Indian ISPs Speed Up BitTorrent by ‘Peering’ with a Torrent Site • Hacker News Board

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

#31

Post by throwaway7767 » Mon, Aug 29, 2016, 4:52 PM UTC

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…

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?

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

#32

Post by wscott » Mon, Aug 29, 2016, 5:17 PM UTC

drzaiusapelord wrote: post #27

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.

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.

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

#33

Post by Projects211 » Mon, Aug 29, 2016, 6:32 PM UTC

icebraining wrote: post #13

mrkgnao wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably other people served by the ISP in, say, the same city?

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.

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

#34

Post by anonbanker » Wed, Aug 31, 2016, 6:14 PM UTC

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.

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.