North American Network Operators Group
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Re: ISPs slowing P2P traffic...

  • From: Mark Radabaugh
  • Date: Sun Jan 13 18:40:16 2008

Geo. wrote:


The vast majority of our last-mile connections are fixed wireless. The
design of the system is essentially half-duplex with an adjustable ratio between download/upload traffic.

This in a nutshell is the problem, the ratio between upload and download should be 1:1 and if it were then there would be no problems. Folks need to stop pretending they aren't part of the internet. Setting a ratio where upload:download is not 1:1 makes you a leech. It's a cheat designed to allow technology companies to claim their devices provide more bandwidth than they actually do. Bandwidth is 2 way, you should give as much as you get.

Making the last mile a 18x unbalanced pipe (ie 6mb down and 384K up) is what has created this problem, not file sharing, not running backups, not any of the things that require up speed. For the entire internet up speed must equal down speed or it can't work. You can't leech and expect everyone else to pay for your unbalanced approach.

Geo.
Your back to the 'last mile access' problem. Most Cable, DSL, and Wireless is asymmetric and for good reason - making efficient use of limited overall bandwidth and providing customers the high download speeds they demand.

You can posit that the Internet should be symmetric but it will take major financial and engineering investment to change that. Given that there is no incentive for network operators to assist 3rd party CDN's by increasing upload speeds I don't see this happening in the near future. I am not even remotely surprised that network operators would be interested in disrupting this traffic.

Mark