't play it anymore.
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The problem is/was only a pain to fix if you want both Internet and TV. People without Fios TV had a much easier time plugging in their own equipment.
I think it was if you didn't have TV and your techs hooked you up with Ethernet running from the switch box then you were in the clear (could use any hardware you want). And if they would only run coax then you could still use your own hardware and just keep theirs to do (I guess) auth.
As
Answering a few questions.... (Score:2)
You can also replace the ActionTec with any other router, which gets an address via DHCP. You just have to clone the MAC address or call Verizon to tell them to reconfigure their router to talk to your MAC address. I believe that some of FIOS TV's capabilities depend on the ActionTec router (e.g. VOD).
All very friendly and easy, if you know n
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Fios has two inputs for internet-- one is called Moca and the other is ONT. ONT provides an ethernet port on the box outside the house. If you don't have TV, you can plug your own router right into this. If you have the TV service, the set top boxes need to get IP addresses. The MOCA connection is coax and plugs into their Actiontec router.
I looked at several possibilities here, one was putting the Actiontec in a MOCA to ethernet
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--J
I call "Bullshit" on Comcast (Score:5, Informative)
Is BitTorrent traffic on a well-known BitTorrent port (6881) throttled?
* 2 out of 2 BitTorrent transfers were interrupted while uploading (seeding) using forged TCP RST packets. It seems like your ISP hinders you from uploading BitTorrent traffic to our test server.
* The BitTorrent download worked. Our tool was successful in downloading data using the BitTorrent protocol.
* There's no indication that your ISP rate limits your BitTorrent downloads. In our tests a TCP download achieved minimal 713 Kbps while a BitTorrent download achieved maximal 720 Kbps.
Is BitTorrent traffic on a non-standard BitTorrent port (4711) throttled?
* 2 out of 2 BitTorrent transfers were interrupted while uploading (seeding) using forged TCP RST packets. It seems like your ISP hinders you from uploading BitTorrent traffic to our test server.
* The BitTorrent download worked. Our tool was successful in downloading data using the BitTorrent protocol.
* There's no indication that your ISP rate limits your BitTorrent downloads. In our tests a TCP download achieved minimal 661 Kbps while a BitTorrent download achieved maximal 741 Kbps.
Is TCP traffic on a well-known BitTorrent port (6881) throttled?
* There's no indication that your ISP rate limits all downloads at port 6881. In our test, a TCP download on a BitTorrent port achieved at least 713 Kbps while a TCP download on a non-BitTorrent port achieved at least 661 Kbps.
* There's no indication that your ISP rate limits all uploads at port 6881. In our test, a TCP upload on a BitTorrent port achieved at least 1353 Kbps while a TCP upload on a non-BitTorrent port achieved at least 1403 Kbps.
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.
Sure (Score:2)
RIAA Illegal Investigators (Score:2)
P2P CDNs don't count (Score:2)
Robert X. Cringely once said that wireless telcos are in the business of creating billable events. What you see here is broadband ISPs desperately trying to do much the same. By convincing governing types that the P2P the public wants is faster fulfillment of
Effects of lawsuit? (Score:2)
Friendly yes, to THEIR services (Score:2)
If you arent, well too bad for you.
This just in... (Score:2, Funny)
And Bill Gates announced Windows is going FOSS (Score:2, Funny)
Sure thet are P2P friendly... (Score:2)
Riiight...Comcast (Score:2)
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They can enforce it and you have the option of canceling without a fee if you don't like new terms of service. THats it.