FW: ISPs slowing P2P traffic...
From my experience, the Internet IP Transit Bandwidth costs ISP's a lot more than the margins made on Broadband lines.
So users who rarely use their connection are more profitable to the ISP. We used the Cisco Service Control Engine (SCE) to throttle P2P bandwidth. Stephen Bailey IS Network Services - FUJITSU Fujitsu Services Limited, Registered in England no 96056, Registered Office 22 Baker Street, London, W1U 3BW This e-mail is only for the use of its intended recipient. Its contents are subject to a duty of confidence and may be privileged. Fujitsu Services does not guarantee that this e-mail has not been intercepted and amended or that it is virus-free. -----Original Message----- From: owner-nanog@merit.edu [mailto:owner-nanog@merit.edu] On Behalf Of Mikael Abrahamsson Sent: 14 January 2008 17:22 To: nanog list Subject: RE: ISPs slowing P2P traffic... On Mon, 14 Jan 2008, Frank Bulk wrote:
In other words, you're denying the reality that people download a 3 to 4 times more than they upload and penalizing every in trying to attain a
1:1 ratio.
That might be your reality. My reality is that people with 8/1 ADSL download twice as much as they upload, people with 10/10 upload twice as much as they download. -- Mikael Abrahamsson email: swmike@swm.pp.se
From my experience, the Internet IP Transit Bandwidth costs ISP's a lot more than the margins made on Broadband lines.
So users who rarely use their connection are more profitable to the ISP.
The fat man isn't a welcome sight to the owner of the AYCE buffet. What exactly does this imply, though, from a networking point of view? ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net "We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again." - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.
On Jan 14, 2008 5:25 PM, Joe Greco <jgreco@ns.sol.net> wrote:
So users who rarely use their connection are more profitable to the ISP.
The fat man isn't a welcome sight to the owner of the AYCE buffet.
Joe, The fat man is quite welcome at the buffet, especially if he brings friends and tips well. That's the buffet's target market: folks who aren't satisfied with a smaller portion. The unwelcome guy is the smelly slob who spills half his food, complains, spends most of 4 hours occupying the table yelling into a cell phone (with food still in his mouth and in a foreign language to boot), burps, farts, leaves no tip and generally makes the restaurant an unpleasant place for anyone else to be.
What exactly does this imply, though, from a networking point of view?
That the unpleasant nuisance who degrades everyone else's service and bothers the staff gets encouraged to leave. Regards, Bill Herrin -- William D. Herrin herrin@dirtside.com bill@herrin.us 3005 Crane Dr. Web: <http://bill.herrin.us/> Falls Church, VA 22042-3004
On Mon, Jan 14, 2008 at 06:43:12PM -0500, William Herrin wrote:
On Jan 14, 2008 5:25 PM, Joe Greco <jgreco@ns.sol.net> wrote:
So users who rarely use their connection are more profitable to the ISP.
The fat man isn't a welcome sight to the owner of the AYCE buffet.
The fat man is quite welcome at the buffet, especially if he brings friends and tips well. That's the buffet's target market: folks who aren't satisfied with a smaller portion.
The unwelcome guy is the smelly slob who spills half his food, complains, spends most of 4 hours occupying the table yelling into a cell phone (with food still in his mouth and in a foreign language to boot), burps, farts, leaves no tip and generally makes the restaurant an unpleasant place for anyone else to be.
However, if the sign on the door said "burping and farting welcome" and "please don't tip your server", things are a bit different. Similar comparisons to use of the word "unlimited" apply.
What exactly does this imply, though, from a networking point of view?
That the unpleasant nuisance who degrades everyone else's service and bothers the staff gets encouraged to leave.
Until it is generally considered common courtesy (and recognised as such in a future edition of "Miss Manners' Guide To The Intertubes") to not download heavily for fear of upsetting your virtual neighbours, it's reasonable that not specifically informing people that their "unpleasant" behaviour is unwelcome should imply that such behaviour is acceptable. - Matt
On Mon, 14 Jan 2008 18:43:12 -0500 "William Herrin" <herrin-nanog@dirtside.com> wrote:
On Jan 14, 2008 5:25 PM, Joe Greco <jgreco@ns.sol.net> wrote:
So users who rarely use their connection are more profitable to the ISP.
The fat man isn't a welcome sight to the owner of the AYCE buffet.
Joe,
The fat man is quite welcome at the buffet, especially if he brings friends and tips well.
But the fat man isn't allowed to take up residence in the restaurant and continously eat - he's only allowed to be there in bursts, like we used to be able to assume people would use networks they're connected to. "Left running" P2P is the fat man never leaving and never stopping eating. Regards, Mark. -- "Sheep are slow and tasty, and therefore must remain constantly alert." - Bruce Schneier, "Beyond Fear"
On Tue, Jan 15, 2008, Mark Smith wrote:
But the fat man isn't allowed to take up residence in the restaurant and continously eat - he's only allowed to be there in bursts, like we used to be able to assume people would use networks they're connected to. "Left running" P2P is the fat man never leaving and never stopping eating.
ffs, stop with the crappy analogies. The internet is like a badly designed commodity network. Built increasingly cheaper to deal with market pressures and unable to shift quickly to shifting technologies. Just like the telcos I recall everyone blasting when I was last actually involved in networks bigger than a university campus. Adrian
On 1/15/08, Adrian Chadd <adrian@creative.net.au> wrote:
ffs, stop with the crappy analogies.
