Blair's quite right. A simple Linux box can limit P2P traffic easily, and I'm sure even Telecom has a few Linux geeks running around in the development team. Still, a good number of the people on this list work for ISPs, and P2P users mean traffic, which means money. Can it be all bad? Unless of course what he's saying about it slowing down the rest of the network is true, but surely if you can charge people for the traffic they use, you merely need to upscale the network using the funds thus procured until it has enough capacity. Perhaps the problem preventing that is that most ISPs loose money on the P2P users by trying to squeeze them onto plans designed for ordinary consumers, when they should simply fling the pipe open and charge what they need to for it. If you're going to get someone else's movies for free, surely you'd be happy to pay a couple of bucks a movie to get them? - Erin -----Original Message----- From: Blair Harrison [mailto:nznog(a)jedi.school.nz] Sent: 28 July 2005 9:09 p.m. To: Richard Dingwall Cc: nznog(a)list.waikato.ac.nz Subject: Re: [nznog] [FW] Re: Interesting articles from Beehive Richard Dingwall wrote:
I would imagine that the low upstream limit could (partly) have been an effort to curb NZ P2P network traffic.
National P2P networks (DC, particularly) became very popular a few years ago, when unlimited 128KBit/128KBit DSL was available (i.e, download as fast as your connection goes - woohoo!).
More recently, as the downstream rate has significantly exceeded the upstream, your slow upload becomes someone else's slow download. Imagine the thrill of leeching at 16KByte/s on a 2MBit connection..!
- Richard
Quite a possibility. I did have one of our high speed customers leave Kazaa on over a few days.. managed to eat up about 75GB of traffic in those couple of days. They were uploading at a rate of about 1.8 gig an hour. I can see the merits of limiting upstream speed in the interests of conserving network capacity, but I don't see why regular non-p2p-using customers should be held back from experiencing true broadband speeds because of the actions of the leechers out there. There are methods available to limit the impact of such P2P applications and I believe at least one large ISP in NZ has implemented a layer 7 filtering system that can limit speeds at the application level. So the technology to limit the impact of P2P users to the network is available, should Telecom choose to use it. Why slow down the rest of the users who want to do really cool things like full screen multi-user videoconferencing and sending media files across town for processing because of the actions of the pesky leechers? Maybe because that would start to eat into their other more traditional 'higher value' revenue streams such as Frame Relay, Metro Ethernet and ATM? (which, incidentally, I can't even find on their website today) P2P may be a big reason and the most obvious, but I doubt it's the only reason. Cheers, Blair _______________________________________________ NZNOG mailing list NZNOG(a)list.waikato.ac.nz http://list.waikato.ac.nz/mailman/listinfo/nznog