Category: Networks

The neutralists are touting a study by a German research center alleging Comcast blocking of BitTorrent at all hours of the day:

The Max Planck Institute has released a new survey of worldwide BitTorrent traffic finding that Comcast and Cox are the chief offenders for throttling traffic, and that they block at all hours of the day and night.

The study is here.

The following statement is attributed to Gigi B. Sohn, president and co-founder of Public Knowledge: “…These results lead us to three conclusions. First, the largest cable companies were doing more blocking than they have admitted to Congress or to the FCC. Second, other cable companies, and all telephone companies, can manage their networks without the need for blocking the traffic of customers. Finally, the fact that the blocking goes on all the time should tell the Commission that it needs to act soon to prevent the practice.”

Like a good engineer, I tried to measure my Comcast link using the German tool, and got this (click on the image to enlarge:)

This tells me that the test system has some problems, as the server has been busy for several hours. Feel free to try it yourself.

I know my BitTorrent isn’t blocked on my Comcast connection because I tested it in real-world conditions: yesterday, I successfully downloaded Fedora Linux version 9, over Comcast using BitTorrent, at full speed and with no interruptions. I then seeded it for several hours before shutting down Azureus (the Linux client for Vuze’s implementation of BitTorrent) and just restarted it an hour ago. So I’m now seeding without incident (click to enlarge:)

Pardon me if I’m skeptical of Ms. Sohn’s charges. It may be that the Germans have found something, but I can’t confirm it; perhaps we need a better instrument.

The Germans are apparently measuring TCP-level behavior, the thing that CMU professor Jon Peha and the infamous David Reed have measured and commented upon. The problem with this analysis is that Vuze’s BitTorrent uses 50 TCP streams by default, continually testing them for the 4 best and making these 4 active at any given time for any given piece of content. So while some of the 50 are torn down by Sandvine management systems, they’re quickly replaced and you retain 4 active upstream TCP connections most of the time.

The test that should be done would simply record the seeding rate of popular BitTorrent sessions like mine. When you do that – test the overall contribution to the swarm, not the 50 TCP connections individually – you find that BitTorrent works quite well on cable networks, contrary to the claims that the neutrality regulation advocates are making.

The German tool simply doesn’t produce meaningful data, and the advocacy groups touting it (Free Press is another) it are deliberately misleading the public.

UPDATE: Peter Svensson, Free Press’ personal reporter, has written the predictable story about the evils of the BitTorrent blocking uncovered by the alleged research organization in Germany. It’s predictable because Svensson ran the gamut of interviews with ISP critics, but didn’t talk to anyone who might shed light on the study. In fact, reducing the number of active TCP connections from a given BitTorrent user often increases his throughput, just like metering lights on freeway on-ramps increase freeway traffic speeds. This is only one of the critical points that these amateur network engineers don’t get.

There’s an interesting article on the Chronicle of Higher Education about the RIAA’s automated pirate catching program. It works just as I said it did at the USF Toll Roads Symposium, which is to say it doesn’t involve Deep Packet Inspection or a private police state, as Professor Tim Wu alleged.

Save the Internet, the front group for Free Press and Google’s main organ in the net neutrality campaign, never ceases to amaze me. They’ve got another bizarre piece of paranoia on their blog about the “closed” network that the Internet will soon become without some random piece of ill-formed regulation. Brett Glass questions them for some evidence, and they offer the following, which I’ve annotated with corrections.

“In October 2007, the Associated Press busted Comcast for blocking its users’ access to peer-to-peer file-sharing networks like BitTorrent and Gnutella. This fraudulent practice is a glaring violation of Net Neutrality.”

Nope. Comcast slows BitTorrent seeding, but doesn’t interfere with BitTorrent downloads. And it doesn’t interfere with Gnutella (a piracy tool) at all. No violation of any law.

“In September 2007, Verizon was caught banning pro-choice text messages. After a New York Times expose, the phone company reversed its policy, claiming it was a glitch.”

Nope. Verizon didn’t block a single text message. There was a 24-hour delay in issuing a shortcode to NARAL; shortcodes enable people to setup the equivalent of an e-mail list of SMS addresses. It had nothing to do with the Internet.

“In August 2007, AT&T censored a live webcast of a Pearl Jam concert just as lead singer Eddie Vedder criticized President Bush.”

This was a concert AT&T streamed from its own web site, not something Pearl Jam did on its own. This is no different from STI censoring comments on its blog, which it does all the time.

“In 2006, Time Warner’s AOL blocked all emails that mentioned http://www.dearaol.com — an advocacy campaign opposing the company’s pay-to-send e-mail scheme.”

This was simply a spam filter run amok. It happens.

“In 2005, Canada’s telephone giant Telus blocked customers from visiting a Web site sympathetic to the Telecommunications Workers Union during a contentious labor dispute.”

One word: CANADA.

“In 2004, North Carolina ISP Madison River blocked their DSL customers from using any rival Web-based phone service.”

