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• What a bunch of idiots, these americans.
  Anyone who knows anything about data networks knows two things!
  
  1) Peer-to-peer traffic is very aggressive in cliaiming ALL AVAILABLE bandwidth and therefore eats up 80-90% of operators' available bandwidth, if left unchecked.
  If the operators add more bandwidth, then the file sharing protocols will just eat that up too.
  
  2) What the FCC is about to do is make "traffic engineering" illegal (a practice which is actually healthy for the network, and done on most, private, enterprise networks to protect the delay sensitive Voice from the bandwidth-hungry data). Basically the FCC is saying, it's survival of the "strongest" (i.e. most aggressive protocols) on the Internet. Say goodbye to viable VoIP and real-time services.
  
  No matter how much more bandwidth the ISP's add, the P2P traffic will claim it, because that's how those protocols are designed.
  
  If anyone doesn't understand what I mean about traffic enginnering, consider this: If you are downloading a DVD, then you don't really care if your download takes an extra 2 minutes to download (i.e. 32 minutes instead of 30). Most of the time, you won't even be in front of the PC and won't notice.
  
  Now consider you are using IP telephony (VoIP), if the operator is not allowed to prioritize traffic, your VoIP traffic (i.e. your voice) may arrive "2 minutes" later than it should (i.e. instead of taking 100ms, it could take 10 seconds) making the application totally useless because voice prioritization is about to become illegal.
  
  Now consider this: A VoIP call uses around 12kbps, while a BitTorrent download will use as much as is available -- several Mbps probably -- totally smothering the VoIP traffic. If the operator were allowed to reduce the bandwidth consumption of the P2P traffic by 1% (assuming a very conservative available bandwidth of 1Mbps), the VoIP traffic could be prioritized and "protected" from being totally smothered. The VoIP applications would acutally work.
  
  I sure hope Europe and the rest of the World don't follow suit. There are Smarter ways to «protect» Internet users' freedom. In reply to: "Report: FCC expected to rule against Comcast"

  July 28, 2008

  3 replies