There is nothing else to be said.

if users want to have $30/month or $40/month broadband, they won’t be able to engage in that sort of massive downloading. The bandwidth costs too much at wholesale, let alone retail.

Google “time warner packet loss” here ( http://www.google.com/#hl=en&q=time+warner+packet+loss&btnG=Google+Search&fp=Q9hKAq0-8-0 ) which means they do not have enough local bandwidth andbackhaul infrastructure to handle their existing customer bandwidth. It has been noted that in many areas, they have severe packet loss with their existing infrastructure. Does’t make anysense to hand the P2P bandwidth hogs a bigger pipe to saturate the upstream even worse, and impact other customers even worse.

Oversubscription on upstream is typically between 10:1 to 500:1, so there isn’t enough bandwidth to give the current installed base access at current speeds that isn’t oversubscribed. AsI noted in a earlier article on this same subject, look at how little actual backbone bandwidth there is here ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_Exchange_Points_by_size ). I suggested Stacy really needs to research this, and write a fair and balanced piece on why unlimited bandwidth at a low flat rate isn’t a good idea today. That piece should outline infrastructure upgrades discussed or planned in the next 5-10 years that will improve this problem.

Start with Gigabits/sec available at the IXP’s for the major metro areas, divide it by two (what comes in, has to go out), and then divide that by the number of homes and businesses in the metro area (rough fair share per drop for internet bandwidth). As a ball park, 80gbps divided by 2 divided by 3 million is 1.3kbps per household drop. That is five to six orders of magnitude away from having the bandwidth for 160mbps per subscriber without oversubscription.

IXP’s in Japan are built out for 248gbps, while the exchange points in the USA are built out for a small fraction of that. Japan is relatively small, with very dense cities and not much long haul fibre required. The USA is relatively huge, with orders of magnitude more long haul fibre required. You can go short distances on fibre at very high speeds. Long distances require cutting the speed to maintain the same power per bit. Faster is more expensive for long hauls.

Demanding more unlimited local bandwidth so you can run your P2P server, or try to watch HD movies in realtime, doesn’t mean that bandwidth exists for very many people to outside the metro area.

Sure, some of this can be handled by CDN’s located in the metro area, but not every ISP has a CDN inside their network. CDN’s do not help with P2P.

Sure, there is some additional bandwidth that goes around all the IXP’s, inside major backbone networks. And there are some private peering locations. Niether of these make up the several orders of magnitude we are short in backhaul bandwidth to provide unlimited flaterate customer bandwidth to support P2P as a universal solution.

If you are aware of any IXP bandwidth differences in the wiki IXP list, please update them.

If you are a P2P user, you may be creating inside your home network. Set P2P clients to use a single session, and set the bandwidth back to 10% to 25% of your internet connection.

That will reduce the congestion problems you see, and your neighbours see from you. Talk with others to do the same thing. P2P can be left running for days to download lots of data at relatively low speeds. The shame, is that the authors of most P2P systems don’t care about your neighbours internet performance, they are just interested in looking like their product is blazing fast, and making sure there are lots of blazing fast server connections.

This is something like a group of idiots terrorizing a peaceful towns park with a bunch of ATV’s, scaring the kids and families just trying to have a nice quite sunday picnic. Sure the ATV owners might be paying the same taxes, but that doesn’t give them the right to run everyone else off that pay the same taxes. This is the same as few P2P users, demanding it’s their right to saturate a local ISP network, and running off all the customers that are really paying the majority of the costs.

find a copy of Matt’s Trace Route (AKA mtr on linux, and similar names on MS Win ports).

It’s an excellent diagnostic that will show you where the packet loss, or connection drop out is.

Since it can be left running for long periods, showing just summary data, it’s useful to document high intermittent packet loss in network segments.

Typical packet loss for a functioning network with over subscription should be in the 0.1% to a few percent as an exception over a several day period. Consistent packet loss of a few percent or more a sign of line problems, or severe congestion, for local hops, like what most P2P applications create.

Packet loss in the several percent range past the local distribution, is from saturated routers in the back haul or long haul network.

You can also use linux ping in logging mode to document time of day related losses once mtr allows you to isolate where the problem is. In Linux land that is:

ping -i 15 target.router | while read i; do echo `date` $i; done

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If you are civic minded, as the ISP what the over subscription ratio is for their network, and set the peer to peer speed at one half your nominal bandwidth divided by the over subscription ratio your network was designed to. That should be pretty close to your fair share, without causing packet loss that destroys the internet experience for your friends and neighbours sharing your local ISP’s network.

Have a talk with greedy users about fair share, specifically stating it’s not fair for one user paying $30/mo to expect to make 29 other users paying the same $30/mo to experience shitty service at best, with high packet loss and high latiency/lag.

The internet, and the portion of the internet that your ISP provides, is something like a public park. it’s not fair for idoit’s to use a local family,kids park design for families to picknic, as an ATV race course. People that need sustained high rate services, should purchase a service plan specifically designed for that use, that has little or no over subscription.

If you have an over subscribed service plan, that you can not get your fair share from, because it’s slow and has high packet loss, then you need to call your ISP, complain about the slowness, and demand that they upgrade the network to meet the expected service levels, or take action against those users that are stealing your fair share by running disruptive applications like P2P and high rate streaming UDP services that do not share well (like first party shooter games, and some streaming video services).

When you are shopping for games and media delivery services, be responsible, and look for those that flow control well, and use TCP connections, rather than high rate non-flow controlled UDP connections.