There were issues specific to BitTorrent. In particular, early uTP versions caused a lot of grief, as they had broken congestion control, which led to absurdly high PPS. Also, it hadn't worked well on congested WiFi hotspots. We had to drop UDP traffic having certain signatures, just to keep the network alive. This was a single one-time incident, though, not a general issue.

Either way, P2P traffic, compared to the unicast one, is also a bit harder for hardware to handle, as there are more connections with different peers. Not an excuse or anything - good ISPs are meant to deal with whatever kind of traffic their customers want to generate (unless it's broken/misbehaving or malware-infested systems), just saying that the load is of a slightly different kind.

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Actually, some ISPs I've heard about were setting up BitTorrent caches. They had set up `retracker.local` systems that some fairly large public trackers had supported, grabbed stats to see what's hot, and spawned seedboxes (serving internal customers only) for the frequently downloaded content. Legal waiver was this was fully automated, and working exactly like any other caching proxy, blah blah - given it was in Russia, no one cared anyway. This was quite nice optimization, that allowed to cut outside traffic, IIRC, up to 2-3 times while actually improving customers' experience.

Insurance companies don't depend on usage being low, they depend on usage being in line with the actuarial/underwriting models. I've spent my career in insurance (P&C and disability), heavily on the data side, and haven't yet seen an underwriting profit in the plans. It's nice when it happens, but investment income on float is the bread and butter.

Why am I telling you this seemingly irrelevant info? Just to conclude that ISPs behave worse than insurance companies :)

EDIT: It'd actually be pretty interesting to see ISP rates regulated the same way ours (insurance) are. I'm talking about regulatory pressure to take rate when operating margins are high, like we get when underwriting profits become regular, and also on the severability of the product rate - regulators don't care if I'm taking a bath on homeowners and making up for it on the auto coverage. It'd be nice for similar on the ISP side with rates somewhat tied to cost, and not subsidizing losses on the cable subscriber side when that end eventually implodes.

I believe the issue is with the distribution of bandwidth between many TCP connections. The problem is that each TCP connection is treated with equal priority, meaning that a web page loading through a single TCP connection competes on equal footing with each of your 100 BitTorrent TCP connections, all running at a relatively low speed per connection. If this activity saturates your Internet connection, and you then try to load a web page, the web page TCP connection attempt will be placed in the back of the large queue that has accumulated in your router, and will take 20 seconds to load.

I also believe the asynchronous configuration, eg. 10/2 mbit rather than 5/5 mbit, of most residential Internet connections exacerbates the problem. One thing would be getting a connection attempt out on a 5/5 mbit connection, but you're constantly sending out huge amounts of ACKs of very small TCP packets already (due to BitTorrent), and your outgoing bandwidth is much smaller than your incoming.

'local' is pretty fluid in this context. If you can route from A to B without leaving the provider's network, it's 'local enough' for this usage. So if they have their own trunks from one city to the next, customers within the entire country could be 'local enough'. If they use someone else's backbone between cities, then 'local enough' would just be each city.

They're not actually concerned with physical distance, the number of hops, etc. It's simply the case that if they keep it entirely within the provider's network, the traffic costs the provider nothing. This is a huge win for the provider, so it's logical to 'share the win' with the end-customer to encourage such behaviour.

Probably other people served by the ISP in, say, the same city?

I'm surprised that users are seeing a big jump in speeds. In my observation, many users in India who use public BitTorrent trackers have a strong tendency to cap their upload speeds heavily and also stop the torrent the moment the download completes in order to get by with whatever they have. This "win-win" scheme that gives local peers to torrent users, if adopted by many other ISPs, would probably result in slower speeds for all users and force them to connect to faster (non-local) peers outside the country.

What piracy? I'm not a pirate. I'm just downloading multiple terabytes of Linux ISO's each month.

The problem is my speed limit is determined by my modem edge device's sync. And that's determined by my snr from the node. I don't think its possible to open up more speed for me if I'm already on the highest tier of the service. I guess for people who aren't, this is an option. Its not like I'm on a 1gbps line and they're only giving me so much internet. I'm on the max the last mile technology can afford.

I do remember some ISPs doing web caching way back, but I think when the DMCA was passed they dropped this service for most cases since the liability on copyright infringement outweighed whatever benefits it gave them and their customers.

So fun! Imagine having a ISP multiply numbers in SMTP traffic.

It's the wild west out there.

That's relatively a new problem for you, 6-7 years ago before the new oceanic cables it would have been a different story.

India isn't that well connected considering it's a nation of 1.5bln people or is it 3 now.

And since many torrent trackers now disable DHT and local peer discovery you tend to get random peers rather than be able to connect to peers close to you which means they get more and more international traffic.

Considering Indian ISPs don't have much to offer in terms of interconnects and peering agreements they most likely pay premium on their end to peer with tier 1 and tier 2 service providers in Europe and the US.

So for them the international bandwidth is very expensive. For you in the down under the available international bandwidth at this point exceeds you local one since the infrastructure lags behind because for many years it was pointless to lay fiber locally as there wasn't enough available bandwidth to feed it.

P.S. I don't think too many people would get your pun most of the users here are far too young and far to restless ;)

>Offline. We are experiencing an unusual load on our server. We are working to fix the issue.

Yeah, the article seems to have broken their site.