The "Net Neutrality War" comes to Canada.

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Thu, Nov 02, 2006 at 10:53:58PM -0500, Pavel Zaitsev wrote:
> I think bit torrent is a bad case, in some ways, because it is really a
> stress tester, for consumer grade network. It is one thing leeching
> 1MB/s from some site, over TCP. It is another, having bazillion packets
> with wild variation in their parameters come to users. They would have
> to upgrade their routing equipment if they'd support torrents and they'd
> rather not do that. There IS now allowance of 100GB per user, so why not
> alleviate bt? because it is more then just bandwidth. Even reasonable
> home linksys routers have trouble dealing with couple of of BT
> downloads. Imagine with kind of load they have at CO.

Bittorrent is just traffic like anything else.  It is not a problem for
any sanely designed router.  Even my USR8054 wireless rouer has
absolutely no problem with a lot of active bittorrents.  The linksys
running vxworks apparently can have trouble even handling a couple of
http connections at once, so well that isn't bittorrent's fault, just
lousy design.

> Yes I agree BT has pushed possibility of catching someone into another
> level, and so it has pushed the network as well.

Every packet a router gets has a source and destination.  Route it based
on that.  Whether it is 100 packets from one stream, or 1 packet from
each of a 100 streams makes no difference at all.  The only time it
matters is if you start to do connection tracking, NAT, firewalling,
etc, which is not the business of the ISP.  Right now they seem to be
putting a lot of resources into inspecting traffic just so they can make
bittorrent slower.  It would take a lot less resources to do nothing.

> There are plenty of other interesting applications are at risk, if we
> aren't careful, all we have open to the internet is port 80 and friends.
> Technically they should loose their common carrier status, which they
> really don't want to do.

You would think they don't want to.  Who knows.  They can always spend
more money on lobying.  Often seems to work.

--
Len Sorensen
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