Decluttering The Tubes, Solutions to the BitTorrent “Problem”?
Written by Ernesto on February 01, 2008Hundreds of larger and smaller ISPs all over the world try to limit BitTorrent traffic on their networks. They often argue that they have no other options, but that’s not completely true.
There has been a lot of discussion lately about Comcast’s efforts to slow down and block BitTorrent traffic, and even the FCC got involved in it. Unfortunately, Comcast is not the only ISP engaging in this kind of behavior, many others use similar tactics.
BitTorrent throttling has been going on for a few years now, but it is getting more attention lately, because the number of people who use BitTorrent keeps growing. The traffic shaping methods used vary from ISP to ISP. Some only limit BitTorrent traffic during certain times of the day, or throttle in specific regions. Others take a more aggressive approach and prevent their customers from seeding, or even downloading .torrent files.
Some people might wonder why ISPs throttle their connection. The argument most often used is that all the BitTorrent traffic on their network slows down other customers’ connections. An argument that makes sense (if it is true), but the real problem is that ISPs tend to be secretive about their throttling efforts. If it really is that big of a problem, be open about it, and let your customers know what they can and cannot do.
Art Reisman, who is chief technical officer at APConnections - a company that happens to manufacture traffic shaping devices, lists some of the possible solutions ISPs can implement in order to cope with the “BitTorrent problem”, which he wanted to share here.
1.) Ask for voluntary cooperation.
One recourse would be to ask customers to scale back on torrents, or to use them at night or another time when network usage is low. There is plenty of precedent in the Green movement to recycle and to reduce carbon footprints. So why not a campaign to scale back BitTorrent usage ?
The downside: Can you imagine a service provider sending a letter to its customer base outlining the technical limitations of allowing unlimited BitTorrent applications, and then asking for some voluntary cooperation? Me neither. Perhaps someday, but for now providers are viewed as a profit-driven adversary by most customers.
The upside: Seems to have a warm, fuzzy, feel-good ring to it.
2.) Keep connections within the providers network.
This is the method currently practiced with help from a popular product provided by Sandvine. The basic idea is that on a large provider network there are enough BitTorrent hosts that a client need not leave the provider’s network to retrieve content.
The downside: Consumers are suspicious of providers looking at their data to make determinations on what type of traffic it is. The consumer may also not get good results if the bulk of the content were located outside their providers network; for example, if a user were to download a file that was popular in Europe, the number of servers hosting it on the Comcast network might be limited.
The upside: Consumers are still freely able to find most BitTorrent content. Providers greatly reduce connections and exchange costs with other providers.
3.) Usage based quotas.
With this method a service provider will charge much higher rates when a preset amount of data usage is exceeded over a calendar month.
The upside: This method is unobtrusive in that the provider need not look at a customer’s data, only their total usage. Experience with university residential networks has shown that once quotas are announced users voluntarily reduce their peer-to-peer or BitTorrent usage.
The downside: More complex billing detail and customer service to resolve disputes. Large providers will still compete by marketing their service as unlimited. Despite the rants about BitTorrent being a resource issue, it is still only a small percentage of total customers that use it.
4.) Limit the total connections allowed at one time per user.
The upside: It’s simple and fair to implement. Providers already set rate caps on Internet speeds, so this is just a rate cap on connections, very similar and easy to swallow for the consumer.
The downside: When users reach their allotted connection limit, all traffic on their link slows down.
5.) Build out networks to handle the increased load and pass the cost onto the consumer.
The upside: It works.
The downside: It’s most likely not economically sustainable. Without some other form of mitigation, the public’s appetite for content appears insatiable.
6.) Cancel the service of users who abuse their privileges. There have been reports of providers doing this already.
The upside: It moves an unprofitable customer off your network and onto a competitor.
The downside: Customers begin to despise you.
Here at TorrentFreak we have discussed some of these alternatives before, and in the long run there is really only one solution that is acceptable. The Internet is only a few years old, if the plan is to keep using it in the future, ISPs need to upgrade their networks. So, invest in more Internet gateway capacity, 10Gbps interconnect ports, and peering agreements. BitTorrent users are not the problem, they only signal that the ISPs need to upgrade their capacity, because customers will only get more demanding in the future. The Internet is not only about sending email, and browsing on text based websites anymore.