The internet is like a badly designed commodity network. Built increasingly cheaper to deal with market pressures and unable to shift quickly to shifting technologies.
Just like the telcos I recall everyone blasting when I was last actually involved in networks bigger than a university campus.
Adrian
I think no matter what happens, it's going to be very interesting as Comcast rolls out DOCSIS 3.0 (with speeds around 100-150Mbps possible), Verizon FIOS expands it's offering (currently, you can get 50Mb/s down and 30Mb/sec up), etc. If things are really as fragile as some have been saying, then the bottlenecks will slowly make themselves apparent. -brandon
On Tue, 15 Jan 2008, Brandon Galbraith wrote:
I think no matter what happens, it's going to be very interesting as Comcast rolls out DOCSIS 3.0 (with speeds around 100-150Mbps possible), Verizon FIOS
Well, according to wikipedia DOCSIS 3.0 gives 108 megabit/s upstream as opposed to 27 and 9 megabit/s for v2 and v1 respectively. That's not what I would call revolution as I still guess hundreds if not thousands of subscribers share those 108 megabit/s, right? Yes, fourfold increase but ... that's still only factor 4.
expands it's offering (currently, you can get 50Mb/s down and 30Mb/sec up), etc. If things are really as fragile as some have been saying, then the bottlenecks will slowly make themselves apparent.
Upstream capacity will still be scarce on shared media as far as I can see. -- Mikael Abrahamsson email: swmike@swm.pp.se
I'm not aware of MSOs configuring their upstreams to attain rates for 9 and 27 Mbps for version 1 and 2, respectively. The numbers you quote are the theoretical max, not the deployed values. Frank -----Original Message----- From: owner-nanog@merit.edu [mailto:owner-nanog@merit.edu] On Behalf Of Mikael Abrahamsson Sent: Tuesday, January 15, 2008 3:27 AM To: nanog@merit.edu Subject: Re: FW: ISPs slowing P2P traffic... On Tue, 15 Jan 2008, Brandon Galbraith wrote:
I think no matter what happens, it's going to be very interesting as Comcast rolls out DOCSIS 3.0 (with speeds around 100-150Mbps possible), Verizon FIOS
Well, according to wikipedia DOCSIS 3.0 gives 108 megabit/s upstream as opposed to 27 and 9 megabit/s for v2 and v1 respectively. That's not what I would call revolution as I still guess hundreds if not thousands of subscribers share those 108 megabit/s, right? Yes, fourfold increase but ... that's still only factor 4.
expands it's offering (currently, you can get 50Mb/s down and 30Mb/sec up), etc. If things are really as fragile as some have been saying, then the bottlenecks will slowly make themselves apparent.
Upstream capacity will still be scarce on shared media as far as I can see. -- Mikael Abrahamsson email: swmike@swm.pp.se
On Tue, 15 Jan 2008, Frank Bulk wrote:
I'm not aware of MSOs configuring their upstreams to attain rates for 9 and 27 Mbps for version 1 and 2, respectively. The numbers you quote are the theoretical max, not the deployed values.
But with 1000 users on a segment, don't these share the 27 megabit/s for v2, even though they are configured to only be able to use 384kilobit/s peak individually? -- Mikael Abrahamsson email: swmike@swm.pp.se
Except that upstreams are not at 27 Mbps (http://i.cmpnet.com/commsdesign/csd/2002/jun02/imedia-fig1.gif show that you would be using 32 QAM at 6.4 MHz). The majority of MSOs are at 16-QAM at 3.2 MHz, which is about 10 Mbps. We just took over two systems that were at QPSK at 3.2 Mbps, which is about 5 Mbps. And upstreams are usually sized not to be more than 250 users per upstream port. So that would be a 10:1 oversubscription on upstream, not too bad, by my reckoning. The 1000 you are thinking of is probably 1000 users per downstream power, and there is a usually a 1:4 to 1:6 ratio of downstream to upstream ports. Frank -----Original Message----- From: owner-nanog@merit.edu [mailto:owner-nanog@merit.edu] On Behalf Of Mikael Abrahamsson Sent: Tuesday, January 15, 2008 5:41 PM To: nanog@merit.edu Subject: RE: FW: ISPs slowing P2P traffic... On Tue, 15 Jan 2008, Frank Bulk wrote:
I'm not aware of MSOs configuring their upstreams to attain rates for 9 and 27 Mbps for version 1 and 2, respectively. The numbers you quote are the theoretical max, not the deployed values.
But with 1000 users on a segment, don't these share the 27 megabit/s for v2, even though they are configured to only be able to use 384kilobit/s peak individually? -- Mikael Abrahamsson email: swmike@swm.pp.se
On Tue, 15 Jan 2008, Frank Bulk wrote:
Except that upstreams are not at 27 Mbps (http://i.cmpnet.com/commsdesign/csd/2002/jun02/imedia-fig1.gif show that you would be using 32 QAM at 6.4 MHz). The majority of MSOs are at 16-QAM at 3.2 MHz, which is about 10 Mbps. We just took over two systems that were at QPSK at 3.2 Mbps, which is about 5 Mbps.
Ok, so the wikipedia article <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Docsis> is heavily simplified? Any chance someone with good knowledge of this could update the page to be more accurate?
