> From a networking perspective most Internet providers are generally not very happy with BitTorrent users.
> These users place a heavy load on the network and can reduce the performance experienced by other subscribers. In addition, the huge amount of data transferred outside the ISPs’ own networks is also very costly.
This could be re-stated with "BitTorrent" replaced with "video" and would still have the same meaning. It seems like ISPs are just acting like insurance companies and depend on the average use being low. It's as if they want to give the users less than what the users pay for instead of improving their networks. I get that managing load, utilization (and maximum demand) over time is not easy, but I doubt if the ISPs have a good enough capacity in the first place considering that many users do consume a lot of video content (which requires higher bandwidth and uses more of the capacity).
There were issues specific to BitTorrent. In particular, early uTP versions caused a lot of grief, as they had broken congestion control, which led to absurdly high PPS. Also, it hadn't worked well on congested WiFi hotspots. We had to drop UDP traffic having certain signatures, just to keep the network alive. This was a single one-time incident, though, not a general issue.
Either way, P2P traffic, compared to the unicast one, is also a bit harder for hardware to handle, as there are more connections with different peers. Not an excuse or anything - good ISPs are meant to deal with whatever kind of traffic their customers want to generate (unless it's broken/misbehaving or malware-infested systems), just saying that the load is of a slightly different kind.
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Actually, some ISPs I've heard about were setting up BitTorrent caches. They had set up `retracker.local` systems that some fairly large public trackers had supported, grabbed stats to see what's hot, and spawned seedboxes (serving internal customers only) for the frequently downloaded content. Legal waiver was this was fully automated, and working exactly like any other caching proxy, blah blah - given it was in Russia, no one cared anyway. This was quite nice optimization, that allowed to cut outside traffic, IIRC, up to 2-3 times while actually improving customers' experience.
Insurance companies don't depend on usage being low, they depend on usage being in line with the actuarial/underwriting models. I've spent my career in insurance (P&C and disability), heavily on the data side, and haven't yet seen an underwriting profit in the plans. It's nice when it happens, but investment income on float is the bread and butter.
Why am I telling you this seemingly irrelevant info? Just to conclude that ISPs behave worse than insurance companies :)
EDIT: It'd actually be pretty interesting to see ISP rates regulated the same way ours (insurance) are. I'm talking about regulatory pressure to take rate when operating margins are high, like we get when underwriting profits become regular, and also on the severability of the product rate - regulators don't care if I'm taking a bath on homeowners and making up for it on the auto coverage. It'd be nice for similar on the ISP side with rates somewhat tied to cost, and not subsidizing losses on the cable subscriber side when that end eventually implodes.
I believe the issue is with the distribution of bandwidth between many TCP connections. The problem is that each TCP connection is treated with equal priority, meaning that a web page loading through a single TCP connection competes on equal footing with each of your 100 BitTorrent TCP connections, all running at a relatively low speed per connection. If this activity saturates your Internet connection, and you then try to load a web page, the web page TCP connection attempt will be placed in the back of the large queue that has accumulated in your router, and will take 20 seconds to load.
I also believe the asynchronous configuration, eg. 10/2 mbit rather than 5/5 mbit, of most residential Internet connections exacerbates the problem. One thing would be getting a connection attempt out on a 5/5 mbit connection, but you're constantly sending out huge amounts of ACKs of very small TCP packets already (due to BitTorrent), and your outgoing bandwidth is much smaller than your incoming.
It's really curious, because even when ISPs have QoS setups they can't seem to guarantee fairness. It's always per-connection instead of per-customer-IP.
My ISP for example seems to classify traffic and prioritise based that (HTTP(s) ports get more bandwidth than others up to the first couple of MB, BitTorrent goes in a low-priority group, etc). Yet I can still eat up all the bandwidth I want by just using multiple connections.
I would think it would be even easier to do this on the customer-IP level? Average over some time span, and customers who haven't used their fair allotment of the bandwidth for that time period get priority over others, and the guy with 2000 bittorrent connections has the same claim to the bandwidth as grandma loading her online banking in the browser through one TCP stream.
Are there some issues I'm missing that make this harder than it seems?
That's a (technologically) brilliant solution, counter to the usual stuff they do antagonizing and annoying users. Hope this article doesn't end up killing Torbox, and hope more of the new players among Indian ISPs (like ACT, You) take this route too; BSNL is of course never going to do it, and Airtel doing it would probably put Torbox into enough scrutiny to kill it, so I hope they don't!
The article keeps mentioning peers in "local network" repeatedly - as an eternal beginner in the networking world, I wonder what exactly they mean. It's obviously not creating LANs willy-nilly (...right?), so what level do they consider "local" here?
'local' is pretty fluid in this context. If you can route from A to B without leaving the provider's network, it's 'local enough' for this usage. So if they have their own trunks from one city to the next, customers within the entire country could be 'local enough'. If they use someone else's backbone between cities, then 'local enough' would just be each city.
They're not actually concerned with physical distance, the number of hops, etc. It's simply the case that if they keep it entirely within the provider's network, the traffic costs the provider nothing. This is a huge win for the provider, so it's logical to 'share the win' with the end-customer to encourage such behaviour.
I'd say so. In Portugal, back when we had caps with different amounts for international vs national vs same-isp traffic, a group made a fork of Emule that could filter the peers based on which group their IP belonged to.
The result (for popular files) was that somebody would download it internationally, then it'd spread nationally and then inside each ISP in stages. It actually worked pretty well.