Art Reisman told TorrentFreak that that there are two solutions that make sense to him: “Raise rates per usage volume instead of flat rates, if it can be kept simple! Second is to limit customer connections as a resource.” Charging for bandwidth uses makes sense indeed, as long as the prices are reasonable. The second option of limiting the number of connections only looks like a temporary fix though.
What do you think?
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A combination of (1) and (2). I don’t mind scheduling large downloads to start at 1AM when hardly anyone is using their connection for “important things”.
I currently get “peak” quota and “off-peak” download quota. Off peak quota is 3x more than peak, so my ISP is being smart and encouraging people to torrent when the pipes aren’t busy.
Although Sandvine suck right now, they have the right idea - downloading something from the US is just inefficient if there are local sources for it. If they can get the technique right so it results in no (or very small) delays in getting the file, then they should do it.
[quote comment="278658"]I don’t like the idea of “Raise rates per usage volume instead of flat rates.”
Mainly because I don’t want to have to “watch my minutes” on the internet.
The US should just have a bandwidth cap. A user exceeds it per month, their internet gets slow. 30GB per month seems suitable.
Also, why are ISP’s complaining about customers using their service to it’s fullest extent? If the ISP has a problem, they should fix their end, and not blame the customer.[/quote]
30 GB? oh my. I go through that in three days. Every three days.
The internet is only a few years old?
Warning, wall of text incoming ^^.
It’s somewhat silly that people keep harping on the theme of ‘The internet is only a few years old’.
In a very real perspective it is so after all, the net as we know it nowadays started only emerging around 95, and it is a very different place now then it was back then. Bittorrent and youtube were nonexistent and the best you could hope for was for an mp3 of shady quality to download in 20 minutes or so, so yes, the high bandwidth Internet is only a few years old.
Also, in all honesty I find the discussion of bandwidth caps weird, as they will not resolve any issues at all. The problem lies, as I see it, in concurrent capacity, not total capacity. The lines and links stay up, even when not in use. I used to live in a town with a 4gb per month limit, and as I do download quite a bit, I went through that quite fast. But when I’ve used up my quota, my line remains active, but only in a crippled fashion, this however does nothing to stop congestion, as when my allocation resets so does everyone else’s, and everyone started happily downloading again. The internet was painfully slow there whenever people had their allocations reset and lovely fast when nigh on everyone was crippled.
So did the caps solve anything, if you ask me, no not really, it just made for a very very congested network whenever the caps got reset, and probably made the congestion worse then it could’ve been, due to everyone waiting for their limit to reset to do the downloads they wanted, making the network take a much larger hit then if it had been spread out over time, and everyone downloading when the idea/urge hit them instead of saving it up.
So what would’ve been the solution, imho lower speeds to the end user and no cap would’ve worked a lot better, as it eases the concurrent load and most certainly would spread the load out much better.
Bandwidth is not a limited resource as in that there is only so much available in total, it’s limited in the sense that there is only so much available per period of time.
To say that a network for example has a capability of say 100 gb/month, and then selling that in chunks is silly, as an user then may want to blow the chunk they bought, say 10gb, in one go, and if multiple users do this, the network will still get congested and bogged down.
Offering reasonable speeds so the network stays under it’s total capacity per moment would work a lot better to resolve that congestion, and make people happier too most likely.
To me the major problem seems to be to change the view from total capacity for a given period of time, to what capacity can it can handle just in the now, as the network does not cease to exist when an arbitrary limit of data has been reached.
The proper way to do this is simply lower the priority of torrent packets on the net.
If the ISPs can tell a torrent package, they can make them get of of the way of other packets.
Re: TheFilmBuff,
I haven’t opened 20 tabs on YouTube, but I have opened 4-5. Why? Because the YouTube server’s speed is permanently set on “pokey”. I can download 20MB from other sites in under a minute, but YouTube takes 3-4 minutes to send me a lousy 5MB video.
[quote comment="280048"]Warning, wall of text incoming ^^.
Also, in all honesty I find the discussion of bandwidth caps weird, as they will not resolve any issues at all. The problem lies, as I see it, in concurrent capacity, not total capacity. The lines and links stay up, even when not in use. I used to live in a town with a 4gb per month limit, and as I do download quite a bit, I went through that quite fast. But when I’ve used up my quota, my line remains active, but only in a crippled fashion, this however does nothing to stop congestion, as when my allocation resets so does everyone else’s, and everyone started happily downloading again. The internet was painfully slow there whenever people had their allocations reset and lovely fast when nigh on everyone was crippled.