And upstreams are usually sized not to be more than 250 users per upstream port. So that would be a 10:1 oversubscription on upstream, not too bad, by my reckoning. The 1000 you are thinking of is probably 1000 users per downstream power, and there is a usually a 1:4 to 1:6 ratio of downstream to upstream ports.
250 users sharing 10 megabit/s would mean 40 kilobit/s average utilization which to me seems very tight. Or is this "250 apartments" meaning perhaps 40% subscribe to the service indicating that those "250" really are 100 and that the average utilization then can be 100 kilobit/s upstream? With these figures I can really see why companies using HFC/Coax have a problem with P2P, the technical implementation is not really suited for the application. -- Mikael Abrahamsson email: swmike@swm.pp.se
The wikipedia article is simplified to the extent that it doesn't embed actual practices. Those are best obtained at SCTE meetings and discussion with CMTS vendors. A 10x oversubscription rate from residential broadband access doesn't seem too unreasonable to me based in practice and what I've heard, but perhaps other operators have differing opinions or experiences. The '250' is really 250 subscribers in my case, but you're right, you see different figures bandied about in regards to homes passed and penetration. Frank -----Original Message----- From: owner-nanog@merit.edu [mailto:owner-nanog@merit.edu] On Behalf Of Mikael Abrahamsson Sent: Wednesday, January 16, 2008 1:07 AM To: nanog@merit.edu Subject: RE: FW: ISPs slowing P2P traffic... On Tue, 15 Jan 2008, Frank Bulk wrote:
Except that upstreams are not at 27 Mbps (http://i.cmpnet.com/commsdesign/csd/2002/jun02/imedia-fig1.gif show that you would be using 32 QAM at 6.4 MHz). The majority of MSOs are at 16-QAM at 3.2 MHz, which is about 10 Mbps. We just took over two systems that were at QPSK at 3.2 Mbps, which is about 5 Mbps.
Ok, so the wikipedia article <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Docsis> is heavily simplified? Any chance someone with good knowledge of this could update the page to be more accurate?
And upstreams are usually sized not to be more than 250 users per upstream port. So that would be a 10:1 oversubscription on upstream, not too bad, by my reckoning. The 1000 you are thinking of is probably 1000 users per downstream power, and there is a usually a 1:4 to 1:6 ratio of downstream to upstream ports.
250 users sharing 10 megabit/s would mean 40 kilobit/s average utilization which to me seems very tight. Or is this "250 apartments" meaning perhaps 40% subscribe to the service indicating that those "250" really are 100 and that the average utilization then can be 100 kilobit/s upstream? With these figures I can really see why companies using HFC/Coax have a problem with P2P, the technical implementation is not really suited for the application. -- Mikael Abrahamsson email: swmike@swm.pp.se
On Tue, 15 Jan 2008 17:56:30 +0900 Adrian Chadd <adrian@creative.net.au> wrote:
On Tue, Jan 15, 2008, Mark Smith wrote:
But the fat man isn't allowed to take up residence in the restaurant and continously eat - he's only allowed to be there in bursts, like we used to be able to assume people would use networks they're connected to. "Left running" P2P is the fat man never leaving and never stopping eating.
ffs, stop with the crappy analogies.
They're accurate. No network, including the POTS, or the road networks you drive your car on, are built to handle 100% concurrent use by all devices that can access it. Data networks (for many, many years) have been built on the assumption that the majority of attached devices will only occasionally use it. If you want to _guaranteed_ bandwidth to your house, 24x7, ask your telco for the actual pricing for guaranteed Mbps - and you'll find that the price per Mbps is around an order of magnitude higher than what your residential or SOHO broadband Mbps is priced at. That because for sustained load, the network costs are typically an order of magnitude higher.
The internet is like a badly designed commodity network. Built increasingly cheaper to deal with market pressures and unable to shift quickly to shifting technologies.
That's because an absolute and fundamental design assumption is changing - P2P changes the traffic profile from occasional bursty traffic to a constant load. I'd be happy to build a network that can sustain high throughput P2P from all attached devices concurrently - it isn't hard - but it's costly in bandwidth and equipment. I'm not against the idea of P2P a lot, because it distributes load for popular content around the network, rather than creating "the slashdot effect". It's the customers that are the problem - they won't pay $1000 per/Mbit per month I'd need to be able to do it... TCP is partly to blame. It attempts to suck up as much bandwidth as available. That's great if you're attached to a network who's usage is bursty, because if the network is idle, you get to use all it's available capacity, and get the best network performance possible. However, if your TCP is competing with everybody else's TCP, and you're expecting "idle network" TCP performance - you'd better pony up money for more total network bandwidth, or lower your throughput expectations. Regards, Mark. -- "Sheep are slow and tasty, and therefore must remain constantly alert." - Bruce Schneier, "Beyond Fear"
At the risk of incurring Mr. Pilosoft's wrath (the Putin of NANOG?), I'll looking for NANOG style ISP meetings to attend in Europe this year (France, Germany, UK, Belgium, and Netherlands). Any suggestions would be appreciated. Please bypass the list and send them directly to me. Roderick S. Beck Director of European Sales Hibernia Atlantic 1, Passage du Chantier, 75012 Paris http://www.hiberniaatlantic.com Wireless: 1-212-444-8829. Landline: 33-1-4346-3209. French Wireless: 33-6-14-33-48-97. AOL Messenger: GlobalBandwidth rod.beck@hiberniaatlantic.com rodbeck@erols.com ``Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth.'' Albert Einstein.
