[130097] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Online games stealing your bandwidth
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jack Bates)
Tue Sep 28 09:59:57 2010
Date: Tue, 28 Sep 2010 08:58:10 -0500
From: Jack Bates <jbates@brightok.net>
To: Warren Bailey <wbailey@gci.com>
In-Reply-To: <E014299C-38B2-4A72-8BC0-68F913EF0CAB@gci.com>
Cc: NANOG <nanog@merit.edu>
Errors-To: nanog-bounces+nanog.discuss=bloom-picayune.mit.edu@nanog.org
On 9/27/2010 7:35 PM, Warren Bailey wrote:
> Can someone name an ISP that encourages P2P traffic?? ;)
>
A proper ISP doesn't encourage any type of traffic. We're indifferent.
Of course, we'll be happy to mention the benefits and draw backs of
using various protocols on the Internet. Demand wise, video streaming to
point and click boxes will load the network far more than p2p ever has;
granted, in the opposite direction of the normal p2p complaint.
My, and my company's, biggest complaint is the lack of improvement on
these protocols to play more friendly with customer's other traffic. It
is not so much the effects of it on my network, as much as how it
effects my customer's unshared link. The "give me everything" tactic,
especially on outbound traffic, saturates the link, which in turn lowers
the customer's other traffic. Am I the only one who likes to stream
video while running bittorrent, surfing the web, checking my email, and
playing some online game all at the same time?
I'm not going to rag on bittorrent, though. I do have adjustments in my
clients to cap the upstream/downstream to allow my other traffic
through. Many clients and protocols don't have this ability, though.
Some purposefully hide themselves and what they are doing. The only
indication is the fact that the "Internet is slow." The people who make
this software should sit in a call center troubleshooting why "The
Internet is slow!" when various software products are bandwidth hogs
(and sometimes are hidden from the customer completely). We, of course,
detect the link saturation, but there is no indicator for us to help the
customer figure out what they need to disable.
Jack
