Why Australian Telco's Plan To Shape BitTorrent Traffic Won't Work 84
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."
Pareto, I hate you. (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:Pareto, I hate you. (Score:5, Informative)
If you don't like it, then build your own fucking network. I hate people that think they are entitled to full utilization of a network they don't own just because they pay a monthly fee.
Here let me fix that for you
I hate people that think they are entitled to full utilization of a network they don't own just because they pay a monthly fee based on advertising claiming they have unlimited access.
The standard /. car analogy is I bought a car based on the advertising assumption that I could drive it any time I want 24x365. I'd be pretty pissed if I found my garage empty one day and it turns out they've been renting it out to 3rd parties behind my back, after all most customers don't use their cars 24x365 and its industry standard in the crooked fine print to profit off renting customer's cars to 3rd parties, etc etc.
Re:Pareto, I hate you. (Score:4, Interesting)
The car anology is. If I slow down all pick up trucks 24 hours a day, it will improve traffic jams between the hours when children finish school and people go to sleep and that other big burst, the first hour or so of work between say 8:30am to 10:00am. Of course what the fuck does slowing down pickup trucks say 10pm to 7:30am have to do with rush hour traffic apart from ensuring all those pickup trucks are still on the road during rush hour.
The reality is, it is all a lie, to enable overloaded oversold networks and of course via collusion with other major ISPs to ramp up profits. Also if at all possible to force through ISPs being the major content publishers (no throttling on their sales) getting a major percentage of all content sales.
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The reality is that youre always going to be on an over-sold line unless you really feel like paying for a dedicated link. They make those, you know; the only thing is the price is substantially higher.
Im not generally one to stick up for ISPs, but it really does sound like you want to have your cake and eat it too.
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The other big lie, cost of service. The cheapest by far infrastructure service is fibre optic to the home. Cheaper than road and I mean really way, way cheaper than roads. Cheaper than sewerage services. Cheaper than stormwater services. Cheaper than electrical power delivery. Cheaper than natural gas delivery. Yet why do they always want to charge more, straight up psychopathic fucking greed and a complete and total disconnect from being good citizens and wanting to support society. Privatisation for all
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Yea, it just has the minor problem that you have to rip up every side-road to get fiber all the way to the house.
Yet why do they always want to charge more
Because people will pay it, and it would be business lunacy to take less money rather than more money. Would you sell your car for half as much to "be a good citizen and support society"? Noone does that, watch the hypocrisy.
Privatisation for all those services is crap and should be prevented and undone where it has occurred.
"Privatization" and "undo" implies that these were once public utilities. They werent.
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Privatisation for all those services is crap and should be prevented and undone where it has occurred.
"Privatization" and "undo" implies that these were once public utilities. They werent.
They were in Australia - hence privatisation with an "s".
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You forgot the part where you also slow down ambulances, because they're shaped like trucks. And when ambulance drivers complain and you allow them all the truck drivers pick up on it and paint their trucks white and have people lying inside along with the goods so they'll get through. So now you need doctors to diagnose people in white trucks to see if they should get through. The road just costs too much for everyone now with all those doctors manning it and people are still dying in ambulances because th
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A more appropriate analogy is to a car lease. These have mileage limits which are analogous to bandwidth limits.
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Agreed that they probably shouldnt be advertising unlimited, but common sense has to intrude at some point. Most restaurants advertise unlimited refills, but I can assure you that not only would the restaurant prevent you from filling up a water cooler on "unlimited refills", but they would be backed up by basically any court in the country. Common sense would dictate that "unlimited" in that case is for "normal use".
The analogy breaks down because while most adult humans are going to have a pretty simila
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That people are suprised that the internet has finite capacity doesnt really change the fact that it does, in fact, have finite capacity.
We can always build more, but 'artificial scarcity' is the name of the game here, also.
Re:Pareto, I hate you. (Score:4, Insightful)
A better analogy would be advertising "unlimited refills" but you really only get unlimited refills on the 3rd tuesday of the month only at 2:15am and only if no one else wants unlimited refills at the same exact time, and by unlimited we really meant that we don't limit how much we advertise refills or how much you can ask your waitress for a refill, but we do in fact positively not guarantee you'll get any soft drinks in your cup at all, although we will of course bill you for the full amount. Also you're not allowed to take us to court because the contract binds you to arbitration with a mediator of our choice who happens to be a friend of ours and who only mediates in person 2000 miles away from your home only one day per year that being the first business day after easter, if you make an appointment 2 years in advance and agree to pay all our legal costs, no matter if you win (snicker, as if that'll happen) or lose. But yeah, aside from that, its unlimited, uh huh uh huh yeah.
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You're way out in left field. Caps suck, but Ive never hit a cap, and on occasion I download 2-3 ISOs @ once (32bit, 64bit, etc), and I've gamed using several BT-based games (SC2, WoW, LoL).
Your "analogy" would lead one to believe that people are hitting caps and being denied service left and right. They arent. It sucks that "all you can eat internet" is out the window, but the percentage of people it actually affects is quite low, I would be astonished if it were more than a few percent.
