June 26, 2008 11:49 AM PDT
Daily Debrief: Defusing a P2P crisis before it starts
The backlash against BitTorrent is only beginning. Mark Cuban and others have raised the idea of charging for upstream bandwidth usage. That's not a popular suggestion but when 5 percent of the people using the Internet are hogging up to 80 percent of its capacity because of P2P transfers, then there's going to be trouble in River City.
Happy to say that there may be a technology answer to the problem. Dr. Lawrence Roberts, who invented computing networking via data packets, gave a talk at the recently concluded Structure 08 conference. I chatted on today's Daily Debrief with Webware's Rafe Needleman, who covered Roberts' speech.
The real issue here is that ISPs are selling too many of these speedy services when their infrastructure doesn't support it.
For example, they are laying gigabit (1000Mbps) fiber down, and then selling 10Mbps service to 2000 people, then complaining that just 100 people are constantly using 8Mbps (even though they are paying for 10Mbps), which is 80% the capacity of the gigabit fiber.
That is just ridiculous. The ISPs dug themselves in a hole, and now the customer is going to end up paying for it, or worse, customers are going to be paying for 10Mbps internet, but get throttled (to 6, 8, or 4Mbps) during peak times.
What are they going to do when movie rentals are availiable online with the torrent style download system? Bittorrent does have legal uses and if you pay for megs dangit you get those megs. Internet squeezing and over selling has been around and borrowed from the days of the "party line" so there is no issue other then one more squeez on the customer.