Seems to me that the point is that given the finite capacity of the cable or telco internet access offerings, there does have to be some way to manaqe demand (ie shape traffic) to allow sharing of available capacity. What is NOT very acceptable to me is that any particular application or destination is subject to this control any more than any other. Traffic shaping that is independent of specific application or source/destination seems the more appropriate response to capacity limits. Users should be able n upper bound anyway). When congestion occurs (perhaps a side effect of oversubscription), shaping limits apply, regardless of application. This is the kind of neutrality that promotes sharing of access without penalizing source/destination or application specifics. Within the user's permitted usage envelope, one might see variations in priority for low latency cases - but this can be accomplished under application control. The ISP just needs to assure that the aggregate user traffic stays within the subscribed envelope.

You are all missing the point here. P2P traffic is not the devil. Many companies uses the same P2P traffic to distribute legal content on the internet, and this content is also throttled down to slower then dialup speeds. as some examples, World of Warcraft uses P2P to distribute its upgrades to it >10 million users on patch days, many linux distributions also distribute there product with P2P to help keep the product free to use. New companies are immerging that allow users to stream rented movies over the internet also use P2P traffic to accomplish this.

You need to stop thinking about P2P traffic as something only used to distribute illegal movies and music. The most famous filesharing program Napster didnt use the bittorrent P2P protocol in question at all.

Wow, I think I find myself in agreement with McSlarrow. It seems he wants to insure companies like Google, Yahoo and Vonage are able to take advantage of cable broadband yet we find at least one cable company won’t even let us subscribe to their internet service to deliver our local TV programming to the headend.

Maybe if he learns I agree with him these companies need to be able to ‘develop business models that hinge on the expectation of their service not being crowded our of bandwidth’ he’ll advise all cable companies to be sure to let StogTv be able to develop our business model that involves IPTV via cable broadband.

I long ago tried to offer McSlarrow an olive branch to see if cable and LAPers (leased access programmers) can’t try to cooperate rather than fight over fulfilling the wishes of Congress for LAPers to have ‘genuine outlets’ for programming.

Robb,

You clearly did not get the point.

When your neighbour is using Bittorrent at the same time you try to get to Google or Yahoo, his traffic (or more rightly, the P2P traffic his computer generates unattended), is in competition with yours in the access network (DSLAM or Cable network).

Sure, later on they diverge, but on some devices and interface, they are together. And while delaying (or even destroying a few packets ;-) of P2P will not change the performance of your neighbour's usage, it will vastly improve yours. Got it now ?

Google, Yahoo!, Amazon, and Vonage are not now, nor have they ever been, crowded out by peer-to-peer traffic. In fact, as Peer-to-peer boomed, these very companies also established their prominence. How could they have done that over the past few years, when users' uplink and downlink speeds were even lower than they are now?!

Nobody is against managed networks, NCTA. The real question is, "who is in control?" If the network in the middle (e.g. ISPs and transit providers) is secretly making these decisions, then that's the wrong plan. You cannot sell Internet Access and then allow unfettered access only to the traffic that you judge to be preferred. You cannot sell Internet Access and then actively inhibit a customer's traffic transiting the network that is perfectly within the terms and conditions upon which it was sold.

Managing the network means not over-overselling it so much that it lingers in a state of congestion!