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Battling over BitTorrent - February 26, 2008

Interesting wrinkle out of yesterday's FCC hearing in Boston on ISPs' network management practices: In defending his company's practice of delaying some BitTorrent traffic during periods of peak demand, Comcast executive VP David Cohen noted that upload requests that get delayed by Comcast's system, "automatically go to another computer," generally on another network that is not currently delaying traffic, so that any delays are "imperceptible to the customer."

Not to other ISPs, however. Basically, Comcast is shunting excess traffic off onto other network operators' systems, solving its own problem by making it theirs. Not only does that seem un-neighborly, it runs counter to efforts underway among other ISPs and peer-to-peer networks to develop protocols that would contain most P2P traffic within an edge network rather than spreading it around to become a burden on the entire Internet.

In his testimony, Cohen argued that the test conducted by the Associated Press that triggered the FCC's investigation was flawed because it did not replicate real-world conditions. Researchers for the AP sought to transfer a copy of the King James Bible from one computer to another over Comcast's network at different times and measured the time required.

According to Cohen, however, such point-to-point exercises don't take into account the fact that requests for a particular file using the BitTorrent protocol can jump to other computers on other networks. In conducting their own tests, Cohen said, Comcast engineers "found dozens of computers with BitTorrent capacity--no problems, no delay, no degradation, using BitTorrent the way it was designed to be used."

That attitude may explain why Comcast has yet to join Verizon and other ISPs in the P4P Working Group, which is attempting to develop cooperative protocols between ISPs and P2P networks precisely to prevent upload requests from "jumping to other computers" on other networks. By containing such traffic within the edge network where it originates, P4P researchers claim, P2P traffic between networks can be greatly reduced, eliminating some of the uncompensated bandwidth use that slows all networks and speeding download times for end users.

In other words, the P4P Working Group is trying to change the way BitTorrent "is designed to be used."

While it's way too early to know if anything will come of the P4P initiative, it portends a potential clash ahead between different types of ISPs over how to manage BitTorrent traffic--in particular between cable MSOs, who rely on shared-network architecture and are thus more likely to be sensitive to P2P traffic within their network, and telcos like Verizon and AT&T, who have built systems with individual network connections and are like to be more sensitive to traffic coming from outside their networks. 

Clearly, the net neutrality battle is just beginning.

Archived audio of yesterday's hearing can be found here.
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