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the contract binds you to arbitration with a mediator of our choice
Such clauses may not be unenforceable under the Competition and Consumer Act 2010's unfair terms provisions.
(This is not legal advice, I am not a lawyer.)
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The standard /. car analogy is I bought a car based on the advertising assumption that I could drive it any time I want 24x365. I'd be pretty pissed if I found my garage empty one day and it turns out they've been renting it out to 3rd parties behind my back, after all most customers don't use their cars 24x365 and its industry standard in the crooked fine print to profit off renting customer's cars to 3rd parties, etc etc.
Only 24x365? Well then, yeah, I'd kind of expect them to pull that renting out to 3rd parties on February 29.
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If you don't like it, then build your own fucking network. I hate people that think they are entitled to full utilization of a network they don't own just because they pay a monthly fee.
Here let me fix that for you
I hate people that think they are entitled to full utilization of a network they don't own just because they pay a monthly fee based on advertising claiming they have unlimited access.
The standard /. car analogy is I bought a car based on the advertising assumption that I could drive it any time I want 24x365. I'd be pretty pissed if I found my garage empty one day and it turns out they've been renting it out to 3rd parties behind my back, after all most customers don't use their cars 24x365 and its industry standard in the crooked fine print to profit off renting customer's cars to 3rd parties, etc etc.
The car analogy is apt: You bought a car you can drive any time you want 24x7x365 but you also bought a car that was *not* designed to actually be DRIVEN 24x7x365. Try driving it non-stop for a few days and see how well it holds up! You can probably count on spending 2 weeks of every month in the repair shop, if you are determined to keep the car in motion non-stop.
Not to mention the *literal* car analogy: the car lease. You paid a lease so you could "have" a car for 3 years' time. But the fine print (
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If you don't like it, then build your own fucking network. I hate people that think they are entitled to full utilization of a network they don't own just because they pay a monthly fee.
Here let me fix that for you
I hate people that think they are entitled to full utilization of a network they don't own just because they pay a monthly fee based on advertising claiming they have unlimited access.
OK, first off, in Australia it's illegal to advertise a service as "unlimited" when it does in fact have limits. Telstra does not offer an uncapped broadband service to consumers. Telstra is a pretty shitty telco in general, almost as bad as the best US Telco. Fortunately thanks to forward thinking govt regulation Telstra does not have a monopoly.
Secondly, I highly doubt this will work. First off, a lot of people will complain to the ACCC, secondly a lot of people will jump ship to one of Telstra's compe
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Good! I'll be glad when the 24x7 torrenting hogs move away from Telstra's network. More bandwidth for me!
Enjoy your high prices and crappy service.
What, you think Telstra doesn't need to make up for the revenue lost from this?
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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
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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.
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Paying $X per Y gbps means, practically, that you are paying $X for (Y * day * 30) GB of traffic. Divide that by your subscribers, and you have a cap per user.
There is, practically speaking, only a semantic difference between paying for X gbps and paying for X GB during a set period.
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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
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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!
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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.
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(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)
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.
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Doesn't work like that. Most of the heavy BW users are trading files. Lets say you have a peak at 8pm, there's 100 angry customers calling in because its slow. Lets say you have a peak at 2am instead, theoretically no one would even notice. I don't care if my file transfers complete at 1am, 3am, 10am... I'm not going to check on it until the next evening, so if the network is supersaturated from 2am to 3am I simply don't care as long as the transfer completes successfully at some point.
I would be really
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The thing I don't understand is why they don't have a "free" period.
If an ISP didn't count traffic from 10pm - 8am against your quota, and perhaps even bumped up your upload cap for that period, then the heavy downloaders would run all that stuff at night.
I know I already have my online backup service and my podcast updates queued to run in the middle of the night because it seems like the courteous thing to do (and it impacts my own connection less) - why not provide a real incentive to do that?
Bandwidth (
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Some ISPs do just this. We had a 50GB on peak 400GB off peak service for years where off peak was define as 1am to 8am.
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Some ISPs certainly do this sort of thing already.
Whether it's a good idea really depends on the ratio of different types of traffic. Packing all the traffic from "heavy downloaders" into a free period in the middle of the night could end up moving the peak to the free period and making the peak worse than it was before.
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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.
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Just buffer some of the packets for ~12 hours and send them out at non-peak times. Problem solved!
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The same quantity of data... (Score:2)
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.
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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)
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.
Pure Greed (Score:2)
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.
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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]
Telephone Bandwidth (Score:2)
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
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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.
More intelligent plan (Score:2)
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
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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)
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
We are only using Bittorrent for iso files (Score:2)
The Last Mile Cache [fredan.se]
Just use market forces... (Score:2)
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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)?
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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)
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
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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
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There is a big difference between being on Telstra Infrastructure compared to Telstra controlled monitored and maintained internet service, you're absolutely right. The NBN Co however will not be providing you with controlled maintained internet service, they will be providing your ISP(who will be providing you with controlled, maintained, monitored internet service) with infrastructure over which to run their service. Specifically, unless you choose to run your own ISP, you won't be a customer of the NBN,
So, in summary... (Score:2)
... 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.
It's a crazy mixed up world (Score:2)