Online games stealing your bandwidth

Tue Sep 28 17:57:15 UTC 2010

BitTorrent have been active contributors to the IETF LEDBAT working
group, which is looking at transport protocols that back off much more
aggressively than TCP, with exactly the idea of making P2P have a
lower impact on other things at the customer edge.
<http://tools.ietf.org/wg/ledbat/>

On Tue, Sep 28, 2010 at 9:58 AM, Jack Bates <jbates at brightok.net> wrote:
> On 9/27/2010 7:35 PM, Warren Bailey wrote:
>>
>> Can someone name an ISP that encourages P2P traffic?? ;)
>>
>
> A proper ISP doesn't encourage any type of traffic. We're indifferent. Of
> course, we'll be happy to mention the benefits and draw backs of using
> various protocols on the Internet. Demand wise, video streaming to point and
> click boxes will load the network far more than p2p ever has; granted, in
> the opposite direction of the normal p2p complaint.
>
> My, and my company's, biggest complaint is the lack of improvement on these
> protocols to play more friendly with customer's other traffic. It is not so
> much the effects of it on my network, as much as how it effects my
> customer's unshared link. The "give me everything" tactic, especially on
> outbound traffic, saturates the link, which in turn lowers the customer's
> other traffic. Am I the only one who likes to stream video while running
> bittorrent, surfing the web, checking my email, and playing some online game
> all at the same time?
>
> I'm not going to rag on bittorrent, though. I do have adjustments in my
> clients to cap the upstream/downstream to allow my other traffic through.
> Many clients and protocols don't have this ability, though. Some
> purposefully hide themselves and what they are doing. The only indication is
> the fact that the "Internet is slow." The people who make this software
> should sit in a call center troubleshooting why "The Internet is slow!" when
> various software products are bandwidth hogs (and sometimes are hidden from
> the customer completely). We, of course, detect the link saturation, but
> there is no indicator for us to help the customer figure out what they need
> to disable.
>
>
> Jack
>