

Fixing the unfairness of TCP congestion control - muriithi
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=1078

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tlrobinson
What a bunch of FUD. Granted there are lots of products that abuse TCP/IP,
even Cloudant, the Y Combinator funded home router startup
<http://www.crunchbase.com/company/cloudant>

But P2P technologies like BitTorrent don't use multiple connections to
maximize bandwidth to a single server, they use multiple connections to
distribute the load across many other hosts.

 _They continue to espouse the virtues of P2P applications as “efficient” but
what they don’t tell us is that “efficient” means efficiency in bandwidth
hogging._

If I want to download a 500MB movie, I _NEED_ to use 500MB of bandwidth one
way or another. The demand is there, the only question is how will it be met.

P2P networks _are_ incredibly efficient in that they distribute the load
across many many hosts and networks. Just because they use lots of bandwidth
doesn't mean they're inefficient. Try distributing a popular torrent from a
single server and watch it melt before your eyes.

 _They also don’t tell us that P2P is efficient at offloading the costs of
video distribution to someone else._

Yeah, that someone else is me and all the other BitTorrent peers who are
_paying_ our ISPs for access to the internet.

 _The diagram below shows what happens when an application like BitTorrent
uses the network continuously._

That has much more to do with the BitTorrent protocol than the TCP/IP
protocols. It takes time for a host to discover other peers and ramp up, etc.
Additionally, comparing BitTorrent to email, and even Skype, is a ridiculous
comparison.

If it's really such a big problem, ISPs should shape traffic across the board,
fairly. AND disclose to their customers what they're really paying for. But
they certainly shouldn't filter or limit specific types of traffic.

~~~
bayareaguy
It's not fud. People who share a single line (i.e. homes, small offices,
wireless coffee shops) in the presence of _other people's_ torrent clients
often report diminished responsiveness if there isn't some traffic shaping set
up.

~~~
tlrobinson
I believe that, but it's the internet as a whole that we should be concerned
with, not individual connections.

