[ NNSquad ] Re: P2P resource taking

[John Bartas <jbartas@speakeasy.net>]

Lauren Weinstein wrote:
> Rather than put a specific announced limit on the amount
> anyone can eat -- or raising prices -- the buffet owner watches
> people eat and when he personally believes someone has eaten too
> much, starts to harrass that person so that they won't keep going
> back for more food.
>   
   Mad magazine once had a cartoon where a surly restaurateur standing 
under an all-you-can eat" sign is yelling at a customer: "WHO SAYS 
THAT'S ALL YOU CAN EAT?  _I_ SAY IT'S ALL YOU  CAN EAT!".

   The trouble with the Buffet analogy is that folks ability to consume 
bandwidth rises very fast. Moore's law-like, I probably double the 
amount of bytes I download every two years. If people's eating capacity 
did this, no one in their right mind would open a buffet.

   But one thing Brett said a few days back has been bothering me: the 
ISP's ability to cache popular downloads was a huge money saver for ISPs 
like him. He mentioned getting a 30% cache hit rate on things like 
popular U-Tube videos, and even said this savings was the difference 
between profitability and losses. A sort of "cache cow", as it were. 
(sorry).

   Buffet or not, anything which raises the ISPs costs will one way or 
another be passed on to customers. So does Bit Torrent cost them serious 
money? I just ran a quick test, and BT used 7.24 Mb of bandwidth to load 
a 4.49 Mb file - about 62% efficient. That's not as efficient as FTP or 
HTTP (which run about 95%), but better than email attachments. If the BT 
on the Internet is replacing email attachments it's less traffic (and 
thus cheaper for ISPs); if it's replacing FTP or HTTP then it's only 
marginally more; e.g. if total Internet traffic is about 30% BT, the 
same files moved as downloads would represent 2/3 of that - BT only 
causes a 10% increase.

   So why are the ISPs upset about  BT? I'm guessing that it's because 
the ISPs think it's replacing HTTP downloads (they may be right), and 
they don't yet know how to cache it. This means there is a 10% net 
increase, PLUS the ISPs loose their 30% cache benefit - a 40% jump in 
costs. No wonder they're grumpy.

   Brett, is there any validity in this? Would a way to cache BT make 
it more palatable to ISPs?

-JB-