Bell's Own Data Exposes P2P As a Red Herring 261
dougplanet writes with news from the Canadian-throttling front: "As ordered by the CRTC, Bell has released (some) of its data on how torrents and P2P in general are affecting its network. Even though there's not much data to go on, it's pretty clear that P2P isn't the crushing concern. Over the two-month period prior to their throttling, they had congestion on a whopping 2.6 and 5.2 per cent of their network links. They don't even explain whether this is a range of sustained congestion, or peaks amongst valleys."
How funny (Score:4, Interesting)
Anyone else find it funny that the article links to a video in it's "rgbFilter podcast"? Could it be that the explosion of streaming video is one of the real causes of network congestion, not a few "copyright infringes"? Never!
Re:Glad to hear this. (Score:5, Interesting)
Capping transfer per month at ridiculously low levels is not necessary though, they get plenty of money to pay for what people use, and lets face it, this is a quasi-socialist ISP environment, people who barely use their connections are paying for those who use the connection all the time.
Might not be fair, but the ISPs have nothing to complain about, they have been taking peoples money without having to provide much in return to most of them for a long, long time.
The traffic is from, for example, Teksavvy (ISP) customers to the Teksavvy backbone. Bell is just an intermediary.
To add to the corus (Score:3, Interesting)
I suggested in the last slashdot report that isp's like Bell should be forced to disclose, using standard measurement methods, the specs on their system so I will know what I am buying. There is no magical mysterious tech here on this thing called the internet. Bell and others should be forced to disclose and not be allowed to fleece their customers with smoke and mirrors. Just like when buying stereo equipment, the law does not allow those companies to misrepresent peak and continuous power etc., There is absolutely no difference. I want what I pay for and I should have ways to see if I'm getting it.
Seeing as it appears Bell was giving us a song and dance and I'm sure others have done similar. I will now take this a step further. This would ensure they are giving us what they claim to be selling. I suggest their networks be monitored by a regulatory body directly. I would even suggest a public channel be open so customers may check for themselves. As a start, why not something similar to the Internet Health Report website for example http://www.internethealthreport.com/ but of course tailored to the individual ISP' internal networks. How else are consumers to know if they are being lied to or cheated regarding this product they are being sold. The public are discovering albeit slowly that internet is just another product and service. Plugging the holes stops misrepresentation just like the power available from my stereo amplifier.
Re:Glad to hear this. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I knew it!! (Score:2, Interesting)
Then affix the disclaimer with text facing in toward the brick and hurdle it through ISP of your choice.
Stand there and laugh at said ISP's lawyers who cannot do anything because the evidence they need to convict you is now wrapped within a release of liability notice.
And in other news... (Score:5, Interesting)
An ISP in Japan will also soon be throttling [arstechnica.com] their user's bandwidth.
Yes, they are creating an upload cap of 30GB per day. Not per month, per day .
I for one, welcome our Japanese ISP bandwidth capping overlords! Please?
Re:Unsustainable congestion... (Score:2, Interesting)
After a close examination it does say percent of congested links (out of several thousand) but the critical threshold would probably be around 10%. Taking the highest percent before DPI which is 6.6%, that's still not high and if it's that bad it would not have been that expensive to upgrade those links. not to mention the CRITERIA for getting ito that count of "congested links". here are the utilization limits for congested as per Bell Canada: DS-3 61%, OC-3 84%, OC-12 and OC-48 90%. so, for one of those links to be considered "congested" and added to that low % graph the following has to occur (using DS-3 links as an example). Over a 14 day period, utilization measurements are taken every 15 minutes. (snap shot of usage at that time). the limit of 61% must be exceeded atleast ONCE on 5 seperate days over that 14 day period. what that means is that for the total UP TIME of a link over that 14 days (in minutes) is 20,160 minutes (24hrs x 60min x 14 days). The link must only be above 61% for a TOTAL 75 of those minutes to be considered "congested", or 0.37% of it's available time. Lets also not forget that there could be a sudden spike of usage right at that 15 minute mark and then die down, but i'll assume the entire 15 minute interval is at that level for simplicity, lol.
- http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r20690166-The-Bell-Disclosure [dslreports.com]
Re:The agenda: The internet makes cable obsolete (Score:5, Interesting)
And they got mighty supporters. Imagine someone being able to create a network without having to shell out millions if not billions just for the infrastructure. In fact, a halfway well off person can start an internet TV network.
