Re: FW: ISPs slowing P2P traffic...
Joe Greco wrote: I have no idea what the networking equivalent of thirty-seven half-eaten bags of Cheetos is, can't even begin to imagine what the virtual equivalent of my couch is, etc. Your metaphor doesn't really make any sense to me, sorry. There isn't one. The "fat man" metaphor was getting increasingly silly, I just wanted to get it over with. Interestingly enough, we do have a pizza-and-play place a mile or two from the house, you pay one fee to get in, then quarters (or cards or whatever) to play games - but they have repeatedly answered that they are absolutely and positively fine with you coming in for lunch, and staying through supper. And we have a "discount" card, which they used to give out to local businesspeople for "business lunches", on top of it. That's not the best metaphor either, because they're making money off the games, not the buffet. (Seriously, visit one of 'em, the food isn't very good, and clearly isn't the real draw.) I suppose you could market Internet connectivity this way - unlimited access to HTTP and POP3, and ten free SMTP transactions per month, then you pay extra for each protocol. That'd be an awfully tough sell, though. As long as you fairly disclose to your end-users what limitations and restrictions exist on your network, I don't see the problem. You've set out a qualification that generally doesn't exist. I can only speak for my network, of course. Mine is a small WISP, and we have the same basic policy as Amplex, from whence this thread originated. Our contracts have relatively clear and large (at least by the standards of a contract) "no p2p" disclaimers, in addition to the standard "no traffic that causes network problems" clause that many of us have. The installers are trained to explicitly mention this, along with other no-brainer clauses like "don't spam." When we're setting up software on their computers (like their email client), we'll look for obvious signs of trouble ahead. If a customer already has a bunch of p2p software installed, we'll let them know they can't use it, under pain of "find a new ISP." We don't tell our customers they can have unlimited access to do whatever the heck they want. The technical distinctions only matter to a few customers, and they're generally the problem customers that we don't want anyway. To try to make this slightly more relevant, is it a good idea, either technically or legally, to mandate some sort of standard for this? I'm thinking something like the "Nutrition Facts" information that appears on most packaged foods in the States, that ISPs put on their Web sites and advertisements. I'm willing to disclose that we block certain ports for our end-users unless they request otherwise, and that we rate-limit certain types of traffic. I can see this sort of thing getting confusing and messy for everyone, with little or no benefit to anyone. Thoughts? David Smith MVN.net
Re: FW: ISPs slowing P2P traffic...
Joe Greco wrote: Time to stop selling the "always on" connections, then, I guess, because it is "always on" - not P2P - which is the fat man never leaving. P2P is merely the fat man eating a lot while he's there. As long as we're keeping up this metaphor, P2P is the fat man who says he's gonna get a job real soon but dude life is just SO HARD and crashes on your couch for three weeks until eventually you threaten to get the cops involved because he won't leave. Then you have to clean up thirty-seven half-eaten bags of Cheetos. Every network has limitations, and I don't think I've ever seen a network that makes every single end-user happy with everything all the time. You could pipe 100Mbps full-duplex to everyone's door, and someone would still complain because they don't have gigabit access to lemonparty. Whether those are limitations of the technology you chose, limitations in your budget, policy restrictions, whatever. As long as you fairly disclose to your end-users what limitations and restrictions exist on your network, I don't see the problem. David Smith MVN.net
Re: ISPs slowing P2P traffic...
>It may. Some of those other things will, too. I picked 1) and 2) as >examples where things could actually get busy for long stretches of >time. The wireless ISP business is a bit of a special case in this regard, where P2P traffic is especially nasty. If I have ten customers uploading to a Web site (some photo sharing site, or Web-based email, say), each of whom is maxing out their connection, that's not a problem. If I have one customer running Limewire or Kazaa or whatever P2P software all the cool kids are running these days, even if he's rate-limited himself to half his connection's maximum upload speec, that often IS a problem. It's not the bandwidth, it's the number of packets being sent out. One customer, talking to twenty or fifty remote hosts at a time, can "kill" a wireless access point in some instances. All those little tiny packets tie up the AP's radio time, and the other nine customers call and complain. One customer just downloading stuff, disabling all the upload features in their P2P client of choice, often causes exactly the same problem, as the kids tend to queue up 17 CDs worth of music then leave it running for a week. The software tries its darnedest to find each of those hundreds of different files, downloading little pieces of each of 'em from multiple servers. We go out of our way to explain to every customer that P2P software isn't permitted on our network, and when we see it, we shut the customer off until that software is removed. It's not ideal, but given the limitations of wireless technology, it's a necessary compromise. I still have a job, so we must have a few customers who are alright with this limitation on their broadband service. There's more to bandwidth than just bandwidth. David Smith MVN.net
Re: Why do some ISP's have bandwidth quotas?
Hex Star wrote: Why is it that the US has ISP's with either no quotas or obscenely high ones while countries like Australia have ISP's with ~12gb quotas? Is there some kind of added cost running a non US ISP? There are more than a few US ISPs that have bandwidth quotas, mostly in the last-mile fixed-wireless space. I imagine the cost of backhauling traffic a few thousand miles in underseas cables would add to the cost of running an ISP in, say, Australia, especially since many sites the end-users will want to see are still hosted in the US. David Smith MVN.net
Re: bandwidth for PyCon 08 in Chicago
On Tue, August 7, 2007 6:48 pm, Carl Karsten wrote: > 1. bandwidth for PyCon, and no one else. This is the easiest, but most > costly. > (20k ish total) That seems awfully high for a short-term hookup, though from the rest of the email I'm guessing you're mainly looking at wireline hookups. Have you shopped around for a short-term wireless link? If you can get on the roof of the hotel, and the roof of someone else nearby that has more bandwidth, and point a pair of radios at each other, that's probably do-able for far less than 20k. In Chicago, the folks at CW Lab (www.cwlab.com) may be able to get you started. They're more of a consulting firm now, from the looks of their Web site, but they've done things like this before, and they're local to Chicago; if they can't help they probably know someone who can. David Smith MVN.net
Re: ISP CALEA compliance
Nikos Mouat wrote: > I have interpretted CALEA to apply only to providers of VOICE service, > be it VOIP or traditional, however I was told this morning point blank > by the FCC that CALEA most definitely applies to all ISPs that provide > internet access at speeds over 200k. That, and the definition of ISP, are still a bit fuzzy... [EMAIL PROTECTED], for instance, has had a LOT of chatter about that, but WISPA's staff attorney believes that small wireless ISPs are required to be CALEA-compliant. (WISPA is a trade association for wireless ISPs.) If small ISPs have to be compliant, it's probably safe to assume big ISPs are too. :) http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/ is the list archive - there's a lot of noise in there, but a fair amount of signal (start in February 2007 or so, and work your way up). There's also forms you're apparently supposed to fill out (FCC Form 445, and a CALEA compliance plan due next week). As always your friendly attorney knows better than I do. David Smith MVN.net
Re: TCP receive window set to 0; DoS or not?
Christopher L. Morrow wrote: > I see this on web, ftp, rsync as well... so perhaps it's just impolite > people? :) Who knows. My DNS servers get a few of those per day. David Smith MVN.net
(newbie) BGP For Dummies?
"Hi, long-time listener, first-time caller..." Can anyone recommend a good forum for BGP questions? I've got my copy of the O'Reilly book handy, but having never really worked with BGP before, I find it's not really the best novice-level work. (Or, if questions about weird inter-AS routing scenarios are on-topic here, I'd be glad to bounce my problems around on NANOG.) Thanks! David Smith MVN.net
