[AusNOG] News: Telstra to clamp down on peer-to-peer

[Mark Smith]

<snip>

> Customers are probably not paying enough to be able to do that, and if they 
> expect it, that's like saying that all our roads should be congestion free, 
> and the only congestion that should ever occur is on our single driveway
>>    when we have two cars - ideal, but impractical. I think it is an 
> unrealistic expectation, and if people think they access circuit speed is a 
> guarantee of their Internet service speed they don't understand how the 
> Internet works and haven't read their T&Cs.
> [snip]
> 
> If your voice traffic is prioritised over my traffic, I qualify this is not 
> neutral. It shouldn't be for the NBN Co (or whoever) to decide that one 
> customer's traffic matters more than another customers because it's of a 
> certain type.
> 

ISPs being able to do this prioritisation is in their T&Cs if they want to be able to do it.

> Granted Voice is a bad example here since it's so small that prioritizing it 
> isn't a big deal, but if this gets into things like video, you're now 
> prioritizing some video services over others, then it's a real problem. When 
> I buy a 100 Mbps service, I expect that I get to 100 Mbps.

To or from where?

What you are buying is 100Mbps access to your ISPs network, which then provides access to the Internet. You are not buying any assurances of 100Mbps. You should get up to 100Mbps, hopefully more often than not, but it is not assured, because it relies on so many parties and so many variables that nobody can make the assurance. Your ISP would only be able to assure 100Mbps performance if they owned and ran the whole Internet, and every application and server attached to it. Even then there may be periods of congestion when e.g. one particular website became popular briefly (the "slashdot" effect).

So then question then becomes, why by 100Mbps instead of 50Mbps? What you're buying is the possibility to do more than 50Mbps if the data source can provide it, or the data destination can accept it. The gamble you're taking is that this is likely to occur often enough that you'll benefit from spending the extra money over a 50Mbps service.

> If the network 
> upstream is congested, then I expect to get 
> (my__paid_for_bw)/(num_cust*avg__paid_for_bw) share of that. I don't want to 
> see that I'm paying for it, but another customer is getting more share 
> because they use a type of protocol, or service that is favoured by the network.
> 
> 
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