* Sean Donelan:
On Sun, 21 Oct 2007, Florian Weimer wrote:
If its not the content, why are network engineers at many university networks, enterprise networks, public networks concerned about the impact particular P2P protocols have on network operations? If it was just a single network, maybe they are evil. But when many different networks all start responding, then maybe something else is the problem.
Uhm, what about civil liability? It's not necessarily a technical issue that motivates them, I think.
If it was civil liability, why are they responding to the protocol being used instead of the content?
Because the protocol is detectable, and correlates (read: is perceived to correlate) well enough with the content?
If there is a technical reason, it's mostly that the network as deployed is not sufficient to meet user demands. Instead of providing more resources, lack of funds may force some operators to discriminate against certain traffic classes. In such a scenario, it doesn't even matter much that the targeted traffic class transports content of questionable legaility. It's more important that the measures applied to it have actual impact (Amdahl's law dictates that you target popular traffic), and that you can get away with it (this is where the legality comes into play).
Sandvine, packeteer, etc boxes aren't cheap either.
But they try to make things better for end users. If your goal is to save money, you'll use different products (even ngrep-with-tcpkill will do in some cases).
The problem is giving P2P more resources just means P2P consumes more resources, it doesn't solve the problem of sharing those resources with other users.
I don't see the problem. Obviously, there's demand for that kind of traffic. ISPs should be lucky because they're selling bandwidth, so it's just more business for them. I can see two different problems with resource sharing: You've got congestion not in the access network, but in your core or on some uplinks. This is just poor capacity planning. Tough luck, you need to figure that one out or you'll have trouble staying in business (if you strike the wrong balance, your network will cost much more to maintain than what the competition pays for therir own, or it will inadequate, leading to poor service). The other issue are ridiculously oversubscribed shared media networks on the last mile. This only works if there's a close-knit user community that can police themselves. ISPs who are in this situation need to figure out how they ended up there, especially if there isn't cut-throat competition. In the end, it's probably a question of how you market your products ("up to 25 Mbps of bandwidth" and stuff like that).
In my experience, a permanently congested network isn't fun to work with, even if most of the flows are long-living and TCP-compatible. The lack of proper congestion control is kind of a red herring, IMHO.
Why do you think so many network operators of all types are implementing controls on that traffic?
Because their users demand more bandwidth from the network than actually available, and non-user-specific congestion occurs to a significant degree. (Is there a better term for that? What I mean is that not just the private link to the customer is saturated, but something that is not under his or her direct control, so changing your own behavior doesn't benefit you instantly; see self-policing above.) Selectively degrading traffic means that you can still market your service as "unmetered 25 Mbps", instead of "unmetered 1 Mbps". One reason for degrading P2P traffic I haven't mentioned so far: P2P applications have got the nice benefit that they are inherently asynchronous, so cutting the speed to a fraction doesn't fatally impact users. (In that sense, there isn't strong user demand for additional network capacity.) But guess what happens if there's finally more demand for streamed high-entropy content. Then you'll have got not much choice; you need to build a network with the necessary capacity,