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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: Can P2P applications learn to play fair on networks?
On 23-okt-2007, at 19:43, Sean Donelan wrote: The problem here is that they seem to be using a sledge hammer: BitTorrent is essentially left dead in the water. And they deny doing anything, to boot. A reasonable approach would be to throttle the offending applications to make them fit inside the maximum reasonable traffic envelope. There are many "reasonable" things providers could do. So then why to you stick up for Comcast when they do something unreasonable? Although yesterday there was a little more info and it seems they only stop the affected protocols temporarily, the uploads should complete later. If that's true, I'd say that's reasonable for a protocol like BitTorrent that automatically retries, but it's hard to know if it's true, and Comcast is still to blame for saying one thing and doing something else. However, in the US last year we had folks testifying to Congress that QOS will never work, providers must never treat any traffic differently, So what? Just because someone testified to something before the US congress doesn't make it true. Or law. DPI is evil, It is. and the answer to all our problems is just more bandwidth. That's pretty stupid. Remove one bottleneck, create another. But it's not to say that some ISPs can't stand to up their bandwidth. The result is network engineering by politician, and many reasonable things can no longer be done. I don't see that. Changing some of the billing methods could encourage US providers to offer "uncapped" line rates, but "capped" data usage. So you could have a 20Mbps/50Mbps/100Mbps line rate, but because the upstream network utilization could be controlled at the data layer instead of the line rate, effective prices may be lower. But I don't know if the bloggersphere is ready for that yet in the US. Buying wholesale metered and reselling unmetered is just not a sustainable business model, you're always at the mercy of your cutomers' usage patterns. Most of the blogoshpere will be able to understand that, as long as ISPs make sure that 98% of all users don't have to worry about hitting traffic limits and/or having to pay extra. Remember that it's in ISP's interest that users use a lot of traffic, because otherwise they don't need to buy fatter lines. So ISPs should work hard to give users as much traffic as they can reasonably give them. (Something my new ISP should take to heart - I moved into a new apartment more than a week ago and I'm still waiting to hear from my new DSL provider.)
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