On Jan 15, 2008 2:42 PM, Rod Beck <Rod.Beck@hiberniaatlantic.com> wrote:
At the risk of incurring Mr. Pilosoft's wrath (the Putin of NANOG?), I'll
he's not a bad guy actually :) it's a rough job corralling all the -admin folks I'm certain. Also this isn't really that off topic is it?
looking for NANOG style ISP meetings to attend in Europe this year (France, Germany, UK, Belgium, and Netherlands). Any suggestions would be
RIPE? In berlin in May: http://www.ripe.net/ripe/meetings/ripe-56/index.html -Chris
On Tue, 15 Jan 2008, Rod Beck wrote:
At the risk of incurring Mr. Pilosoft's wrath (the Putin of NANOG?), You meant the "srh of nanog". And I'm not ;)
I'll looking for NANOG style ISP meetings to attend in Europe this year (France, Germany, UK, Belgium, and Netherlands). Any suggestions would be appreciated. Please bypass the list and send them directly to me. The first thing that comes to mind is RIPE. Next thing that comes to mind is UKNOF.
Also, that isn't really off-topic. However, if you get off-list replies, could you please do a follow-up summary post and list the european neteng groups, that would be quite helpful. A good starting point for the search is www.euro-ix.net, which lists european IXPs. Many IXP's have annual (or more often) meetings of members, which serve similarly to NANOG. See: https://www.euro-ix.net/news/meetevent/ for starters. -alex
This is amazing. People are discovering oversubscription. When we put the very first six 2400bps modems for the public on the internet in 1989 and someone shortly thereafter got a busy signal and called support the issue was oversubscription. What? You mean you don't have one modem and phone line for each customer??? Shortly thereafter the fuss was dial-up ISPs selling "unlimited" dial-up accounts for $20/mo and then knocking people off if they were idle to accomodate oversubscription. But as busy signals mounted it wasn't just idle, it was "on too long" or "unlimited means 200 hours per month" until attornies-general began weighing in. And here it is over 18 years later and people are still debating oversubscription. Not what to do about it, that's fine, but seem to be discovering oversubscription de novo. Wow. It reminds me of back when I taught college and I'd start my first Sept lecture with a puzzled look at the audience and "didn't I explain all this *last* year?" But at least they'd laugh. Hint: You're not getting a dedicated megabit between chicago and johannesburg for $20/month. Get over it. HOWEVER, debating how to deal with the policies to accomodate oversubscription is reasonable (tho perhaps not on this list) because that's a moving target. But here we are a week later on this thread (not to mention nearly 20 years) and people are still explaining oversubscription to each other? Did I accidentally stumble into Special Nanog? -- -Barry Shein The World | bzs@TheWorld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 800-THE-WRLD | Login: Nationwide Software Tool & Die | Public Access Internet | SINCE 1989 *oo*
On Mon, 14 Jan 2008 18:43:12 -0500 "William Herrin" <herrin-nanog@dirtside.com> wrote:
On Jan 14, 2008 5:25 PM, Joe Greco <jgreco@ns.sol.net> wrote:
So users who rarely use their connection are more profitable to the ISP.
The fat man isn't a welcome sight to the owner of the AYCE buffet.
Joe,
The fat man is quite welcome at the buffet, especially if he brings friends and tips well.
But the fat man isn't allowed to take up residence in the restaurant and continously eat - he's only allowed to be there in bursts, like we used to be able to assume people would use networks they're connected to. "Left running" P2P is the fat man never leaving and never stopping eating.
Time to stop selling the "always on" connections, then, I guess, because it is "always on" - not P2P - which is the fat man never leaving. P2P is merely the fat man eating a lot while he's there. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net "We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again." - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.
Joe Greco wrote:
Time to stop selling the "always on" connections, then, I guess, because it is "always on" - not P2P - which is the fat man never leaving. P2P is merely the fat man eating a lot while he's there.
As long as we're keeping up this metaphor, P2P is the fat man who says he's gonna get a job real soon but dude life is just SO HARD and crashes on your couch for three weeks until eventually you threaten to get the cops involved because he won't leave. Then you have to clean up thirty-seven half-eaten bags of Cheetos. Every network has limitations, and I don't think I've ever seen a network that makes every single end-user happy with everything all the time. You could pipe 100Mbps full-duplex to everyone's door, and someone would still complain because they don't have gigabit access to lemonparty. Whether those are limitations of the technology you chose, limitations in your budget, policy restrictions, whatever. As long as you fairly disclose to your end-users what limitations and restrictions exist on your network, I don't see the problem. David Smith MVN.net
As long as we're keeping up this metaphor, P2P is the fat man who says
Guys, according to wikipedia over 70 million people fileshare http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethics_of_file_sharing That's not the fat man, that's a significant portion of the market. Demand is changing, meet the new needs or die at the hands of your customers. It's not like you have a choice. The equipment makers need to recognize that it's no longer a one size fits all world (where download is the most critical) but instead that the hardware needs to adjust the available bandwidth to accomodate the direction data is flowing at that particular moment. Hopefully some of them monitor this list and are getting ideas for the next generation of equipment. George Roettger Netlink Services
Geo. wrote:
Guys, according to wikipedia over 70 million people fileshare http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethics_of_file_sharing
That's not the fat man, that's a significant portion of the market.
Demand is changing, meet the new needs or die at the hands of your customers. It's not like you have a choice.
