symmetric vs. asymmetric [was: Verizon Policy Statement on Net Neutrality]

Thu Apr 23 14:06:42 UTC 2015

It's amazing, really.

Netflix and YouTube now overtake BitTorrent and all other file sharing
peer-to-peer traffic combined, even on academic networks, by order(s) of
magnitude.  The amount of peer-to-peer traffic is not even significant in
comparison.  It might as well be IRC from our perspective.

Internet usage habits have shifted quite a bit in the past decade.  I think
the takeaway is that if you provide content in a way that is fairly priced
and convenient to access (e.g. DRM doesn't get in your way), most people
will opt for the legal route.  Something we were trying to explain to the
MPAA and RIAA years ago when they shoved the DMCA down our throats.

I'm certainly in favor of symmetrical service.  I think there is a widely
held myth that DOS attacks will take down the Internet when everyone has
more bandwidth.  The fact is that DOS attacks are a problem regardless of
bandwidth, and throttling people isn't a solution.  The other (somewhat
insulting) argument that people will use greater upload speeds for illegal
activity is pretty bogus as well.

The limit on upload bandwidth for most people is a roadblock to a lot of
the services that people will take for granted a decade from now; cloud
backup, residential video surveillance over IP, peer-to-peer high
definition video conferencing.  And likely a lot of things that we haven't
imagined yet.

As funny as it sounds, I think Twitch (streaming video games) has been the
application that has made the younger generation care about their upload
speed more than anything else.  They now have a use case where their
limited upload is a real problem for them, and when they find out their ISP
can't provide anything good enough they get pretty upset about it.

On Wed, Apr 22, 2015 at 6:02 PM, Jay Ashworth <jra at baylink.com> wrote:

> ----- Original Message -----
> > From: "Frank Bulk" <frnkblk at iname.com>
>
> > Those are measured at the campus boundary. I don't have visibility inside
> > the school's network to know who much intra-campus traffic there may be .
> > but we know that peer-to-peer is a small percentage of overall Internet
> > traffic flows, and streaming video remains the largets.
>
> BitTorrent makes special efforts to keep as much traffic local as possible,
> I understand; that probably isn't too helpful... except at scales like that
> on a resnet at a sizable campus.
>
> Cheers,
> -- jra
> --
> Jay R. Ashworth                  Baylink
> jra at baylink.com
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>

-- 
Ray Patrick Soucy
Network Engineer
University of Maine System

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