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.
... JG
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
As long as we're keeping up this metaphor, P2P is the fat man who says
Guys, according to wikipedia over 70 million people fileshare
That's not the fat man, that's a significant portion of the market.
Demand is changing, meet the new needs or die at the hands of your
customers. It's not like you have a choice.
The equipment makers need to recognize that it's no longer a one size fits
all world (where download is the most critical) but instead that the
hardware needs to adjust the available bandwidth to accomodate the direction
data is flowing at that particular moment. Hopefully some of them monitor
this list and are getting ideas for the next generation of equipment.
George Roettger
Netlink Services
Geo. wrote:
Guys, according to wikipedia over 70 million people fileshare
File sharing - WikipediaThat's not the fat man, that's a significant portion of the market.
Demand is changing, meet the new needs or die at the hands of your
customers. It's not like you have a choice.
A few years ago I worked in a startup WISP environment - a coop that had a total of 5 T1s across three PoPs servicing some 100+ households over a 50 sq mile area.
We had a customer share his 25GB music collection through gnutella, and then leave for a weekend vacation skiing. Meanwhile, other neighboring members who were actually still at home and attempting to use the network interactively, suffered until rate limiting was put into place. Contracts aside, given this is a coop, who has more right to use the bandwidth, at an ethical level?
The fact is that for shared content, as in customer-seeded torrents or shared gnutella files, demand scales at what *appears* to be an exponential rate in proportion to the amount of shared content. Please explain how a rural WISP can buy a pipe that will scale with that type of demand, and how they can recover the associated costs. Because in my experience, adding new upstream capacity often just exacerbates the overall problem, especially for nodes with strong signals to the PoP.
Note, this was in a rural area where the other available Internet options are:
1) satellite - expensive and wretched latency for the telecommuting crowd trying to get to their company resources over VPN
2) dialup - also poor latency that, when combined with VPN overhead is nearly useless for the majority of telecommuters
3) ISDN - $150-200 / month for better latency and moderately better throughput. I used a combination of satellite and ISDN prior to inception of the Coop to meet both low-latency needs for shell access and satellite for downloading large files. Then I looked at the combined costs (I didn't pay the ISDN) and realized I could almost be on a T1.
4) Fractional T1 or FR - $400-600+ / month
The only economically feasible way of providing broadband residential services are shared T1 distributed by wifi. There's no cable, no DSL, no FIOS. And there's zero likelihood, given distribution density and engineering challenges, that any of those offerings will ever make it up there.
At the time we started, there were three other WISPs in the same county competing with each other, all created in the same year, that had to contend with the P2P issues, as well as radio interference (I knew most of the parties and promoted the idea of "mutally assured destruction" if we didn't work out a channel schema, fortunately coverages didn't overlap in too many places).
Bandwidth may be commodified if you live in a major metropolitan area, but I don't see the rural WISPs having any other economically feasible options apart from QoS to control the P2P issues.
When I was on the BoD of the Coop, I promoted education as the primary method to change user P2P behavior, backed up by filters and QoS as needed. Others wanted Packet-shaper ($$$) automatic enforcement, but I felt that over time the P2P would migrate to encryption as a result of shaping (this back in ~ 2003 and it seemed like it was just around the corner, so perhaps I'm wrong on this).
As an alternative to education and QoS, I felt that metering and billing off of bandwidth used per-house was a good approach that would have it's own educational value. When bandwidth isn't actually a commodity, suddenly torrent is no longer the best means to acquire new "content" (and from my experience I can tell you, yes the customers were mostly downloading music and videos they didn't own).
P2P is IMHO a perfect example of the "tragedy of the commons". Too many users feel like "If I don't grab as much for myself as I can, some other fool is going to do the same thing and then I'll be left out". That mentality itself is also a form of mutually assured destruction in its own right.
So, to answer the "meet the new needs or die" poster I say - show me one other viable option for the rural WISP that doesn't involve QoS or filters and still makes a profit. Because I know a lot of WISPs who would love a better solution.
Finally: most of the people posting on this list aren't the ones writing the marketing or developing the actual product offerings. So all the people responding that "you shouldn't be selling unlimited if you can't afford to provide it" need to back off for a minute and recognize this simple reality. If engineers were running the sales and marketing I'm sure the world would be just fine 
David E. Smith wrote:
[...]
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
Well said. I'm not sure what the future holds, but there is an example
in the marketplace already: satellite broadband.
Because bandwidth to/from a transponder is severely limited (even with
the newer tech), they have the "buffet" problem even worse.
So, a long time ago they went to a point-blank limitation known as "fair
access policy". See
http://my.wildblue.net/download/legal/public/fair_access_policy_08012007.pdf
as an example. Essentially, go as fast as you want until your transfer
limit is reached; then run at dialup speeds until your cap clears. To
your typical end user, nothing is noticed. Heavy users do notice.
A few lessons learned from that industry:
1. when they switched existing customers to it, the customers went
ballistic and hated it. (even the ones not really affected by it.) I
don't blame them as that was not really what they were thinking when
they invested in the equipment. (Ah, customer expectations...)
2. whenever they "adjust" the policy further, the customers still hate
it; even if the fine print says they can change it. New customers, who
always had FAP, don't hate it as much.
3. it actually does work. They alleviate billing fears by not charging
extra or shutting off service, instead they throttle bandwidth. Most of
them have graphs the customer can get to and see. They don't largely
don't discriminate on type of traffic (i.e. P2P vs. other).
I doubt we see this in the cable or dsl world for a while, but I
wouldn't be surprised if the industry is pushed that way. There is a
definite downside, but it actually is technically fair.
Just my opinion.
John