A few years ago I worked in a startup WISP environment - a coop that had a total of 5 T1s across three PoPs servicing some 100+ households over a 50 sq mile area. We had a customer share his 25GB music collection through gnutella, and then leave for a weekend vacation skiing. Meanwhile, other neighboring members who were actually still at home and attempting to use the network interactively, suffered until rate limiting was put into place. Contracts aside, given this is a coop, who has more right to use the bandwidth, at an ethical level? The fact is that for shared content, as in customer-seeded torrents or shared gnutella files, demand scales at what *appears* to be an exponential rate in proportion to the amount of shared content. Please explain how a rural WISP can buy a pipe that will scale with that type of demand, and how they can recover the associated costs. Because in my experience, adding new upstream capacity often just exacerbates the overall problem, especially for nodes with strong signals to the PoP. Note, this was in a rural area where the other available Internet options are: 1) satellite - expensive and wretched latency for the telecommuting crowd trying to get to their company resources over VPN 2) dialup - also poor latency that, when combined with VPN overhead is nearly useless for the majority of telecommuters 3) ISDN - $150-200 / month for better latency and moderately better throughput. I used a combination of satellite and ISDN prior to inception of the Coop to meet both low-latency needs for shell access and satellite for downloading large files. Then I looked at the combined costs (I didn't pay the ISDN) and realized I could almost be on a T1. 4) Fractional T1 or FR - $400-600+ / month The only economically feasible way of providing broadband residential services are shared T1 distributed by wifi. There's no cable, no DSL, no FIOS. And there's zero likelihood, given distribution density and engineering challenges, that any of those offerings will ever make it up there. At the time we started, there were three other WISPs in the same county competing with each other, all created in the same year, that had to contend with the P2P issues, as well as radio interference (I knew most of the parties and promoted the idea of "mutally assured destruction" if we didn't work out a channel schema, fortunately coverages didn't overlap in too many places). Bandwidth may be commodified if you live in a major metropolitan area, but I don't see the rural WISPs having any other economically feasible options apart from QoS to control the P2P issues. When I was on the BoD of the Coop, I promoted education as the primary method to change user P2P behavior, backed up by filters and QoS as needed. Others wanted Packet-shaper ($$$) automatic enforcement, but I felt that over time the P2P would migrate to encryption as a result of shaping (this back in ~ 2003 and it seemed like it was just around the corner, so perhaps I'm wrong on this). As an alternative to education and QoS, I felt that metering and billing off of bandwidth used per-house was a good approach that would have it's own educational value. When bandwidth isn't actually a commodity, suddenly torrent is no longer the best means to acquire new "content" (and from my experience I can tell you, yes the customers were mostly downloading music and videos they didn't own). P2P is IMHO a perfect example of the "tragedy of the commons". Too many users feel like "If I don't grab as much for myself as I can, some other fool is going to do the same thing and then I'll be left out". That mentality itself is also a form of mutually assured destruction in its own right. So, to answer the "meet the new needs or die" poster I say - show me one other viable option for the rural WISP that doesn't involve QoS or filters and still makes a profit. Because I know a lot of WISPs who would love a better solution. Finally: most of the people posting on this list aren't the ones writing the marketing or developing the actual product offerings. So all the people responding that "you shouldn't be selling unlimited if you can't afford to provide it" need to back off for a minute and recognize this simple reality. If engineers were running the sales and marketing I'm sure the world would be just fine ;)
Joe Greco wrote:
Time to stop selling the "always on" connections, then, I guess, because it is "always on" - not P2P - which is the fat man never leaving. P2P is merely the fat man eating a lot while he's there.
As long as we're keeping up this metaphor, P2P is the fat man who says he's gonna get a job real soon but dude life is just SO HARD and crashes on your couch for three weeks until eventually you threaten to get the cops involved because he won't leave. Then you have to clean up thirty-seven half-eaten bags of Cheetos.
I have no idea what the networking equivalent of thirty-seven half-eaten bags of Cheetos is, can't even begin to imagine what the virtual equivalent of my couch is, etc. Your metaphor doesn't really make any sense to me, sorry. Interestingly enough, we do have a pizza-and-play place a mile or two from the house, you pay one fee to get in, then quarters (or cards or whatever) to play games - but they have repeatedly answered that they are absolutely and positively fine with you coming in for lunch, and staying through supper. And we have a "discount" card, which they used to give out to local businesspeople for "business lunches", on top of it.
Every network has limitations, and I don't think I've ever seen a network that makes every single end-user happy with everything all the time. You could pipe 100Mbps full-duplex to everyone's door, and someone would still complain because they don't have gigabit access to lemonparty.
Certainly. There will be gigabit in the future, but it isn't here (in the US) just yet. That has very little to do with the deceptiveness inherent in selling something when you don't intend to actually provide what you advertised.
Whether those are limitations of the technology you chose, limitations in your budget, policy restrictions, whatever.
As long as you fairly disclose to your end-users what limitations and restrictions exist on your network, I don't see the problem.
You've set out a qualification that generally doesn't exist. For example, this discussion included someone from a WISP, Amplex, I believe, that listed certain conditions of use on their web site, and yet it seems like they're un{willing,able} (not assigning blame/fault/etc here) to deliver that level of service, and using their inability as a way to justify possibly rate shaping P2P traffic above and beyond what they indicate on their own documents. In some cases, we do have people burying T&C in lengthy T&C documents, such as some of the 3G cellular providers who advertise "Unlimited Internet(*)" data cards, but then have a slew of (*) items that are restricted - but only if you dig into the fine print on Page 3 of the T&C. I'd much prefer that the advertising be honest and up front, and that ISP's not be allowed to advertise "unlimited" service if they are going to place limits, particularly significant limits, on the service. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net "We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again." - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.
