
Indian ISPs Speed Up BitTorrent by ‘Peering’ with a Torrent Site - chetangole
https://torrentfreak.com/indian-isps-speed-bittorrent-peering-torrent-site-160828/
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newscracker
> From a networking perspective most Internet providers are generally not very
> happy with BitTorrent users.

> These users place a heavy load on the network and can reduce the performance
> experienced by other subscribers. In addition, the huge amount of data
> transferred outside the ISPs’ own networks is also very costly.

This could be re-stated with "BitTorrent" replaced with "video" and would
still have the same meaning. It seems like ISPs are just acting like insurance
companies and depend on the average use being low. It's as if they want to
give the users less than what the users pay for instead of improving their
networks. I get that managing load, utilization (and maximum demand) over time
is not easy, but I doubt if the ISPs have a good enough capacity in the first
place considering that many users do consume a lot of video content (which
requires higher bandwidth and uses more of the capacity).

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runeks
I believe the issue is with the distribution of bandwidth between many TCP
connections. The problem is that each TCP connection is treated with equal
priority, meaning that a web page loading through a single TCP connection
competes on equal footing with each of your 100 BitTorrent TCP connections,
all running at a relatively low speed per connection. If this activity
saturates your Internet connection, and you then try to load a web page, the
web page TCP connection attempt will be placed in the back of the large queue
that has accumulated in your router, and will take 20 seconds to load.

I also believe the asynchronous configuration, eg. 10/2 mbit rather than 5/5
mbit, of most residential Internet connections exacerbates the problem. One
thing would be getting a connection attempt out on a 5/5 mbit connection, but
you're constantly sending out huge amounts of ACKs of very small TCP packets
already (due to BitTorrent), and your outgoing bandwidth is much smaller than
your incoming.

~~~
throwaway7767
It's really curious, because even when ISPs have QoS setups they can't seem to
guarantee fairness. It's always per-connection instead of per-customer-IP.

My ISP for example seems to classify traffic and prioritise based that
(HTTP(s) ports get more bandwidth than others up to the first couple of MB,
BitTorrent goes in a low-priority group, etc). Yet I can still eat up all the
bandwidth I want by just using multiple connections.

I would think it would be even easier to do this on the customer-IP level?
Average over some time span, and customers who haven't used their fair
allotment of the bandwidth for that time period get priority over others, and
the guy with 2000 bittorrent connections has the same claim to the bandwidth
as grandma loading her online banking in the browser through one TCP stream.

Are there some issues I'm missing that make this harder than it seems?

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sundarurfriend
That's a (technologically) brilliant solution, counter to the usual stuff they
do antagonizing and annoying users. Hope this article doesn't end up killing
Torbox, and hope more of the new players among Indian ISPs (like ACT, You)
take this route too; BSNL is of course never going to do it, and Airtel doing
it would probably put Torbox into enough scrutiny to kill it, so I hope they
don't!

The article keeps mentioning peers in "local network" repeatedly - as an
eternal beginner in the networking world, I wonder what exactly they mean.
It's obviously not creating LANs willy-nilly (...right?), so what level do
they consider "local" here?

~~~
mrkgnao
Probably other people served by the ISP in, say, the same city?

~~~
icebraining
I'd say so. In Portugal, back when we had caps with different amounts for
international vs national vs same-isp traffic, a group made a fork of Emule
that could filter the peers based on which group their IP belonged to.

The result (for popular files) was that somebody would download it
internationally, then it'd spread nationally and then inside each ISP in
stages. It actually worked pretty well.

~~~
Projects211
We actually had roughly the same set up in college, using DC++ instead of
Emule. Connections within the university weren't limited, but connections
outside were. So one person would download it at limited speeds, then spread
it around at unlimited speeds.

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mani04
Quoted from article: "The question is, however, how long this will last..."

I hope people do not link this to promotion of piracy straightaway. I hope
there are also enough legal torrent websites that come up, so that the
government does not see torrents as illegal and start acting against it.

It is only the content that makes a torrent legal or illegal. The concept of
torrent is fantastic.

~~~
DarkLinkXXXX
What piracy? I'm not a pirate. I'm just downloading multiple terabytes of
Linux ISO's each month.

~~~
mani04
Ofcourse you are not a pirate :)

But the article ends with a note on piracy, which is irrelevant in this
context. Also most people think that torrent means piracy, which is wrong.

