

Bittorrent declares war on VoIP, gamers - jmackinn
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/12/01/richard_bennett_utorrent_udp/

======
quantumhobbit
The author here comes across as too biased and passionate to be taken
seriously. I understand that he wants to hype up his story to draw in readers
but his "The sky is falling" attitude obscures any of the real issues and
considerations involved.

Bittorrent, legal issues aside, is being throttled by many ISPs. It is only
natural for bittorrent to fight back. There will be casualties, but I can't
see ISPs throttling all UDP traffic, breaking VoIP. The internet won't break
in some “Congestion Collapse”.

I also disagree that P2P applications would be indistinguishable from VoIP
without deep packet inspection as the author suggested. The network usage
statistics for VoIP and P2P must look quite different and should be easily
distinguished.

~~~
noonespecial
Seriously. Its a 5 liner in a tc script on any linux box to make udp streams
behave nice and share the bandwidth without driving up each others latency.

I think ISP's can figure it out. The fact that many isp's are also telcos
presents a far greater threat to voip than bittorrent, tcp, upd or otherwise.

------
staunch
Gaming and VoIP both tend to be very low bandwidth. Seems like it'd be very
easy to throttle all UDP traffic down without hurting either of them. Latency
is way more important for them than bandwidth.

------
wmf
Followup: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=382152>

------
Xichekolas
Why the sky is in fact NOT falling:
<http://forum.utorrent.com/viewtopic.php?pid=379206#p379206>

------
ComputerGuru
Flagged as FUD.

Seriously, read the other links... the whole thing is just flamebait.

------
ROFISH
Isn't UDP, by definition, unstable packets that could be dropped at anytime?

~~~
lvecsey
Any packet can be dropped at any time, for TCP or UDP. So the protocol stack
or application needs to deal with it and re-send, using a backoff policy.

Its worth looking at IM2000 and the pertinent questions that D. J. Bernstein
asks about a future mail infrastructure.

<http://cr.yp.to/im2000.html>

