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ISPs Fight Against Encrypted BitTorrent Downloads
Posted by
Zonk
on Fri Sep 01, 2006 01:03 PM
from the stopping-the-flow dept.
from the stopping-the-flow dept.
oglsmm writes to mention an Ars Technica article about a new product intended to detect and throttle encrypted BitTorrent traffic. When torrents first saw common use ISPs would throttle the bandwidth available to them, in order to ensure connectivity for everyone. Some clients began encrypting their data to get around this, and the company Allot Communications is now claiming their NetEnforcer product will return the advantage to the ISPs. From the article: "Certainly, increasing BitTorrent traffic is a concern for ISPs. In early 2004, torrents accounted for 35 percent of all traffic on the Internet. By the end of that year, this figure had almost doubled, and some estimate that in certain markets, such as Asia, torrent traffic uses as much as 80 percent of all bandwidth. However, BitTorrent is an extremely important tool that has many uses other than what everyone assumes it is good for, namely movie piracy."
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lol, moustrap, mouse (Score:5, Funny)
well, it only makes sense (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:well, it only makes sense (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:well, it only makes sense (Score:5, Insightful)
In the eyes of the ISP, they're selling you a 3Mb pipe for burst traffic, so your email or web page loads really fast, not so that you can saturate your pipe 24/7. I'm not saying I agree with that, but that's what the ISP has priced things at. The average person uses nowhere near the bandwidth of his connection, and that allows them to charge cheaper rates by overselling.
To put this another way, if everyone saturated their pipe, they would have to charge upwards of 10x for your cable or DSL connection as they currently do.
Parent
Re:well, it only makes sense (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course not! How else am I going to re-sell it to some other sap.
What we need is more truth in ads. Make sure your customers know that you are not guaranteeing a given bandwith unless they pay for a clear channel or some such.
Parent
Re:well, it only makes sense (Score:5, Informative)
The price is formulated on the basis that you do not use it.
I agree with you - this is fraud and there is only one way to fix this.
The problem will go away immediately if ISPs turn off flat pricing and users start to pay for bandwidth used. Even better - if they start charging a differential/tiered pricing depending on the type of traffic. There is no rocket science here. The gear currently on the market is supposed to be able to do it (does it do it is a different matter).
The business models is well known and this is the way the Internet used to operate all the way up to the end of the 1990-es (especially in the slower peripheral parts). This was abandoned when the incumbent telcos entered the access market in the end of the 1990-es. They went after scale and port densities which resulted in bandwidth accounting features being abandoned across most of the equipment. Cisco broke all of its accounting by introducing CEF, other vendors were not any different.
Over the last 5-6 years most of the features crept back due to demand by business users so technologically the gear is in the same (or better) shape as before the telcos entered the market as far as accounting is concerned. In addition to that new gear from Ellacoya, P-cube and such can do things the old systems were not capable of.
All it will take to get this working now will be people who know how to formulate a viable product and tie this up all the way into billing, CRM and relevant backend systems. Unfortunately there are not that many people left capable of doing it in most ISPs so they prefer the BIG STICK(tm) or the "magic vendor silver bullet". It is easier. It does not require investment. It does not require thinking. It does not require competence. Sad, but true - this reflects the state of the industry.
It is rotten, it sucks and it hates its customers.
Parent
Many other uses (Score:5, Funny)
Many uses other than Movie Piracy (Score:5, Informative)
- Game Demos
- Software updates / upgrades
- Free / Legal Videos
Re:Many uses other than Movie Piracy (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:Many uses other than Movie Piracy (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Espically for Linux (Score:5, Insightful)
I just don't see how else a not-for-profit group is going to get fast distribution of something that big for cheap. If you look at web hosting you find that bandwidth of that order is not at all cheap. However, BT let us all share the load a little.
I'm sure people do sue it for illegal purposes but I tell ya what, it has made getting free legal software so much easier. Gone are the days of waiting around on a slow ass FTP that seems like it's being run out of some guy's broom closet (which is probably where it is being run). I find on most Linux torrents I can get 30+mbits/sec no problem.