So did the caps solve anything, if you ask me, no not really, it just made for a very very congested network whenever the caps got reset, and probably made the congestion worse then it could’ve been, due to everyone waiting for their limit to reset to do the downloads they wanted, making the network take a much larger hit then if it had been spread out over time, and everyone downloading when the idea/urge hit them instead of saving it up.
[/quote]
Uhh, didn’t they think to stagger the reset dates so not everybody came off their cap at the same time??? What kind of dumbass town is this??
Personally, I would prefer a super high speed capped connection at the expense of a slower unlimited one. I currently get a 20mbit, 150gb/month package in Australia. You can only use 40gb from 7am to 1am which is a pain but otherwise it’s pretty good.
Wouldn’t you prefer a 500mbit connection with a terabyte limit over a 3mbit unlimited connection? Sure, the 3mbit connection can use a terabyte going flat out for a month, but I’ll take the 500mbit one thanks.
Feb 02, 2008 at 02:50 by Branston PickleQuote Branston Pickle
@29
Ah It was fairly recently they amended their FUP. xD
Heres the script:
http://allyours.virginmedia.com/html/internet/traffic.html
i was turning off utorrent between 4-12pm thanks for the heads up.
fhuck companies. We should try a distributed internet over WIFI or Wimax.
You know distributed computing os the internet.
And finally the users will rule over the internet
where I live we pay about US$250 / month and get 60GB bandwidth..go over this and they charge us 20c a meg! Thats the best deal in Australia for the largest download plan…. You’re soooo lucky! for now at least….
10 mbs without bitorrent or p2p ??
what the deal?
If my ISP asked me to limit my torrenting to the night time, I would assist and schedule most my load for the night. I got no problem with that.
Yay Primus! Its about $45 a month, truly unlimited and unthrottled bandwidth!
I’ve downloaded over 10GB in the last 24 hours and I haven’t run a single P2P program. All the downloads have been from Usenet.
Personally, I’d prefer a slower, but unlimited account over a faster one with a quota. If I had a faster account, I’d just ant to download more and would quickly use up my quota. At a slower speed, I can’t donload things as quickly, but at least I wouldn’t have to worry about how much I download.
For whatever it’s worth, when I signed up for AT&T DSL, I specifically asked them if they had any usage caps and they said no. I mentioned that I’d heard of other companies throttling heavy users or imposing quotas and I was assured that AT&T didn’t do that. Of course now they’re planning to filter everything, but that’s a separate issue.
The solution is obvious if you look at just about any other buisness.
Supply more of your product!
I would prefer slower speeds, but UNLIMITED. (even those they say it’s already unlimited) Let me say it again, un-li-mi-ted traffic!
The BitTorrent problem is not the only one to argue about. People like to watch good quality streaming videos on the web, TV Shows which are not really copyrighted in the U.S. and use other high bandwidth applications: gaming, video chatting, etc…
It is good to have a 12Mb Comcast Power Boost for such things, for instance, but when you get cut off by USING ITS 1/8 capacities (which is roughly 500GB over the month), does it also means that Comcast CAN NOT handle fully loaded 1.5Mb channel over the month (which also gives 500GB of dl data), while Europe providers can handle much more? Are we live in America, or in Russia, where such thing like traffic limits are still exist? At least in Russia providers DO SAY to their customers what they should expect and what plan should they purchase considering certain traffic limitations. From Comcast we don’t hear anything, we still think that the Internet excess is unlimited. Well, that’s not true and they know this. Using their monopoly rights of a second largest internet provider they can do whatever they want and wait a little bit more before start upgrading their s**** network. But like someone said in here, “sooner or later they would have to do this”.
Companies exist for the customers, and the customers are those in right to decide what they want!
