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Australia Government Media Piracy The Internet IT

Why Australian Telco's Plan To Shape BitTorrent Traffic Won't Work 84

Posted by timothy from the locking-doorknobs-on-revolving-doors dept.
New submitter oztechmuse writes "Australian Telco Telstra is planning to trial shaping some BitTorrent traffic during peak hours. Like all other telcos worldwide, they are facing increasing traffic with a long tail of users: 20% of users consume 80% of bandwidth. The problem is, telcos in Australia are already shaping BitTorrent traffic as a study by Measurement Lab has shown and traffic use continues to increase. Also, the 20% of broadband users consuming the most content will just find a different way of accessing the content and so overall traffic is unlikely to be reduced."
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Why Australian Telco's Plan To Shape BitTorrent Traffic Won't Work More

Why Australian Telco's Plan To Shape BitTorrent Traffic Won't Work

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  • Pareto, I hate you. (Score:4, Informative)

    by Lisias ( 447563 ) on Tuesday February 05, 2013 @08:59AM (#42795937) Homepage Journal

    I don't like this measure (it's what my provider does to me), but it works.

    I have a limited amount of data each month to use at my full connection's bandwidth. When I overflow it, my bandwidth is throttled down.

    This consumption can be monitored using my cable modem's MAC (or my phone's imei) , and the values are settled by contract.

    Speaking frankly, It's a shit. Now and then I must restrain myself from downloading (now) that HD movie. But, hell, this works as a measure to prevent this situation.

    • There are issues with quotas.

      Providers have been known to blatantly lie about your bandwidth usage.

      It applies arbitrary limits even when non-downloaders need burst traffic on occasion.

      It does not credit you for unused bandwidth.

      It tends to cost users far in excess of what a provider's actual incremental costs are for adding capacity.

      If you pay for bandwidth, you should be able to use it. If a provider advertises a certain amount of bandwidth, they should be capable of, barring exceptional circumstances out

      • It does not credit you for unused bandwidth.

        So you want a pay-per-GB system then? Because thats the net effect of paying $X for Y gb of traffic, and then getting refunded for unused gb of traffic.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      What your provider does to you is not traffic shaping. It's a maximum data per month with a slowdown after the maximum has been reached.

      Shaping means that other traffics gets priority over the bittorrent traffic. So that your movie download will go slower, but other traffic like browsing, skype or watching youtube movies won't be affected.

      Shaping during peak hours won't decrease the amount of data (and it shouldn't). That's not the goal of traffic shaping. It'll just decrease the amount of bittorrent bandwi

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Lisias ( 447563 )

        What your provider does to you is not traffic shaping. It's a maximum data per month with a slowdown after the maximum has been reached.

        Yeah, I know.

        However, I don't have to care about the hour of the day if I wanna see that youtube HD video. *I* decide when I want o promote my torrent bandwidth, or when I need it to other users.

        That monthly quota sucks, I agree. But - at least to me - it sucks less than having to adapt my Internet consume to what the rest of the my provider's consumers are doing at the moment!

    • I don't like this measure (it's what my provider does to me), but it works.

      I have a limited amount of data each month to use at my full connection's bandwidth. When I overflow it, my bandwidth is throttled down.

      This consumption can be monitored using my cable modem's MAC (or my phone's imei) , and the values are settled by contract.

      Speaking frankly, It's a shit. Now and then I must restrain myself from downloading (now) that HD movie. But, hell, this works as a measure to prevent this situation.

      No. This works as a measure to milk the fuck out of your wallet.
      It is almost unheard of in Europe. We get unmetered cheap internet without scams like caps or throttling. I am paying $12 for 30/3 Mbits, I could jump to 120/12 for $60.
      This is on private networks build by private ISPs. Australia builds national Fiber and then forces caps on users. True LOLland.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Lisias ( 447563 )

        (About quotas)

        Speaking frankly, It's a shit. Now and then I must restrain myself from downloading (now) that HD movie. But, hell, this works as a measure to prevent this situation.

        No. This works as a measure to milk the fuck out of your wallet.
        It is almost unheard of in Europe. [...]

        Yes, this is a measure to milk money. As every single other measure in every single place of the world. In some of these places, you can choose who will milk less of your wallet. In some other, you have less options.

        I am one of these unlucky guys.

        So my choices are:

        1) Be milked by a ISP that makes traffic shaping, and then get screwed up if by some unlucky event I need to watch a YouTube video HD video (as the Campus Party 2013 talk of Buz Aldrin) or to download some ISO image using bittorrent in a peak hour

  • Dont need to reduce overall traffic (Score:5, Interesting)

    by jabuzz ( 182671 ) on Tuesday February 05, 2013 @09:00AM (#42795947) Homepage

    The problem the telcos have is not the total volume of traffic but to use a car analogy the "rush hour" effect. If by traffic shaping they can push the 20% to move some of their downloading outside the peak times, then it means they don't have to buy bandwidth that is going to sit unused 90% of the time.

    If the 20% all did their downloading overnight it would not be a problem.

    • Bittorrent is designed as a slow backgroung grind, distributing things. That it works fast, kind of, sometimes, is due to mighty infrastructure investment. IF you really NEED that movie in half an hour that damned bad, go to Best Buy or a Red Box.

    • Just buffer some of the packets for ~12 hours and send them out at non-peak times. Problem solved!