A worldwide TV network, just to make matters worse (for those that oppose it, that is).
Can you see how not only established TV networks but also governments don't really like that idea? It's already bad enough that Al Jazeera spills counterpropaganda against Fox, now imagine anyone being able to do that. Worldwide.
I could well see that some governments don't really like that idea one bit.
Re:So then.. what is this about? (Score:3, Interesting)
The fact that more and more (top level) ISPs are also in some way concerned with TV, broadcasting or content. The last thing you want is to faciliate a competing (internet) TV network.
And the easiest way to do that is to control what your users can do with their bandwidth and what they can't. If you can simply keep them from watching TV online (and I'm not even talking about doing something "illegal" like watching a syndicated show abroad, just something that's more interesting than the reality soaps we get shoveled down our throats on ordinary TV these days), you retain customers for your TV services.
They rob bodies, too (Score:4, Interesting)
Having been paid in full to have an ailing father's Bell service switched over, a friend of mine is now having to fight Bell to get some money back. They cashed the cheque immediately, then, after his death used their direct deposit privilege on the old boy's bank account to pay themselves twice.
And they're making the family deal with the problem through the bank rather than refunding or crediting the phone bill of the survivor.
If Bell Canada had a totem, it would be a rabid, starving rat.
Re:Article is pure shit (Score:2, Interesting)
The blog linked to is pure shit. Here's a link to the actual article:
A while back, I thought /. instituted (or started enforcing) a 'policy' that linking directly to the news article in the summary was highly preferable over linking to a blog that links to the article.
Am I just imagining that?
Re:How funny (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually 5 percent is already a _lot_. The network should never be utiliced to more than 50%, even at peak times.
But it's not the fault of the customers, it's the fault of the company. It's their duty to constantly upgrade their network connections. Why else should they charge money.
If it really was about network congestion, they wouldn't block P2P-trafic, but they would give those packets lower priority. That way those packets only get dropped whenever there is an actual congestion.
Re:The agenda: The internet makes cable obsolete (Score:4, Interesting)
It's brilliant, because your revenue is proportional to how much you distribute the content. Low interest content generates little money, but little cost, and vice versa for the popular stuff.
It still seems like a novelty because the video quality is absolutely hideous, but a few generations from now it will be very good, and decades from now, our eyes will be the limiting factor and quality won't even need to improve further. We're basically there with audio already (too bad so many people still think 128k mp3s sound good).
This is 1.0. In the future, everyone gets their own TV show. If you get really popular (for free), you better believe you'll be able to get a cut of that ad revenue too. Why? Because You Tube is going to have a lot of competition....
Re:Harm done. (Score:2, Interesting)
s/???/Start a new meme/
In comparison... (Score:4, Interesting)
In comparison, the tiny Netherlands with all that cheese and those cows seems to have a lot of consumer ISPs to choose from. Here's a partial list:
Alice Comfort
Argeweb
12move
Abel Telecom
CompuServe
Concepts
DDS
Domestix
EDPnet
Fiberworld
Filternet
GreenOnline
HCC Net
Het Net
InterNLnet
KPN ADSL
Orange
Planet ADSL
Primus
Qfast ICT
Quicknet
Scarlet
Solcon
Speedlinq
SpeedXS
Studenten.net
Supersnel ADSL
Tele2 ADSL
The One Hosting
Tiscali ADSL
TweakDSL
Unet
Vastelastenbond Internet+bellen
xsDSL
XS4ALL tip
ZIEZO.biz
Even bloody Compuserve (yes that one!) will sell you 20down / 1up ADSL for 19.95 euros a month. For another 5 euros a month they'll add PSTN phone termination and a DID. 30 euros monthly for 20 mb down is most typical now. And little traffic shaping if any, to my knowledge.
In fact providers such as XS4all make a political statement against such practices, when they can under legal and contractual agreements, as they do with their statement of privacy too.
For more complete info: http://adsl.startpagina.nl/ [startpagina.nl]
Re:Glad to hear this. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Harm done. (Score:3, Interesting)
What obviously no-one can ask is "just how bad is 2.6% congestion", never mind 5%
Well, as a network engineer, I can tell you this : it's VERY bad. This number means that some of their core lines were inoperable 1/20th of the time due to p2p.