Joe Greco wrote:
I have no idea what the networking equivalent of thirty-seven half-eaten bags of Cheetos is, can't even begin to imagine what the virtual equivalent of my couch is, etc. Your metaphor doesn't really make any sense to me, sorry.
There isn't one. The "fat man" metaphor was getting increasingly silly, I just wanted to get it over with.
Interestingly enough, we do have a pizza-and-play place a mile or two from the house, you pay one fee to get in, then quarters (or cards or whatever) to play games - but they have repeatedly answered that they are absolutely and positively fine with you coming in for lunch, and staying through supper. And we have a "discount" card, which they used to give out to local businesspeople for "business lunches", on top of it.
That's not the best metaphor either, because they're making money off the games, not the buffet. (Seriously, visit one of 'em, the food isn't very good, and clearly isn't the real draw.) I suppose you could market Internet connectivity this way - unlimited access to HTTP and POP3, and ten free SMTP transactions per month, then you pay extra for each protocol. That'd be an awfully tough sell, though.
As long as you fairly disclose to your end-users what limitations and restrictions exist on your network, I don't see the problem.
You've set out a qualification that generally doesn't exist.
I can only speak for my network, of course. Mine is a small WISP, and we have the same basic policy as Amplex, from whence this thread originated. Our contracts have relatively clear and large (at least by the standards of a contract) "no p2p" disclaimers, in addition to the standard "no traffic that causes network problems" clause that many of us have. The installers are trained to explicitly mention this, along with other no-brainer clauses like "don't spam." When we're setting up software on their computers (like their email client), we'll look for obvious signs of trouble ahead. If a customer already has a bunch of p2p software installed, we'll let them know they can't use it, under pain of "find a new ISP." We don't tell our customers they can have unlimited access to do whatever the heck they want. The technical distinctions only matter to a few customers, and they're generally the problem customers that we don't want anyway. To try to make this slightly more relevant, is it a good idea, either technically or legally, to mandate some sort of standard for this? I'm thinking something like the "Nutrition Facts" information that appears on most packaged foods in the States, that ISPs put on their Web sites and advertisements. I'm willing to disclose that we block certain ports for our end-users unless they request otherwise, and that we rate-limit certain types of traffic. I can see this sort of thing getting confusing and messy for everyone, with little or no benefit to anyone. Thoughts? David Smith MVN.net
Joe Greco wrote:
I have no idea what the networking equivalent of thirty-seven half-eaten bags of Cheetos is, can't even begin to imagine what the virtual equivalent of my couch is, etc. Your metaphor doesn't really make any sense to me, sorry.
There isn't one. The "fat man" metaphor was getting increasingly silly, I just wanted to get it over with.
Actually, it was doing pretty well up 'til near the end. Most of the amusing stuff was [off-list.] The interesting conclusion to it was that obesity is a growing problem in the US, and that the economics of an AYCE buffet are changing - mostly for the owner.
Interestingly enough, we do have a pizza-and-play place a mile or two from the house, you pay one fee to get in, then quarters (or cards or whatever) to play games - but they have repeatedly answered that they are absolutely and positively fine with you coming in for lunch, and staying through supper. And we have a "discount" card, which they used to give out to local businesspeople for "business lunches", on top of it.
That's not the best metaphor either, because they're making money off the games, not the buffet. (Seriously, visit one of 'em, the food isn't very good, and clearly isn't the real draw.)
True for Chuck E Cheese, but not universally so. I really doubt that Stonefire is expecting the people who they give their $5.95 business lunch card to to go play games. Their pizza used to taste like cardboard (bland), but they're much better now. The facility as a whole is designed to address the family, and adults can go get some Asian or Italian pasta, go to the sports theme area that plays ESPN, and only tangentially notice the game area on the way out. The toddler play areas (<8yr) are even free. http://www.whitehutchinson.com/leisure/stonefirepizza.shtml This is falling fairly far from topicality for NANOG, but there is a certain aspect here which is exceedingly relevant - that businesses continue to change and innovate in order to meet customer demand.
I suppose you could market Internet connectivity this way - unlimited access to HTTP and POP3, and ten free SMTP transactions per month, then you pay extra for each protocol. That'd be an awfully tough sell, though.
Possibly. :-)
As long as you fairly disclose to your end-users what limitations and restrictions exist on your network, I don't see the problem.
You've set out a qualification that generally doesn't exist.
I can only speak for my network, of course. Mine is a small WISP, and we have the same basic policy as Amplex, from whence this thread originated. Our contracts have relatively clear and large (at least by the standards of a contract) "no p2p" disclaimers, in addition to the standard "no traffic that causes network problems" clause that many of us have. The installers are trained to explicitly mention this, along with other no-brainer clauses like "don't spam."
Actually, that's a difference, that wasn't what Mark@Amplex was talking about. Amplex web site said they would rate limit you down to the minimum promised rate. That's disclosed, which would be fine, except that it apparently isn't what they are looking to do, because their oversubscription rate is still too high to deliver on their promises.
