Bit Torrent Clipper Box
by Andrew McCaskey
Slashdot Review Podcast
Sponsored in part by : WickedLasers.com the
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I was in the airport in Chicago trying to pulldown the article in ArsTechnica concerning ISP efforts to sniff out encrypted bittorent – with a box from Allot Communications called NetEnforcer. I finally got to have a look this evening once I caught the commuter flight back home. There was another link from cited on Engadget. Here’s a portion of that post:
“According to Allot, BitTorrent traffic accounts for some 40-50 percent of ISP bandwidth, with many ISPs already taking steps to throttle it, but until now they’ve been unable to do anything about the encrypted torrenting that’s been possible with the latest clients.â€
One of the UK based readers on Engadget observed that he pays for an 8Mbit/sec unlimited connection,- but for the 60GB or so he pulls a month, they are also collecting about $45 US for 20 other people on the same connection using only 1Gb a month.
So it is coming back to the same sort of queueing and provisioning problem that we observed maybe six or eight years ago. As you recall, the combination of miscalculation and greed is a powerful one. First, ( just like shared hosting today) you can load up facilities with hundreds of customers if you figure they don’t all show up at once, and for awhile it is Free Lunch. You can keep on selling with minimal investment, and those are good dollars that fall right through the fixed costs.
What the formulas of dial in modem banks never accounted for was a change in consumer behavior that added second lines at home, dialed in, and left it nailed up for hours at a time.
Now I am so ancient that I remember using the Erlang traffic tables to determine PBX subscribers and trunks – but somewhere someone is making the same sort of calculation.The temptation to add more subscribers on the chance that they won’t use much. You can either stop selling to those customers, or whack off the top of the demand with the Net Enforcer box.
As a friend so aptly put it, the greedy boat is fast but not very stable. Customer demand is changing and somebody’s Free Lunch is about to be eaten. I expect that the Net Enforcer box will be a short term solution.