The target number in any network, in case anyone doesn't know, is 0%. Congestion == line down. It creates unacceptable and unworkeable slowdowns.
And let's not forget that this congestion was created while they were upgrading their lines as fast as they could.
Re:How funny (Score:3, Interesting)
The relevant networks here are all ATM (the ones being throttled, the ones P2P is being used over).
My understanding is that ATM doesn't handle retransmissions. Furthermore, Bell's data shows that network wide, with millions of customers and trillions of ATM cells flying about per month, they only suffer from about 3500-4500 cell loss events per month.
You'd think that if they had even a single congested line, they'd be dropping millions (or even billions) of ATM cells per month.
Re:Glad to hear this. (Score:2, Interesting)
Where I live, we have two broadband options, Verizon DSL or Suddenlink Cable. I also live about 20 minutes via highway from the capital city of my state, who has the same two options as everyone else in the valley.
Re:Harm done. (Score:4, Interesting)
By destroying P2P traffic they are doing it to some traffic that has a large part of the traffic volume in their networks and see what happens. P2P has probably been chosen as a legitimate target since it has a considerable amount of "illegal" or "gray" data which in turn means that the number of companies that are affected and buying services from the ISP is lower. Which in turn means that the risk of costly legal suits are held at bay.
So the P2P corruption is mostly a test, not the real deal.
The true reason is that they want to keep the customers to themselves and just tell their customers that they will only get good video if they buy it from them and not any independent vendor.
And this means that everybody has to sit and watch the movies and TV channels that the ISP provides and nothing else - with injected commercials and other crap.
Re:Harm done. (Score:5, Interesting)
I am a network engineer. 90% is a really high threshold for calling something congested. Also, 15 minute averages are better than a lot of measurements I've seen, but are far from perfect - lots of "microburst" type activity can cause a noticeable loss in performance over a much shorter period than that.
Bittorrent-type flow patterns do tend to cause microburst issues - it might be that Bell CA needs to implement some more fine-grained measurements to see whether the thresholds are still the right ones for them.
Peering is the issue (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Glad to hear this. (Score:1, Interesting)
That's because federally regulated businesses end up getting bloated and inefficient. They may START with good intentions and good ideas, but end up kow-towing to political agendas due to patronage, mismanagement, and blackmail.
To see proof of regulatory inefficiency, check out gasbuddy and have a look at the gas prices in the regulated provinces of NS and NB. The prices are regularly 2-4 cents per litre higher than the non-regulated provinces. That extra overhead goes to fund the regulatory body.
The business model of private enterprise and free market SHOULD mitigate this. A bloated, inefficient company should lose market share to one that offers the same product (or a better one) for the same price or slightly cheaper. That's the idea at any rate.
I'm actually in favor of the buyout. I suspect that it will be the first step off a very very large cliff, to the benefit of all. What do teachers know about running a telecom? When Bell-Aliant goes bust, it will leave a gaping hole in the telecommunication industry which can be filled by a nimble, new player. RIM perhaps?
Re:Ars Technia users fail math (Score:3, Interesting)
But the Japanese don't live in a world where the files they are sharing scale up with the bandwidth. Just because Comcast bandwidth is 100x lower, doesn't mean that the Japanese are using some sort of super internet where every file has been bulked up by a factor of a 100. It's not teh beefcake-interweb.
These caps are equal to 30Gb a day. Yes, it's a small percentage of their burst speed, but that is because they have huge bandwidth on the edge of the network, and a much smaller ratio between the capacity of the backbone and the capacity of the leaf nodes.
As a comparison, if I lived close enough to my exchange to get perfect ADSL2 I could have a 2.6Mb uplink. If I saturated that link 24 hours a day then I could still only upload 28GB a day. Are you trying to tell me that the deal in Japan is worse because it's a smaller percentage of the peak rate?
Re:Bank needs to repay you. (Score:3, Interesting)
I actually did this with my ex-banker. You would have seen a news item about 5 years ago saying someone auctioned assets of a bank because of a court order and how it was stopped by a personal guarantee by the bank president.
Yup. I did manage to sell off about 5 PCs before the bank served me with a court's injunction.
I got my order signed by a Justice of Peace -:)
And eventually i got my money back (the PCs of course were valued at $1.10 each-:))