No, they blocked VoIP, not a “web-based” anything. The FCC fined them for it, and they stopped, proving that existing law is sufficient.

“Shaw, a major Canadian cable, internet, and telephone service company, intentionally downgrades the “quality and reliability” of competing Internet-phone services that their customers might choose — driving customers to their own phone services not through better services, but by rigging the marketplace.”

Nope, Shaw sells (in CANADA) a service that prevents P2P degradation of VoIP. It’s a good service.

So the bottom line is: STI offers only exaggerations, half-truths, and outright lies. Everyone should oppose any campaign built on such a foundation.

John Conyers, husband of the hysterical Detroit councilwoman who was publicly smacked-down by an elementary school student recently for failing to think before speaking, has re-introduced the worst net neutrality bill ever:

The bill’s introduction comes on the heels of a hearing earlier this week about a Net neutrality proposal in a competing House panel, the Energy and Commerce Committee, which traditionally engaged in turf battles with the Judiciary Committee over certain matters.

The trouble with these anti-prioritization bills is their failure to align with the way the Internet actually works, as well as with the way it needs to work in the future. Prioritization makes it possible for one network to support many different uses, and that’s an increasingly important feature as we try to consolidate all of our communications networks onto one infrastructure. And prioritization is also how to get per-user fairness on a network that doesn’t have any by design.

In the realm of networks, then, prioritization is necessary to preserve American values. Now why doesn’t Conyers get that?

Here’s the text of the bill from the last session. This is the worst part:

(b) If a broadband network provider prioritizes or offers enhanced quality of service to data of a particular type, it must prioritize or offer enhanced quality of service to all data of that type (regardless of the origin or ownership of such data) without imposing a surcharge or other consideration for such prioritization or enhanced quality of service.

This sort of nonsense makes the Internet inhospitable for voice and video-conferencing services.

Does Conyers want to strangle the Internet because it has embarrassed his wife by making her theatrics viewable around the world? It wouldn’t be utterly paranoid to think so.

UPDATE: See George Ou’s blog for a nice summary of the arguments that net neutrality critics such as yours truly have made over the last couple of years on the subject of prioritization, including all of my favorite quotes.

If I were a dedicated blogger, I’d have a lot to write about today.

The Markey hearing yesterday featured an extremely bizarre reminiscence by the Chairman on the good old days when he championed the fight against the black rotary dial telephone. Unfortunately, that was 30 years ago and Markey hasn’t found a good fight since then, hence the dearth of sponsors for his silly Internet regulation bill.

Google and Comcast are in bed together, with both ponying up serious money to build a nation-wide WiMax network friendly to Google’s advertising.

And Comcast confirms they’re thinking about some usage-sensitive pricing that will at last penalize bandwidth hogs on their network. This is the plan that the big regulators have asked broadband carriers to consider, so be careful what you wish for.

Sen. Ron Wyden (D, Google) is threatening ISPs with loss of safe harbor if they don’t bend to the will of his sponsor. Don’t make too much of this, as it’s an Ars Technica story by a very biased reporter.

MAP and AT&T are holding a series of policy forums on net neutrality in Silicon Valley, where nobody cares about politics but the ladies. This should be interesting.

One conclusion we can draw from this sudden outburst of net neutrality stories: 2008 is an election year, and we’re at the phase where all the fringe causes are trotted out for their focus group effects to be measured. Net neutrality is being sized up for traction relative to corn-based ethanol, among other things.

C-Span has the feed, in Real format, check it out. I’ll have something to say later.

Not to be outdone by the Senate or the FCC, good ole chairman Markey of the House Telecom Subcommittee is holding a hearing on his personal favorite piece of Internet regulation this Tuesday:

The House Telecommunications & Internet Subcommittee will hold a hearing May 6 on the Internet Freedom Preservation Act (HR 5353), which could put some more teeth in the Federal Communications Commission’s guidelines on network nondiscrimination, the issue that prompted the network-neutrality and, more recently, network-management debates.

The bill was introduced by Subcommittee chairman Ed Markey (D-Mass.) in February in the wake of various complaints against cable operators and telephone companies for their network-management practices. The result has been more hearings, on the Hill and at the FCC, on an issue that dominated telecommunications debate in the last Congress.

Markey will hear testimony from some of the good guys and from the other people, so it should be a riot.
More on this later.

See George Ou’s new blog for the scoop on seeding Torrents from Comcast without running into Reset problems. George shows how to combine the traditional Torrent with a bit of Comcast web space to avoid running afoul of Comcast’s network management, and more importantly, without screwing over your neighbors:

As many of you reading this blog probably already know, Comcast has been disconnecting a certain percentage of TCP streams emanating from BitTorrent and other P2P (peer-to-peer) seeders. This effectively delays and degrades the ability of Comcast customers to seed files using P2P applications. For normal healthy Torrents that are distributed across multiple users and multiple ISPs, losing a few seeders intermittently isn’t too noticeable. But for rare Torrents or Torrents that have to originate from a Comcast broadband customer, this can pose some challenges. The rare Torrent becomes even less reliable than they already are while popular Torrents originating from Comcast’s broadband network take much longer to become healthy.

