A new challenge in P2P management; Streaming college football; Discovery and History top cable favorite list; Wi-fi and cell phones

Alarming Title: BitTorrent declares war on the Internet [Broadband Politics]

Earlier this week, Richard Bennett covered the newest development in peer-to-peer software development that involves the makers of a popular P2P application changing protocols in an obvious attempt to evade ISPs' network management practices. The makers of the uTorrent application - a BitTorrent P2P application, have changed from the TCP protocol to the UDP protocol for file transfers. Basically TCP is a protocol designed for bulk data transfers that aren't time sensitive. UDP is a time-sensitive protocol used for VoIP, video streaming and gaming. By switching to UDP, uTorrent essentially is turning the unwritten rules of the road for the Internet on their head.

Network operators have been largely successful in managing P2P traffic - which accounts for more than half of all Internet traffic even though only a small percentage of Internet users use P2P applications. Responsible network management keeps the broadband experience enjoyable for everyone - even P2P users. Due to the way P2P applications currently work, without responsible management practices, P2P transfers would quickly overwhelm network resources, degrading the broadband experience for everyone, including P2Pers.

But this new twist threatens to throw a wrench in responsible network management. According to Bennett, attempting to manage uTorrent P2P streams using the UDP implementation would threaten to disrupt other UDP application users - like VoIP users. Thus, it's not possible for ISPs to simply target P2P without disrupting other users. Here's Bennett's take on the Pandora's box that uTorrent has opened:

The internet evolved as a gentleman’s system in the comfortable confines of the ivory towers of academe, but now that it’s an essential part of daily life for more than a billion people, the time has come to get realistic about its management. Some of the people who use this system are spoiled children with no more concern for the greater good than junkies looking for their next fix. They can’t be allowed to spoil it for the rest of us, and the only practical means to prevent their doing so is to unleash effective management upon them.

While we've yet to see how uTorrent's use of the UDP protocol affects network traffic patterns, this development should be concerning to all broadband users.

I checked in with our network management experts and they are indeed concerned about this development. Using UDP for P2P forces ISP's to consider how to manage a whole new type of bandwidth-consuming P2P activities. The problem is that UDP was designed to transport time-sensitive packets like VoIP, streaming and online gaming.

But the real issue is, how much longer must we play this cat and mouse game? We will continue to manage our networks in order to deliver excellent service to all of our customers. If we must, we'll find a solution to this challenge. However, it also forces ISP operators again to ask the fundamental question about metering and charging for consumption. I know it's not a popular idea but I am becoming more convinced that the only fair way to manage heavy usage is to charge those who consume heavily. That's fair for us and it's fair to consumers by distributing the cost of providing service to users based on their consumption.

While we still have no plans on the drawing board to implement monthly limits and heavy-usage billing, we continue to watch the market tests being conducted by other ISP's. I will keep you informed of our thinking, but no changes are planned for the foreseeable future.

Watch Alabama vs. Florida in the SEC Championship Football Game Online [NewTeeVee] 

While most college football teams in Insight's footprint are still waiting to see how their post-season hopes are shaping up, there's one game coming up on Saturday that will likely determine one of the two teams playing for college football's national championship. It's the SEC Championship featuring the University of Florida Gators and the University of Alabama Crimson Tide. Now, while this is the type of game that HDTV was designed for, CBS (which is broadcasting the game) is giving viewers a second option for watching. CBS will webcast the SEC Championship live from CBSSports.com. CBS is also using the MediaFLO service to broadcast the stream to mobile phones. 

Discovery, History and ESPN Are Cable Favorites: Beta Research [Multichannel News] 

For the 15th consecutive year, Discovery Channel ranks as the number one favorite channel among a survey of cable television viewers. The annual Beta Research Cable Subscriber survey found that 30% of cable viewers named the channel among their top five favorite channels. Coming in a close second was the History Channel at 28% and ESPN at 22%. Beta Research compiled the survey after interviewing 700 cable subscribers between July 1 and September 6. Following the top three favorites in the survey were Food Network, Lifetime, HGTV, and TNT. What about you? What's your favorite cable channel, and why do you enjoy watching it?

The Handset of the Future Needs Wi-Fi [GigaOm]

Since 2003, nearly 250 separate mobile phone models have been equipped with Wi-Fi, allowing them to connect to a user's home broadband connection. Using the broadband connection, mobile phone users can surf the Internet much faster than their mobile provider's wireless connection speed. Some mobile phone models and providers allow users to run VoIP on their handset, using the broadband connection over Wi-Fi. The video attached to this article includes several other devices - digital cameras and portable gaming devices - that also have a Wi-Fi feature that increases the freedom of use of these devices.

Comments

[Ryan]

I've always found it a bit disturbing when P2P applications have been painted as the black horse. These applications aren't created with the intent to crash the internet or cause global nuclear war. They are created as a legitimite way to transfer large files with a limited amount of bandwidth.

Now limiting ones usage of bandwidth to something reasonable I am for. I currently have an ISP with a monthly bandwidth limit, but a limit that is quite generous.

[ARGO]

Love will always find a way.

[Steve Huff]

If people's bandwidth was to be limited, there would need to be a easy way to monitor what they have used so far.

[Chris Buechler]

To clarify UDP vs. TCP - the standard for UDP is dated August 1980, many years before VoIP, online gaming, etc. existed. The difference between the two is TCP provides reliable delivery and UDP does not. If a TCP packet is lost, the protocol knows that and it is retransmitted. A lost UDP packet is just gone. Applications that use UDP have to use other mechanisms for loss detection and correction, if such a thing is needed. The reason UDP is used for time sensitive traffic is because you don't want that traffic being retransmitted if it's lost - a VoIP packet that comes in a fraction of a second late because of a retransmission is completely useless. So to avoid wasting bandwidth for something that will be useless if it doesn't arrive the first time, you use a connectionless protocol like UDP.

TCP is different in that it ensures reliable delivery, so the applications using it do not need to be concerned with network reliability. Part of the functionality of TCP is the ability for a host to tell another host that the connection has been closed (a TCP RST (reset)). What "network management" of ISPs will commonly do is spoof TCP RST packets to their customers, looking like they came from the remote P2P endpoint. This is an effective way of limiting TCP communications because it provides a means of killing the active connection.

UDP makes doing that impossible, because there is no concept of a session with UDP, and no means of telling a host the connection is closed. It'll just keep sending traffic no matter what the ISP does. The ISP can drop it somewhere upstream in their network, but the effectiveness of that is much more limited.

ISPs will be fighting a losing battle until going to usage based billing. It's more fair for the customers (if done reasonably), and easier to handle for the ISP than trying to keep up with the changing traffic on the network.

[Deborah]

I have no clue wat this is. I need to upgread on my tech info,

[sineswiper]

The UDP thing is a non-issue. Chris described the TCP/UDP protocols pretty well above. It is NOT "made for VoIP", and as long as it's not using a dedicated VoIP port number (which it isn't), ISPs can choose to block it very easily. Also, I think that UDP has been an option for BitTorrents since the standard was around.

Also, I think doing this to try to prevent TCP RST packets is a bit of "too little, too late". Comcast has already dropped that model, due to the EFF lawsuit, and most MSOs have moved to a usage-based system in response to it, anyway.