North American Network Operators Group

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Re: Can P2P applications learn to play fair on networks?

  • From: Joe Provo
  • Date: Tue Oct 23 11:07:46 2007

On Tue, Oct 23, 2007 at 01:18:01PM +0200, Iljitsch van Beijnum wrote:
> 
> On 22-okt-2007, at 18:12, Sean Donelan wrote:
> 
> >Network operators probably aren't operating from altruistic  
> >principles, but for most network operators when the pain isn't  
> >spread equally across the the customer base it represents a  
> >"fairness" issue.  If 490 customers are complaining about bad  
> >network performance and the cause is traced to what 10 customers  
> >are doing, the reaction is to hammer the nails sticking out.
> 
> The problem here is that they seem to be using a sledge hammer:  
> BitTorrent is essentially left dead in the water. 

Wrong - seeding from scratch, that is uploading without any 
download component, is being clobbered. Seeding back into the 
swarm works while one is still taking chunks down, then closes.
Essentially, all clients into a client similar to BitTyrant
and focuses on, as Charlie put it earlier, customers downloading
stuff.

>From the perspective of thee protocol designers, unfair sharing
is indeed "dead" but to state it in a way that indicates customers
cannot *use* BT for some function is bogus.  Part of the reason
why caching, provider based, etc schemes seem to be unpopular
is that private trackers appear to operate much in the way that
old BBS download/uploads used to... you get credits for contributing
and can only pull down so much based on such credits.  Not just
bragging rights, but users need to take part in the transactions
to actually use the service. A provider-hosted solution which 
managed to transparently handle this across multiple clients and 
trackers would likely be popular with the end users.

Cheers,

Joe 

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