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

[Mark Smith]

>________________________________
> From: Phillip Grasso <phillip.grasso at gmail.com>
>To: Joshua D'Alton <joshua at railgun.com.au> 
>Cc: "AusNOG at lists.ausnog.net" <ausnog at lists.ausnog.net> 
>Sent: Wednesday, 6 February 2013 11:15 PM
>Subject: Re: [AusNOG] News: Telstra to clamp down on peer-to-peer
> 
>
>Its their network and cost dynamic they should manage how they see fit; so long as they aren't blocking or going against net neutrality. 
>

I think one of the problems with the terms "net neutrality" is that it is a single term which can mean two things, and when it is used it sometimes isn't that clear what people are referring to. Is it :

- not touching the traffic at all, meaning not implementing QoS measures so that latency sensitive traffic isn't impacted by bulk throughput traffic (of which "P2P" is an example)

- blocking access to certain websites, and making them "pay to access", which is what you're describing below


I think "violating network neutrality" to prioritise latency sensitive traffic over bulk throughput traffic can be a reasonable thing to do if necessary, and this is what Telstra seem to be announcing they're going to be doing. The only other alternative is to buy enough bandwidth until the congestion disappears, or rather, is shifted to where it only impacts the person who is causing the congestion (i.e. putting the problem where it is caused) (I'm ignoring the options of making those customers go away, or not soliciting them in the first place). In a residential broadband network, that means buying so much bandwidth in the core of your network that the traffic bottle neck link is always the individual customers' access circuits.  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.

Given the dramatic increases in access circuit speed that the NBN is going to provide, I think these protocol aware traffic throttling devices are only going to become more common.

Perhaps one way to make the "P2P'ers" happy would be to use these DPI devices to mark this traffic as scavenger class, and then give it to them for free, or some how making it much much cheaper e.g. 1/10th of the price of non-scavenger class traffic, filling up the "white space" in the network when capacity is unused. ISPs would then be getting some form of value return on their normally unutilised link capacity.

The second form of "network neutrality" is, of course, abhorrent.

>
>The wider concern is how does this impact the rest of the industry; are they Cough 'signalling' cough..... (hmm e.g. one bank announces their interest rates increase; surprise  the others do exactly the same [ well not any more] ).  The concern is that we go back to dark ages of blocking potential innovations / opportunities for our local industry. Limiting its ability to flourish by creating possible large 'constraints' on the next generation products / services. NBN coming down the line, I'd hope that 'could' pave the way for 'lan' style speeds to homes and allowing the Australian industry to be incubators of the next Google's/Facebooks of the world.  
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>On Wed, Feb 6, 2013 at 9:59 PM, Joshua D'Alton <joshua at railgun.com.au> wrote:
>
>Yes you can be skypes ports won't be blocked, it will be the standard P2P ports like 6969 and so on.
>>
>>
>>On Wed, Feb 6, 2013 at 9:29 PM, Scott Howard <scott at doc.net.au> wrote:
>>
>>On Tue, Feb 5, 2013 at 10:45 PM, Julian DeMarchi <julian at jdcomputers.com.au> wrote:
>>>
>>>On 02/05/2013 09:02 PM, Joshua D'Alton wrote:
>>>>> And not to mention P2P torrent traffic is only about 10% of illegal
>>>>> traffic, compared to the 30%+ of file locker and 60%+ of usenet.
>>>>
>>>>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skype
>>>>
>>>>runs over p2p...
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>Parts of that page are very much out of date.  Although Skype is still technically peer-to-peer based, the "peers" (supernodes) that previously could be any other Skype users system, are now only Microsoft systems in Microsoft datacenters. So in essence, it's more of a client-server architecture than P2P (even though it still does use P2P-style concepts to find those servers)
>>>
>>>
>>>Even so, it's a moot point - Telstra aren't talking about throttling "P2P", they are talking about throttling specific P2P protocols - and dollars-to-donuts says Skype would not be one of those they are considering.
>>>
>>>  Scott
>>>
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>>>
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