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.

[Killer_KF]

There is no such thing as a bandwidth hog. If I pay for 10Mbps or 5Mbps or whatever speed, then I should be able to get that speed whenever I want and however long I want. You should be able to use your 10Mbps 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

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.

[bizzel-carpet-cleaner]

Killer_KF you are SPOT on with that answer.
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.

[consag]

Come off it. Using Killer's numbers, the ISP would have to lay 200 1 gigabit fibers to provide the 2000 people 10 Mbps. Who would pay for it?

[Imalittleteapot]

If the ISPs printed the real numbers of what they can actually provide, for what they charge, I doubt anyone would buy that either. I wish I could do that. I'd sell cars that got unlimited mpg. I'd of course put in the fine print they don't really get unlimited mpg. That was just to sell it. Of course, I'd still get arrested for fraud. Some how the ISPs manage to get away with it though.