It’s all worked out and very thorough.

This is the full, uncut copy I submitted to the Mercury News. The published piece (In neutrality debate, carriers get blamed for Net’s weaknesses) has moved to the Merc’s archives, where you have to pay to retrieve it.

The Circus is Coming

The circus is coming to Palo Alto. The FCC’s network neutrality circus that is, the dramatic battle between two conflicting views of the Internet. In this tussle, the lovely but fanciful notion of a semi-divine and nearly perfect engine of democracy and community sets itself against the reality that today’s Internet is a warty gadget that lives on the edge of collapse in the best of times.

The FCC is investigating a group of complaints from the consumer protection lobby and a local startup, Vuze, Inc., against Silicon Valley’s cable company, Comcast. The complaints allege seven different kinds of villainy and seek enormous fines. The Commission has already held one public hearing, sponsored by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at the Harvard Law School, and holds the follow-up at Berkman Center alumnus Larry Lessig’s Stanford Center for Internet and Society.

Little good came from the Berkman hearing. Both panels were dominated by legal scholars, academics, and business interests dead set on securing free rides. Vuze was given its own time and the special privilege of a multi-media presentation, while ordinary witnesses encountered resistance from the Commission in simply showing Power Point slides, let alone short video clips (such as the Web Hog commercial from 2000, that I wanted to show.)

Chairman Martin made no secret of his sympathies. He badgered Comcast’s solitary witness after fairly swooning over Vuze and failed to display the slightest insight into the management challenges faced by broadband carriers. The Internet was designed for the polite society of network engineering professors and their graduate students, not our rough-and-tumble world of viruses, e-mail scams, and copyright theft, and it shows. Peer-to-peer applications, such as the open source version of BitTorrent used by Vuze, are designed to consume a disproportionate share of network bandwidth, and carriers have to limit this appetite to provide good service to mainstream users. Japan has learned that adding more capacity to the network doesn’t alleviate this problem: peer-to-peer consumes the largest share of the pipe, no matter how big it is.

Continue reading “First Draft FCC Piece”

The FCC commissioners are going to sit through seven hours of non-stop testimony tomorrow, a severe test of bladder and patience. Here’s the last-minute witness list:

12:45 p.m. Panel Discussion 1 – Network Management and Consumer Expectations

Introduction: Lawrence Lessig, C. Wendell and Edith M. Carlsmith Professor of Law, Stanford Law School

* Rick Carnes, President, Songwriters Guild of America
* Michele Combs, Christian Coalition of America
* George Ou, Independent Consultant and Former Network Engineer
* Jon Peha, Associate Director of the Center for Wireless and Broadband Networking; Professor, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and the Department of Engineering and Public Policy, Carnegie Mellon University
* Jean Prewitt, President and Chief Executive Officer, Independent Film & Television Alliance
* James P. Steyer, Chief Executive Officer and Founder, Common Sense Media
* Robb Topolski, Software Quality Engineer

2:15 p.m. Break

3:00 p.m. Panel Discussion 2 – Consumer Access to Emerging Internet Technologies and Applications

Introduction: Barbara van Schewick, Assistant Professor of Law, Stanford Law School

* Jason Devitt, Chief Executive Officer, SkyDeck
* Harold Feld, Senior Vice President, Media Access Project
* George S. Ford, Chief Economist Phoenix Center for Advanced Legal & Economic Public Policy Studies
* Brett Glass, Chief Executive Officer, Lariat.net
* Blake Krikorian, Chief Executive Officer, Sling Media
* Jon Peterson, Co-Director, Real-Time Applications and Infrastructure (RAI), Internet Engineering Task Force
* Gregory L. Rosston, Deputy Director, Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research
* Ben Scott, Policy Director, Free Press

The ratio is two rational people to four lunatics and one moderate on each panel, which is about what you’d expect. It’s progress over the last hearing, however, where the there was only one rational person and one moderately rational person on each panel.

The people who will have me throwing bricks are Michele Combs and Robb Topolski on the first panel, and Jason Devitt and Ben Scott on the second one. Combs won’t talk about the current issue, as she’s unaware that the debate has moved on since she signed up for net neutrality two years ago. We’re actually talking about managing bandwidth hogs today, a subtly different notion. Topolski, the unemployed software tester, will spend most of his time talking about himself, and probably pull some numbers out of the air, and Scott will be generally annoying.

The lineup is less overtly biased than the last one, but the Stanford venue and the introductions by the highly partisan Lessig and van Schewick will set the tone.

Network neutrality is a nostalgia trap, the longing for a return to an Internet that never was. The question is how long this circus can continue before the players are unmasked.