Parent
Connections (Score:5, Insightful)
No, that's in order to continue selling people bandwidth they couldn't deliver, known to ISPs as "statistical oversubscription". Then when we want to get what we paid for, they take it away entirely. Unless you're watching the telco's own IPTV, which somehow has as much bandwidth as they need to sell it to you, for an additional charge.
Blocking competitive services to support ripoff monopoly business models is the reason telcos and other big ISPs hate Net Neutrality [eff.org].
Not quite... (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Not quite... (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
While they are largely at fault (Score:5, Insightful)
One option people have is to just get better service. I personally went with Speakeasy. They don't block or throttle your connection in any way (they claim they don't, and I haven't detected any). You can host servers, whatever you like. However, it's more pricey than lower grade service. I drop about $130/month to get 6m/768k DSL with 8 static IPs. But, I've never had it fail to work at the highest speeds, and they are true to their word, I do a TON of upstream with those servers and I've never heard a peep out of them or seen my connection throttled at all.
Net access is just another area where you get what you pay for. Sure, I could offer people 100mbit net access for $20/month and just lay ethernet to their houses (we are assuming I had the permits here). However at that price, I couldn't guarantee 100mbits of upstream for each subscriber. Hell I'd be lucky to get 10mbits of upstream for all subscribers.
Parent
But I thought SPAM was 80% of traffic? (Score:5, Funny)
Wow, stunning efficiency, or bad statistics.
Re:But I thought SPAM was 80% of traffic? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Um, mirror? (Score:5, Insightful)
Would it be really hard to throw together a 1TB file store with the latest patches, demos, ISOs and the like?
That way the customers can get stuff inside the network and the ISP doesn't have to worry about upstream net usage.
OMG it's like I'm smart and all.
Tom
Has to be done (Score:5, Informative)
The thing is, bandwidth isn't cheap. People bitch that ISPs "oversubscribe", and that we can't really deliver our advertised bandwidth to everyone all of the time. This is true, but how do you think we manage to sell people 5Mb connections for $40/month? Do you know how much 5Mb of bandwidth costs and ISP? It's a lot more than $40. In the market I'm in, we pay THOUSANDS of dollars for that much bandwidth.
The real problem is that bandwidth is too expensive in this country, thanks to the likes of AT&T and MCI and all the other big players. They've got tons of unused fiber lying around, and it costs them next-to-nothing to use it, but it still costs the end-user (in this case, the ISP) a hell of a lot of cash.
Re:Has to be done (Score:5, Insightful)
No, it doesn't "have to be done". You could just advertise what you can actually deliver, and anything a customer happens to get above that is gravy. Right now, you "manage to sell" people 5Mb connections for $40 a month in the same way that the guy at the corner "manages to sell" Rolex watches for ten dollars a shot.
Parent
Re:Has to be done (Score:5, Informative)
The levels of oversubscription on some ISP's are just insane my previous cable company had a 512kbs cap per user (90 homes per channel not over subscribed) and had problem providing that to there head end at peak times. ISP's are going to 100x ratios and investing mroe in help desk and fixes than just getting more bandwith.
Parent
Two Choices (Score:5, Insightful)
2: Sue them under the DMCA for reverse-engineering and breaking the technological protection method used to protect your content.
Use either, or both, as appropriate.
Re:Question (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re:Illegal? (Score:5, Insightful)
Isnt it illegal to read any part of encrypted data accross the internet?
Probably not, but they aren't "reading" data in any case. They're just looking at the encrypted streams and figuring out, based upon the way the traffic flows, the ports, etc. that it is bittorrent traffic. Of course engineers can just make bittorrent traffic mimic other, legitimate traffic more closely to make it impossible to distinguish between them.
Ever notice that whole lot of crap runs on port 80 these days? The reason is that ISPs and maintainers of firewalls have turned off the rest of the internet under the assumption that it will stop the traffic they don't like. Really it just squished everything into one place and made it harder to properly administer.
Parent
Re:"war"? (Score:5, Insightful)
Competition? Surely, you jest. Unless, of course, you mean "Competition between two subsidized monopolies," namely the local cable company and the local telco. Some choice.
As Lily Tomlin's telephone operator character liked to say, "We're the telephone company. We don't care. We don't have to."
Parent