We actually had roughly the same set up in college, using DC++ instead of Emule. Connections within the university weren't limited, but connections outside were. So one person would download it at limited speeds, then spread it around at unlimited speeds.
I'm surprised that users are seeing a big jump in speeds. In my observation, many users in India who use public BitTorrent trackers have a strong tendency to cap their upload speeds heavily and also stop the torrent the moment the download completes in order to get by with whatever they have. This "win-win" scheme that gives local peers to torrent users, if adopted by many other ISPs, would probably result in slower speeds for all users and force them to connect to faster (non-local) peers outside the country.
Quoted from article: "The question is, however, how long this will last..."
I hope people do not link this to promotion of piracy straightaway. I hope there are also enough legal torrent websites that come up, so that the government does not see torrents as illegal and start acting against it.
It is only the content that makes a torrent legal or illegal. The concept of torrent is fantastic.
I find myself doing exactly this myself, if only to anger my ISP (Shaw Communications), who likes to throttle bittorrent connections. I also force my apt-get dist-upgrade and emerge -eaUDv world downloads exclusively over Tor and I2P throughout my enterprise for the same reason. I'm positive I set off red flags and waste precious resources to monitor my download habits, hopefully diverting attention from others that need that anonymity and privacy more than I do.
American ISPs could do this, it would just be marketed differently.
Just remove all speed restrictions to traffic within their own network.
If only traffic leaving your network is a problem for scaling, then don't restrict internal traffic. The P2P clients would naturally favor those local faster peers, and if enough larger ISPs did this, then the P2P clients would be explicitly changed to favor local peers.
The problem is my speed limit is determined by my modem edge device's sync. And that's determined by my snr from the node. I don't think its possible to open up more speed for me if I'm already on the highest tier of the service. I guess for people who aren't, this is an option. Its not like I'm on a 1gbps line and they're only giving me so much internet. I'm on the max the last mile technology can afford.
I don't really know the numbers, but perhaps the majority of the customers for your ISP are not like you but have the entry level plan. And perhaps the majority of their p2p bandwidth comes from that large contingent of entry level users. This is not obviously true since p2p users are probably more likely to have the upgraded speeds, but it might be true. In that case, it might be that allows entry-level users to have faster access to internal nodes might reduce the overall traffic outside of the ISP.
So the ISP could benefit, and users could benefit and the ISP doesn't need to make any statement for or against p2p clients.
I do remember some ISPs doing web caching way back, but I think when the DMCA was passed they dropped this service for most cases since the liability on copyright infringement outweighed whatever benefits it gave them and their customers.
Israeli ISPs did that 10+ years ago it didn't end well the BSA and a few other copyrights owners went after them.
Another thing that some ISPs did to torrent users was injecting the the "upload rate cheat" into their customers traffic to get them banned on trackers that detect traffic faking.
Some ISPs do not count upload traffic towards the data caps. This encourages upload/seeding behaviour which results in higher % of local peers, reducing their cost and increasing user experience. From a networking perspective it makes sense as traffic is usually one way from DC towards user. If they can reshape it becomes efficient and cost effective.
Some universities had another way of doing something similar, torrents and similar services are for most part blocked within the network. However local file sharing services like DC++ thrived, the administration is well aware of this, but do not do anything. The few people who get content from outside share internally. Performance was great as sharing was effectively only WAN and the university saved on bandwidth
Some ISPs in Russia were doing the same (I don't know if they still do). The idea is that *.torrent files contain retracker.local in the list of trackers, this tracker is local to each ISP and will respond with local peers.
"Ironically, many ISPs have also been ordered by courts to block access to hundreds of piracy sites, including many torrent search engines. For now, however, Torbox remains freely accessible."
In Italy one of the first providers to offer "fiber to the building" (Fastweb) basically tolerated on their network a huge seedbox / ftp / file exchange that everybody knew about. This was better for them, because keeping things local as much as possible kept their costs down and real internet traffic light.
I don't know if that "thing" is still there, I expect the copyright ayatollah will have eventually cracked down on it.
That's relatively a new problem for you, 6-7 years ago before the new oceanic cables it would have been a different story.
India isn't that well connected considering it's a nation of 1.5bln people or is it 3 now.
And since many torrent trackers now disable DHT and local peer discovery you tend to get random peers rather than be able to connect to peers close to you which means they get more and more international traffic.
Considering Indian ISPs don't have much to offer in terms of interconnects and peering agreements they most likely pay premium on their end to peer with tier 1 and tier 2 service providers in Europe and the US.
So for them the international bandwidth is very expensive.
For you in the down under the available international bandwidth at this point exceeds you local one since the infrastructure lags behind because for many years it was pointless to lay fiber locally as there wasn't enough available bandwidth to feed it.
P.S.
I don't think too many people would get your pun most of the users here are far too young and far to restless ;)
Nothing new, I heard about an ISP that, oriented by the law dept, even put the local peer in the DSL IP range so it looked like yet another client. The peer saved lots and lots of international bandwidth.
> These users place a heavy load on the network and can reduce the performance experienced by other subscribers. In addition, the huge amount of data transferred outside the ISPs’ own networks is also very costly.
This could be re-stated with "BitTorrent" replaced with "video" and would still have the same meaning. It seems like ISPs are just acting like insurance companies and depend on the average use being low. It's as if they want to give the users less than what the users pay for instead of improving their networks. I get that managing load, utilization (and maximum demand) over time is not easy, but I doubt if the ISPs have a good enough capacity in the first place considering that many users do consume a lot of video content (which requires higher bandwidth and uses more of the capacity).