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Indian ISPs Speed Up BitTorrent by ‘Peering’ with a Torrent Site

torrentfreak.com

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Re: Indian ISPs Speed Up BitTorrent by ‘Peering’ with a Torrent Site

#21

Post by newscracker »

> 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).

Re: Indian ISPs Speed Up BitTorrent by ‘Peering’ with a Torrent Site

#22

Post by mani04 »

DarkLinkXXXX wrote: post #19
mani04 wrote: post #14

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.

What piracy? I'm not a pirate. I'm just downloading multiple terabytes of Linux ISO's each month.

Ofcourse you are not a pirate :)

But the article ends with a note on piracy, which is irrelevant in this context. Also most people think that torrent means piracy, which is wrong.

Re: Indian ISPs Speed Up BitTorrent by ‘Peering’ with a Torrent Site

#23

Post by runeks »

newscracker wrote: post #21

> 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 mean…

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.

Re: Indian ISPs Speed Up BitTorrent by ‘Peering’ with a Torrent Site

#24

Post by manquer »

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

Re: Indian ISPs Speed Up BitTorrent by ‘Peering’ with a Torrent Site

#26

Post by toyg »

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.

Re: Indian ISPs Speed Up BitTorrent by ‘Peering’ with a Torrent Site

#27

Post by drzaiusapelord »

wscott wrote: post #12

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.

Re: Indian ISPs Speed Up BitTorrent by ‘Peering’ with a Torrent Site

#28

Post by SmellTheGlove »

newscracker wrote: post #21

> 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 mean…

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.

Re: Indian ISPs Speed Up BitTorrent by ‘Peering’ with a Torrent Site

#29

Post by drdaeman »

newscracker wrote: post #21

> 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 mean…

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.

-----

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.

Re: Indian ISPs Speed Up BitTorrent by ‘Peering’ with a Torrent Site

#30

Post by [deleted] »

runeks wrote: post #23
newscracker wrote: post #21

> 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 mean…

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…

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