FW: ISPs slowing P2P traffic...

Joe Greco jgreco at ns.sol.net
Tue Jan 15 17:51:40 UTC 2008


> Joe Greco wrote:
> > Time to stop selling the "always on" connections, then, I guess, because
> > it is "always on" - not P2P - which is the fat man never leaving.  P2P
> > is merely the fat man eating a lot while he's there.
> 
> As long as we're keeping up this metaphor, P2P is the fat man who says 
> he's gonna get a job real soon but dude life is just SO HARD and crashes 
> on your couch for three weeks until eventually you threaten to get the 
> cops involved because he won't leave. Then you have to clean up 
> thirty-seven half-eaten bags of Cheetos.

I have no idea what the networking equivalent of thirty-seven half-eaten
bags of Cheetos is, can't even begin to imagine what the virtual equivalent
of my couch is, etc.  Your metaphor doesn't really make any sense to me,
sorry.

Interestingly enough, we do have a pizza-and-play place a mile or two
from the house, you pay one fee to get in, then quarters (or cards or
whatever) to play games - but they have repeatedly answered that they
are absolutely and positively fine with you coming in for lunch, and 
staying through supper.  And we have a "discount" card, which they used
to give out to local businesspeople for "business lunches", on top of it.

> Every network has limitations, and I don't think I've ever seen a 
> network that makes every single end-user happy with everything all the 
> time. You could pipe 100Mbps full-duplex to everyone's door, and someone 
> would still complain because they don't have gigabit access to lemonparty.

Certainly.  There will be gigabit in the future, but it isn't here (in
the US) just yet.  That has very little to do with the deceptiveness
inherent in selling something when you don't intend to actually provide
what you advertised.

> Whether those are limitations of the technology you chose, limitations 
> in your budget, policy restrictions, whatever.
> 
> As long as you fairly disclose to your end-users what limitations and 
> restrictions exist on your network, I don't see the problem.

You've set out a qualification that generally doesn't exist.  For example,
this discussion included someone from a WISP, Amplex, I believe, that 
listed certain conditions of use on their web site, and yet it seems like
they're un{willing,able} (not assigning blame/fault/etc here) to deliver
that level of service, and using their inability as a way to justify
possibly rate shaping P2P traffic above and beyond what they indicate on 
their own documents.

In some cases, we do have people burying T&C in lengthy T&C documents,
such as some of the 3G cellular providers who advertise "Unlimited
Internet(*)" data cards, but then have a slew of (*) items that are
restricted - but only if you dig into the fine print on Page 3 of the
T&C.  I'd much prefer that the advertising be honest and up front, and
that ISP's not be allowed to advertise "unlimited" service if they are
going to place limits, particularly significant limits, on the service.

... JG
-- 
Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net
"We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I
won't contact you again." - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN)
With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.



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