RE Kushner List Account wrote: > The question is, what are you actually paying for as a customer? To > discriminate against bits just because they actually use what they are > paying for is beyond me. > > At least a bandwidth cap is easier to understand. You get what you pay for.
Speaking as a former sysadmin of an ISP, I would say that the issue is the following: 1) There is a high correlation of network-disrupting levels of traffic and BitTorrent; 2) Unlike some "bursty" downloads (like your CentOS ISO from an FTP server), BitTorrent traffic has the tendency to be sustained at higher levels for longer periods since the architecture presumes that everyone's a client and everyone's a server and fragments are always moving around. This is what tends to upset oversubscription assumptions that are otherwise functional, and are the only way that the ISP can possibly afford to give you the bandwidth for the price of consumer-grade broadband. I would tend to agree with you that discriminating against types of services and/or traffic through rate-limiting buckets and deep packet inspection is worse than a blanket bandwidth cap. However, you need to keep in mind the other side of the coin; were it not for Torrent, there would not be a need for traffic policing (in the overwhelming preponderance of cases) either way, so it's considered unfair to punish everyone with a bandwidth cap on everything when in reality, it's not a problem if their applications *occasionally* burst to very high levels of throughput. This is different from using up a lot of bandwidth continuously. My ISP doesn't care if I chug down a CentOS ISO tonight at close to my DSL line rate. But if I downloaded them all day long, all day, every day, there would be a problem, but the way to solve that problem isn't by taking away others' freedom to download a CentOS ISO when they feel like it in principle. -- Alex Balashov Evariste Systems Web : http://www.evaristesys.com/ Tel : (+1) (678) 954-0670 Direct : (+1) (678) 954-0671 Mobile : (+1) (706) 338-8599 _______________________________________________ -- Bandwidth and Colocation Provided by http://www.api-digital.com -- asterisk-users mailing list To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users