North American Network Operators Group

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[admin] Re: Can P2P applications learn to play fair on networks? and Re: Comcast blocking p2p uploads

  • From: Alex Pilosov
  • Date: Mon Oct 22 03:44:03 2007

On Mon, 22 Oct 2007, Randy Bush wrote:

> actually, it would be really helpful to the masses uf us who are being
> liberal with our delete keys if someone would summarize the two threads,
> comcast p2p management and 204/4.
240/4 has been summarized before: Look for email with "MLC Note" in 
subject. However, in future, MLC emails will contain "[admin]" in the 
subject.

Interestingly, the content for the p2p threads boils down to:

a) Original post by Sean Donelan: Allegation that p2p software "does not
play well" with the rest of the network users - unlike TCP-based protocols
which results in more or less fair bandwidth allocation, p2p software will
monopolize upstream or downstream bandwidth unfairly, resulting in
attempts by network operators to control such traffic.

Followup by Steve Bellovin noting that if p2p software (like bt) uses
tcp-based protocols, due to use of multiple tcp streams, fairness is
achieved *between* BT clients, while being unfair to the rest of the 
network. 

No relevant discussion of this subject has commenced, which is troubling, 
as it is, without doubt, very important for network operations.

b) Discussion started by Adrian Chadd whether p2p software is aware of
network topology or congestion - without apparent answer, which leads me 
to guess that the answer is "no".

c) Offtopic whining about filtering liability, MSO pricing, fairness,
equality, end-user complaints about MSOs, filesharing of family photos,
disk space provided by MSOs for web hosting.

Note: if you find yourself to have posted something that was tossed into
the category c) - please reconsider your posting habits.

As usual, I apologise if I skipped over your post in this summary. 

-alex