When we're setting up software on their computers (like their email client), we'll look for obvious signs of trouble ahead. If a customer already has a bunch of p2p software installed, we'll let them know they can't use it, under pain of "find a new ISP."
We don't tell our customers they can have unlimited access to do whatever the heck they want. The technical distinctions only matter to a few customers, and they're generally the problem customers that we don't want anyway.
There is certainly some truth to that. Getting rid of the unprofitable customers is one way to keep things good. However, you may find yourself getting rid of some customers who merely want to make sure that their ISP isn't going to interfere at some future date.
To try to make this slightly more relevant, is it a good idea, either technically or legally, to mandate some sort of standard for this? I'm thinking something like the "Nutrition Facts" information that appears on most packaged foods in the States, that ISPs put on their Web sites and advertisements. I'm willing to disclose that we block certain ports for our end-users unless they request otherwise, and that we rate-limit certain types of traffic.
ABSOLUTELY. We would certainly seem more responsible, as providers, if we disclosed what we were providing.
I can see this sort of thing getting confusing and messy for everyone, with little or no benefit to anyone. Thoughts?
It certainly can get confusing and messy. It's a little annoying to help someone go shopping for broadband and then have to dig out the dirty details in the T&C, if they're even there. In a similar way, I get highly annoyed at hotels that offer "free Internet," and then it turns out that they only offer 802.11b in the lobby, and you need MSIE to go through their portal system, and there's a maximum session life of 300s for all proxied connections, which makes the life of a UNIX guy who's simply looking to do SSH a bit of hell. Admittedly, it has gotten somewhat better in recent years. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net "We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again." - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.
On Jan 15, 2008 3:52 PM, Joe Greco <jgreco@ns.sol.net> wrote:
Joe Greco wrote:
I have no idea what the networking equivalent of thirty-seven half-eaten bags of Cheetos is, can't even begin to imagine what the virtual equivalent of my couch is, etc. Your metaphor doesn't really make any sense to me, sorry.
There isn't one. The "fat man" metaphor was getting increasingly silly, I just wanted to get it over with.
Actually, it was doing pretty well up 'til near the end. \
Not really, it's been pretty far out there for more than a few posts and was completely dead when "farting and burping" was used in an analogy. -M<
I have reached the conclusion that some of these threads are good indicators of the degree of underemployment among our esteemed members. But don't worry, I am not a snitch. Roderick S. Beck Director of European Sales Hibernia Atlantic 1, Passage du Chantier, 75012 Paris http://www.hiberniaatlantic.com Wireless: 1-212-444-8829. Landline: 33-1-4346-3209. French Wireless: 33-6-14-33-48-97. AOL Messenger: GlobalBandwidth rod.beck@hiberniaatlantic.com rodbeck@erols.com ``Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth.'' Albert Einstein. -----Original Message----- From: owner-nanog@merit.edu on behalf of Martin Hannigan Sent: Tue 1/15/2008 9:25 PM To: Joe Greco Cc: nanog@merit.edu Subject: Re: FW: ISPs slowing P2P traffic... On Jan 15, 2008 3:52 PM, Joe Greco <jgreco@ns.sol.net> wrote:
Joe Greco wrote:
I have no idea what the networking equivalent of thirty-seven half-eaten bags of Cheetos is, can't even begin to imagine what the virtual equivalent of my couch is, etc. Your metaphor doesn't really make any sense to me, sorry.
There isn't one. The "fat man" metaphor was getting increasingly silly, I just wanted to get it over with.
Actually, it was doing pretty well up 'til near the end. \
Not really, it's been pretty far out there for more than a few posts and was completely dead when "farting and burping" was used in an analogy. -M<
On Tue, Jan 15, 2008 at 12:14:33PM -0600, David E. Smith <dave@mvn.net> wrote a message of 61 lines which said:
To try to make this slightly more relevant, is it a good idea, either technically or legally, to mandate some sort of standard for this? I'm thinking something like the "Nutrition Facts" information that appears on most packaged foods in the States, that ISPs put on their Web sites and advertisements. I'm willing to disclose that we block certain ports [...]
As a consumer, I would say YES. And FCC should mandates it. Practically speaking, you may find the RFC 4084 "Terminology for Describing Internet Connectivity" interesting: As the Internet has evolved, many types of arrangements have been advertised and sold as "Internet connectivity". Because these may differ significantly in the capabilities they offer, the range of options, and the lack of any standard terminology, the effort to distinguish between these services has caused considerable consumer confusion. This document provides a list of terms and definitions that may be helpful to providers, consumers, and, potentially, regulators in clarifying the type and character of services being offered. http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4084.txt
Stephane Bortzmeyer (bortzmeyer) writes:
that appears on most packaged foods in the States, that ISPs put on their Web sites and advertisements. I'm willing to disclose that we block certain ports [...]
As a consumer, I would say YES. And FCC should mandates it.
... and if the FCC doesn't mandate it, maybe we'll see some self-labelling, just like the some food producers have been doing in a few countries ("this doesn't contain preservatives") in the absence of formal regulation.
Practically speaking, you may find the RFC 4084 "Terminology for Describing Internet Connectivity" interesting:
Agreed. Something describing Internet service, and breaking it down into "essential components" such as: - end-to-end IP (NAT/NO NAT) - IPv6 availability (Y/N/timeline) - transparent HTTP redirection or not - DNS catchall or not - possibilities to enable/disable and cost - port filtering/throttling if any (P2P, SIP, ...) - respect of evil bit
Joe Greco wrote:
As long as you fairly disclose to your end-users what limitations and restrictions exist on your network, I don't see the problem.