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wscott
American ISPs could do this, it would just be marketed differently.

Just remove all speed restrictions to traffic within their own network.

If only traffic leaving your network is a problem for scaling, then don't
restrict internal traffic. The P2P clients would naturally favor those local
faster peers, and if enough larger ISPs did this, then the P2P clients would
be explicitly changed to favor local peers.

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drzaiusapelord
The problem is my speed limit is determined by my modem edge device's sync.
And that's determined by my snr from the node. I don't think its possible to
open up more speed for me if I'm already on the highest tier of the service. I
guess for people who aren't, this is an option. Its not like I'm on a 1gbps
line and they're only giving me so much internet. I'm on the max the last mile
technology can afford.

~~~
wscott
I don't really know the numbers, but perhaps the majority of the customers for
your ISP are not like you but have the entry level plan. And perhaps the
majority of their p2p bandwidth comes from that large contingent of entry
level users. This is not obviously true since p2p users are probably more
likely to have the upgraded speeds, but it might be true. In that case, it
might be that allows entry-level users to have faster access to internal nodes
might reduce the overall traffic outside of the ISP.

So the ISP could benefit, and users could benefit and the ISP doesn't need to
make any statement for or against p2p clients.

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dogma1138
Israeli ISPs did that 10+ years ago it didn't end well the BSA and a few other
copyrights owners went after them. Another thing that some ISPs did to torrent
users was injecting the the "upload rate cheat" into their customers traffic
to get them banned on trackers that detect traffic faking.

~~~
revelation
So fun! Imagine having a ISP multiply numbers in SMTP traffic.

It's the wild west out there.

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manquer
Some ISPs do not count upload traffic towards the data caps. This encourages
upload/seeding behaviour which results in higher % of local peers, reducing
their cost and increasing user experience. From a networking perspective it
makes sense as traffic is usually one way from DC towards user. If they can
reshape it becomes efficient and cost effective.

Some universities had another way of doing something similar, torrents and
similar services are for most part blocked within the network. However local
file sharing services like DC++ thrived, the administration is well aware of
this, but do not do anything. The few people who get content from outside
share internally. Performance was great as sharing was effectively only WAN
and the university saved on bandwidth

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nenreme
Some ISPs in Russia were doing the same (I don't know if they still do). The
idea is that *.torrent files contain retracker.local in the list of trackers,
this tracker is local to each ISP and will respond with local peers.

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rutherblood
"Ironically, many ISPs have also been ordered by courts to block access to
hundreds of piracy sites, including many torrent search engines. For now,
however, Torbox remains freely accessible."

yep that's the india i know

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toyg
In Italy one of the first providers to offer "fiber to the building" (Fastweb)
basically tolerated on their network a huge seedbox / ftp / file exchange that
everybody knew about. This was better for them, because keeping things local
as much as possible kept their costs down and real internet traffic light.

I don't know if that "thing" is still there, I expect the copyright ayatollah
will have eventually cracked down on it.

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elktea
Interesting setup. For my company (in Aus) our most expensive cost, by far and
away, is the last-mile bandwidth.

~~~
dogma1138
That's relatively a new problem for you, 6-7 years ago before the new oceanic
cables it would have been a different story.

India isn't that well connected considering it's a nation of 1.5bln people or
is it 3 now.

And since many torrent trackers now disable DHT and local peer discovery you
tend to get random peers rather than be able to connect to peers close to you
which means they get more and more international traffic.

Considering Indian ISPs don't have much to offer in terms of interconnects and
peering agreements they most likely pay premium on their end to peer with tier
1 and tier 2 service providers in Europe and the US.

So for them the international bandwidth is very expensive. For you in the down
under the available international bandwidth at this point exceeds you local
one since the infrastructure lags behind because for many years it was
pointless to lay fiber locally as there wasn't enough available bandwidth to
feed it.

P.S. I don't think too many people would get your pun most of the users here
are far too young and far to restless ;)

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epx
Nothing new, I heard about an ISP that, oriented by the law dept, even put the
local peer in the DSL IP range so it looked like yet another client. The peer
saved lots and lots of international bandwidth.

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skibz
torbox.net is down

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i2rohan
>Offline. We are experiencing an unusual load on our server. We are working to
fix the issue.

Yeah, the article seems to have broken their site.

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mrkgnao
Yes, and we love them for it.

