Can P2P applications learn to play fair on networks?

Iljitsch van Beijnum iljitsch at muada.com
Wed Oct 24 07:44:47 UTC 2007


On 23-okt-2007, at 19:43, Sean Donelan wrote:

>> The problem here is that they seem to be using a sledge hammer:  
>> BitTorrent is essentially left dead in the water. And they deny  
>> doing anything, to boot.

>> A reasonable approach would be to throttle the offending  
>> applications to make them fit inside the maximum reasonable  
>> traffic envelope.

> There are many "reasonable" things providers could do.

So then why to you stick up for Comcast when they do something  
unreasonable?

Although yesterday there was a little more info and it seems they  
only stop the affected protocols temporarily, the uploads should  
complete later. If that's true, I'd say that's reasonable for a  
protocol like BitTorrent that automatically retries, but it's hard to  
know if it's true, and Comcast is still to blame for saying one thing  
and doing something else.

> However, in the US  last year we had folks testifying to Congress  
> that QOS will never work, providers must never treat any traffic  
> differently,

So what? Just because someone testified to something before the US  
congress doesn't make it true. Or law.

> DPI is evil,

It is.

> and the answer to all our problems is just more bandwidth.

That's pretty stupid. Remove one bottleneck, create another. But it's  
not to say that some ISPs can't stand to up their bandwidth.

> The result is network engineering by politician, and many  
> reasonable things can no longer be done.

I don't see that.

> Changing some of the billing methods could encourage US providers  
> to offer "uncapped" line rates, but "capped" data usage.  So you  
> could have a 20Mbps/50Mbps/100Mbps line rate, but because the  
> upstream network utilization could be controlled at the data layer  
> instead of the line rate, effective prices may be lower.

> But I don't know if the bloggersphere is ready for that yet in the US.

Buying wholesale metered and reselling unmetered is just not a  
sustainable business model, you're always at the mercy of your  
cutomers' usage patterns. Most of the blogoshpere will be able to  
understand that, as long as ISPs make sure that 98% of all users  
don't have to worry about hitting traffic limits and/or having to pay  
extra. Remember that it's in ISP's interest that users use a lot of  
traffic, because otherwise they don't need to buy fatter lines. So  
ISPs should work hard to give users as much traffic as they can  
reasonably give them.

(Something my new ISP should take to heart - I moved into a new  
apartment more than a week ago and I'm still waiting to hear from my  
new DSL provider.)



More information about the NANOG mailing list