You've set out a qualification that generally doesn't exist. For example, this discussion included someone from a WISP, Amplex, I believe, that listed certain conditions of use on their web site, and yet it seems like they're un{willing,able} (not assigning blame/fault/etc here) to deliver that level of service, and using their inability as a way to justify possibly rate shaping P2P traffic above and beyond what they indicate on their own documents.
Actually you misrepresent what I said versus what you said. It's getting a little old. I responded to the original question by Deepak Jain over why anyone cared about P2P traffic rather then just using a hard limit with the reasons why a Wireless ISP would want to shape P2P traffic. You then took it upon yourself to post sections of our website to Nanog and claim that your service was much superior because you happen to run Metro Ethernet. Our website pretty clearly spells out our practices and they are MUCH more transparent than any other provider I know of. Can we do EXACTLY what we say on our website if EVERY client wants to run P2P at the full upload rate? No - but we can do it for the ones who care at this point. At the moment the only people who seem to care about this are holier than thou network engineers and content providers looking for ways to avoid their own distribution costs. Neither one of them is paying me a dime. Mark
----- Original Message ----- From: "Joe Greco" <jgreco@ns.sol.net> [snip]
As long as you fairly disclose to your end-users what limitations and restrictions exist on your network, I don't see the problem.
You've set out a qualification that generally doesn't exist. For example, this discussion included someone from a WISP, Amplex, I believe, that listed certain conditions of use on their web site, and yet it seems like they're un{willing,able} (not assigning blame/fault/etc here) to deliver that level of service, and using their inability as a way to justify possibly rate shaping P2P traffic above and beyond what they indicate on their own documents.
In some cases, we do have people burying T&C in lengthy T&C documents, such as some of the 3G cellular providers who advertise "Unlimited Internet(*)" data cards, but then have a slew of (*) items that are restricted - but only if you dig into the fine print on Page 3 of the T&C. I'd much prefer that the advertising be honest and up front, and that ISP's not be allowed to advertise "unlimited" service if they are going to place limits, particularly significant limits, on the service.
... JG
Yep. "In the US, Internet access is still generally sold as all-you-can-eat, with few restrictions on the types of services or applications that can be run across the network (except for wireless, of course), but things are different across the pond. In the UK, ISP plus.net doesn't even offer "unlimited" packages, and they explain why on their web site. 'Most providers claiming to offer unlimited broadband will have a fair use policy to try and prevent people over-using their service," they write. "But if it's supposed to be unlimited, why should you use it fairly? The fair use policy stops you using your unlimited broadband in an unlimited fashion-so, by our reckoning, it's not unlimited. We don't believe in selling 'unlimited broadband' that's bound by a fair use policy. We'd rather be upfront with you and give you clear usage allowances, with FREE overnight usage.' " The above (and there's much more) from: http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/Deep-packet-inspection-meets-net-neu... If I was a WISP, I'd be saving up for that DPI box. --Michael
David E. Smith wrote:
[...] Every network has limitations, and I don't think I've ever seen a network that makes every single end-user happy with everything all the time. You could pipe 100Mbps full-duplex to everyone's door, and someone would still complain because they don't have gigabit access to lemonparty.
Whether those are limitations of the technology you chose, limitations in your budget, policy restrictions, whatever.
As long as you fairly disclose to your end-users what limitations and restrictions exist on your network, I don't see the problem.
David Smith MVN.net
Well said. I'm not sure what the future holds, but there is an example in the marketplace already: satellite broadband. Because bandwidth to/from a transponder is severely limited (even with the newer tech), they have the "buffet" problem even worse. So, a long time ago they went to a point-blank limitation known as "fair access policy". See http://my.wildblue.net/download/legal/public/fair_access_policy_08012007.pdf as an example. Essentially, go as fast as you want until your transfer limit is reached; then run at dialup speeds until your cap clears. To your typical end user, nothing is noticed. Heavy users do notice. A few lessons learned from that industry: 1. when they switched existing customers to it, the customers went ballistic and hated it. (even the ones not really affected by it.) I don't blame them as that was not really what they were thinking when they invested in the equipment. (Ah, customer expectations...) 2. whenever they "adjust" the policy further, the customers still hate it; even if the fine print says they can change it. New customers, who always had FAP, don't hate it as much. 3. it actually does work. They alleviate billing fears by not charging extra or shutting off service, instead they throttle bandwidth. Most of them have graphs the customer can get to and see. They don't largely don't discriminate on type of traffic (i.e. P2P vs. other). I doubt we see this in the cable or dsl world for a while, but I wouldn't be surprised if the industry is pushed that way. There is a definite downside, but it actually is technically fair. Just my opinion. John
participants (22)
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Adrian Chadd -
Alex Pilosov -
Bailey Stephen -
Barry Shein -
Brandon Galbraith -
Christopher Morrow -
David E. Smith -
Frank Bulk -
Geo. -
Joe Greco -
John Dupuy -
Mark Radabaugh -
Mark Smith -
Martin Hannigan -
Matt Palmer -
Michael Painter -
Mikael Abrahamsson -
Mike Lewinski -
Phil Regnauld -
Rod Beck -
Stephane Bortzmeyer -
William Herrin