Leo Bicknell wrote:
I'm a bit confused by your statement. Are you saying it's more
cost effective for ISP's to carry downloads thousands of miles
across the US before giving them to the end user than it is to allow
a local end user to "upload" them to other local end users?
Not to speak on Joe's behalf, but whether the content comes from
elsewhere on the Internet or within the ISP's own network the issue is
the same: limitations on the transmission medium between the cable modem
and the CMTS/head-end. The issue that cable companies are having with
P2P is that compared to doing a HTTP or FTP fetch of the same content
you will use more network resources, particularly in the upstream
direction where contention is a much bigger issue. On DOCSIS 1.x
systems like Comcast's plant, there's a limitation of ~10mbps of
capacity per upstream channel. You get enough 384 - 768k connected
users all running P2P apps and you're going to start having problems in
a big hurry. It's to remove some of the strain on the upstream channels
that Comcast has started to deploy Sandvine to start closing *outbound*
connections from P2P apps.
-Eric