P.s. The thing about 500Gb of bandwidth per month is near truth. I heard some cases that after using “unlimited” Comcast internet connection people were getting cut off. I don’t think that they’ve downloaded much over 500Gb, I would think even less that that, but still got cut off.
the real problem is misrepresentation of the product. i had a friend recently switch over to my isp [twsocal] and listened in on the phone call and they said it was unlimited - now in our case it is :D - but when i was up north in comcast area i asked them how much bw was alotted per month and they said unlimted i grabbed a few things [600-700 gigs or something in like 2 weeks or so] they called my dad threatening to cancel his service! what a crock of sh1t!! lol
look isp’s we all know you are overselling, but there is a limit to how far you can overpromise before it catches up with you - take a lesson from verizon and just spend the cash
I think solution no. 4 is the best
The only internet switching and being the smartest in my book would have to be verizon…. this company has been falling behind becuase of comcast and becase of there internet being really good and relibable(me being old customer b4 throttling). Im currently waiting for that lovley fiberoptics to get around my neighbor hood. thats the only downside… i feel like shit going for 1mb/s dls to a lowsey 150k/bs max preety much with verizon dsl. but ive used fios before and my god will everyone fall in love with it.(of course i was using the 50mb/s connection :D) 4 xbox360 playing h3. 3 computers wirelessy connected all playing css and me downloading off of limewire at 2mb/s and someone else downloaidn ga movie at 5 mb/s
iono all i can say its really really fast :D! Have fun and be safe.
(friends dont let other friends go without protection so why risk it…. Use peerguardian2)
-leet (i miss demonoid </3)
[quote comment="284270"]The only internet switching and being the smartest in my book would have to be verizon…. this company has been falling behind becuase of comcast and becase of there internet being really good and relibable(me being old customer b4 throttling). Im currently waiting for that lovley fiberoptics to get around my neighbor hood. thats the only downside… i feel like shit going for 1mb/s dls to a lowsey 150k/bs max preety much with verizon dsl. but ive used fios before and my god will everyone fall in love with it.(of course i was using the 50mb/s connection :D) 4 xbox360 playing h3. 3 computers wirelessy connected all playing css and me downloading off of limewire at 2mb/s and someone else downloaidn ga movie at 5 mb/s
iono all i can say its really really fast :D! Have fun and be safe.
(friends dont let other friends go without protection so why risk it…. Use peerguardian2)
-leet (i miss demonoid </3)[/quote]
[quote comment="284270"]The only internet switching and being the smartest in my book would have to be verizon…. this company has been falling behind becuase of comcast and becase of there internet being really good and relibable(me being old customer b4 throttling). Im currently waiting for that lovley fiberoptics to get around my neighbor hood. thats the only downside… i feel like shit going for 1mb/s dls to a lowsey 150k/bs max preety much with verizon dsl. but ive used fios before and my god will everyone fall in love with it.(of course i was using the 50mb/s connection :D) 4 xbox360 playing h3. 3 computers wirelessy connected all playing css and me downloading off of limewire at 2mb/s and someone else downloaidn ga movie at 5 mb/s
iono all i can say its really really fast :D! Have fun and be safe.
(friends dont let other friends go without protection so why risk it…. Use peerguardian2)
-leet (i miss demonoid </3)[/quote]
[quote comment="278652"]Charging for bandwidth uses makes sense indeed, as long as the prizes are reasonable.
Should be ‘prices’.[/quote]
Solution:
Slowing the connection down by usage and pricing the usage differenty to time. Example:
00-06 price 1 tick(s)/Mb
06-08 pirce 2 tick(s)/Mb
08-16 price 3 tick(s)/Mb
16-21 price 5 tick(s)/Mb
21-00 price 3 tick(s)/Mb
Now 300 ticks will slow your connection down by 30%, 800 ticks will slow it to 50% and so on…
Then at midnight your connection and tick counter is reseted to full speed.
ISP traffic shaping/throttling does not work and never will work. These ISP morons have bought a false bill of goods.
Since the shaping era began everyone I know, leaves their computers on for longer and downloads as many files as possible. Similar to filling a bucket with water. Either you turn the tap, fill it fast and turn it off, or you fill it by letting the faucet drip for days on end. Often you let it overflow and let the tap drip continuously. The net result of which is, more bandwidth is being used. The ISP’s in turn do not gain anything other than dollars from ‘false’ advertising, which they need so they can pay consultants and companies for ‘traffic shaping’ which does not work.
These ISP clowns are living in the 90’s, sending cutsy e-mails to grandma with a geewhiz fancy typewriter.
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