  • All that slowing down peoples' lines will do is give them more time to find stuff to download before the old stuff is finished. In the end the same amount of data is going to go through the pipes, unless their line was completely saturated 100% of the time.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Eskarel ( 565631 )

      The core driver of this is not actually reducing bandwidth usage, the ISPs for the most part don't actually care about that. The driver is the fact that ISPs are starting to provision VOIP services, both because it's profitable and in preparation for when the NBN rolls out and everyone's phones are VOIP. They don't really care if you download 50 GB of data or 10 GB so long as you've paid for it, they care whether the people paying them for VOIP calls are getting the service they are paying for. QoS(which is

  • Not acceptable (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Unlike the US, Australian broadband plans are tightly capped with data limits, we are paying for a certain amount of GB per month. If the ISP want to restrict the capacity for a user to fully utilise that pre-paid allowance, they should at a bare minimum refund the unused balance at the end of each billing cycle. I will fight this in the consumer tribunal if they every throttle my traffic based upon which protocol I am using.

  • 20% of people do 80% of the work. 20% of the people do 80% of the innovation.20% of the people use 80% of the bandwidth.......Seems to be how the world works.
    Maybe charge 5 cents per gigabyte, ie somewhere within 10x of the (telcos) cost and get rid of the socialist business models. The greed never ends.

    • 20% of people do 80% of the work. 20% of the people do 80% of the innovation.20% of the people use 80% of the bandwidth.......Seems to be how the world works.

      So much so that it's got a name. [wikipedia.org]

      • The situation is (somewhat) similar to Telephone bandwidth. In the U.S., before modems became widespread, the phone company could easily offer unlimited service for a fixed price. This was possible because they had reasonably good usage models and could predict the infrastructure needed to provide some level of service.

        When the internet exploded, people drastically increased their modem usage and some people were literally using the link 24/7. This left the phone companies with far larger hardware requi

    • Maybe charge 5 cents per gigabyte

      If their prices were this low, nobody would complain, as that would be $50/1TB.

      The problem is that the ISPs without caps look like their prices are that low because of the speeds they advertise, but then you rarely get the advertised speed 24/7. As for caps, $50/250GB isn't at all unusual on a wired ISP. That's $0.20/GB, way more than 20x the cost to the ISP.

  • If they were more intelligent they'd financially sponsor a couple BT clients WITH the minor requirement that 25% of their financial support be spent implementing time based shaping.

    I have never downloaded a torrent other than using the command line client on a screen session running on a 24x7 monster file server. However, the family gets unhappy when I use up all the BW in and out of the house while they're home. I've always had throttle-able settings in clients even in the oldest suprnova days. But I wa

    • I have never downloaded a torrent other than using the command line client on a screen session running on a 24x7 monster file server. However, the family gets unhappy when I use up all the BW in and out of the house while they're home. I've always had throttle-able settings in clients even in the oldest suprnova days. But I want a semi-intelligent auto configuring client such that it cranks wide open from midnight to 5 am, then down to 20% or less during morning time, then wide open during work days of the week but slow on weekends and holidays etc etc.

      Consider trying the Transmission-cli Bittorrent client instead of rtorrent (which it sounds like you are using). It runs as a daemon that can be connected to via a web page or an RPC client (apt-get install transmission-qt transmission-remote-cli).

      You can then use cron to send commands to the daemon when you want to throttle the torrents.

  • Analogy (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    If I buy a car that reads 220kph on the clock, I expect it should do at least that; it would be grossly misrepresentative and false advertising of the product to do otherwise. Apply this to bandwidth and quota, if I lease a service that potentially offers me 24mbps but I receive 10mbps (environmental factors, similar to a car entering a corner) then I expect to consistently receive this bandwidth, and quota is the fuel tank till empty.

    Unfortunately, Telstra oversell's its pipes between exchanges; this means

  • Since that is static content, the last mile cache would actually be a better solution for this.

    The Last Mile Cache [fredan.se]
  • Just use market forces: Charge the people who use more bandwidth more money - Grandparents who are watching 3-minute YouTube videos of their grandkids will pay less than Joey Hackerston who is downloading HD movies every night. Or charge more for data in the evening and less at 3AM - The market will sort out the problem - Those people who Torrent will adjust their behaviours (or pay more).

    • Grandparents who are watching 3-minute YouTube videos of their grandkids will pay less

      AHAHAHAHAHahaha, when was the last time you actually paid LESS for something (something not made in China)?

      • AHAHAHAHAHahaha, when was the last time you actually paid LESS for something (something not made in China)?

        All the time. Plane tickets, for example, are much cheaper than they were 30 years ago (indexed to today's dollars).

  • This is nothing, wait for the NBN (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Well at least now people can churn from Telstra to some other ISP who doesn't block at the moment.

    When everyone is forced to use the NBN there will be no other option, they'll simply block/filter anything and everything they want across every downstream ISP. Don't like it, tough, can't complain to ISP, not them doing it, all done by upstream provider controlled by the Government.

    The NBN is about having complete control to block everything they want, monitor everything they want, and not have to worry about

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Eskarel ( 565631 )

      Except that there's already one pipe(Telstra), the NBN isn't replacing your ISP(they're replacing Telstra). There are a couple of places where the direct connection to your home might be provided by Optus or a wireless provider, but eventually you'll end up on Telstra infrastructure. You will still have exactly the same degree of choice you have now, you'll just be using fibre built and paid for by the government and owned by a privatized government entity as opposed to using copper built and paid for by th

  • ... the plan will fail because ... it's already happened?

    That's some hella logic going on there...

    In other news: the Australian porn industry wants teenage boys to masturbate, Julia Gillard is thinking of becoming a redhead, and Australian TV networks want to try packing 7 ad breaks into an hour of TV.

  • Where businesses publicly announce plans to deliberately not give their customers the thing the customer paid for.

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