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UTorrent 2.0 To Elimininate The Need For ISP Throttling
- MikeCapone 17y agoIf this works out as planned and ISPs trust it enough to ease up on the throttling, seems like everybody will win.
- tomjen2 17y agoThey won't. All this does is remove a convenient excuse they have to throttle the bandwidth.
- mikedouglas 17y agoThe article is a little light on technical facts. The previous Bittorrent protocol used TCPs congestion control. Any reason to believe that their UDP+µTP replacement will outperform it? Edit: found the draft RFC: http://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0029.html http://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0029.html. Looks like the congestion control is window- and latency-based. | "The window size in the socket structure specifies the number of bytes we may have in flight (not acked) in total, on the connection." | "Each socket aims to never see more than 100 ms delay on the send link. If it does, it will throttle back."
- tybris 17y agoIt's very unlikely. I've seen a bit of the research in this area and all this stuff has been tried before with marginal success. Van Jacobson did a pretty good job.
- wmf 17y agoThe point of uTP is not to outperform TCP but to underperform it, using the network's idle bandwidth but not competing with regular TCP.
- nas 17y agoA magic number like 100 ms seems like a bad idea. Also, it's not clear to me what happens when minimum path latency is > 100 ms. Based on my superficial understanding, the uTP rate would go to (nearly) zero.
- wmf 17y agouTP spec: http://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0029.html http://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0029.html Previous uTP discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=877510 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=877510 A more general proposal for controlling Internet congestion: http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-moncaster-congestion-exposure-problem-01.html http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-moncaster-congestion-exposu...
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- tumult 17y agoI like the way they are spinning this. The new protocol, over UDP, is more difficult for ISPs to throttle without harming everything else on UDP (VoIP, games, streaming video, etc) that people regularly use (AFAIK.) That being said, they really did create the new protocol to have more elegant throttling. Morris: "It’s not QoS, but rather a congestion management mechanism implemented at the end-user’s layer 7 [Application]. This will stop uTP from eating up traffic bandwidth reserved for latency sensitive apps like VoIP and gaming. What’s more, the congestion management mechanism isn’t something we implemented as an afterthought – it’s the whole point of uTP." from http://torrentfreak.com/utorrent-2-0-to-elimininate-the-need-for-isp-throttling-091031/ http://torrentfreak.com/utorrent-2-0-to-elimininate-the-need... Looking forward to it, even though Comcast doesn't seem throttle my BitTorrent traffic at my location (North Bay area.)
- wmf 17y agoWho's spinning it that way? I didn't see that in the article. Also, DPI or traffic analysis can easily distinguish different UDP-based protocols.
- tumult 17y agoIs that really feasible for ISPs? I know you can traffic shape anything, but would they bother? I remember there was a pretty big ruckus when this was first announced, since many of the uT guys were talking about how it would be much harder to throttle.
- wmf 17y agoISPs can detect BitTorrent traffic today and I don't see why uTP would be any harder to detect than the classic BitTorrent protocol.
- smokinn 17y agoObviously you don't live in Canada. Over here, all the major ISPs do DPI to throttle torrents and about 6 months back the only way to not be throttled was to go with a smaller DSL ISP that leased lines from Bell. Then, one day, Bell turned around and started doing DPI on wholesale client lines and throttling their torrent traffic too. Some people raised a stink about it and it got to the CRTC for a decision and, in typical CRTC fashion, they issued a non-decision that essentially said DPI should only be used when necessary. Nothing changed. It's now impossible* to get an internet line that doesn't throttle torrents in most of Canada. * Not impossible to run torrents without being throttled though, you just have to set Azureus to its "RC5 encryption" settings and Bell won't be able to analyze your packets though this will break any private trackers that don't use https (most do).
- pierrefar 17y agoCan an ISP fake a network congestion that uTorrent detects and automatically slows itself? That would be the next logical evolutionary step for people hell-bent on stopping filesharing. That's ISPs, RIAA, etc...
- wmf 17y agoYep, it shouldn't be too difficult to delay uTP traffic and convince it to slow itself down. It's unlikely that ISPs would do that since getting caught would cause another neutrality smackdown from the FCC.
- mikedouglas 17y agoISPs can, but they can already traffic shape, so that isn't really a weakness. Malicious clients can't because the throttling is done per-socket.
- drkevorkian 17y agoISP's don't have any vested interest in stopping filesharing. In fact I'm sure many of them would love to have it since its a great reason to use their service.
- sorbus 17y agoThe ideal customer is someone who pays for a fast connection, and then uses it to check their email once a week. Lower bandwidth usage leads to more profit for the ISP, since they can get away with overselling their infrastructure. Thus, ISPs do have a vested interest - especially considering that many of them oversell their infrastructure. And if this leads to more people using torrents (because they won't be noticing as many issues, and this will lead to usage getting closer and closer to network capacity), it will cut into profits, and potentially require investments in new infrastructure.