[asterisk-users] OT: What do you guys think of this?

[BJ Weschke]

Alex Balashov wrote:
> RE Kushner List Account wrote:
>
>   
>> The question is, what are you actually paying for as a customer?  To 
>> discriminate against bits just because they actually use what they are 
>> paying for is beyond me.
>>
>> At least a bandwidth cap is easier to understand. You get what you pay for.
>>     
>
> Speaking as a former sysadmin of an ISP, I would say that the issue is 
> the following:
>
> 1) There is a high correlation of network-disrupting levels of traffic 
> and BitTorrent;
>
> 2) Unlike some "bursty" downloads (like your CentOS ISO from an FTP 
> server), BitTorrent traffic has the tendency to be sustained at higher 
> levels for longer periods since the architecture presumes that 
> everyone's a client and everyone's a server and fragments are always 
> moving around.  This is what tends to upset oversubscription assumptions 
> that are otherwise functional, and are the only way that the ISP can 
> possibly afford to give you the bandwidth for the price of 
> consumer-grade broadband.
>
>
> I would tend to agree with you that discriminating against types of 
> services and/or traffic through rate-limiting buckets and deep packet 
> inspection is worse than a blanket bandwidth cap.   However, you need to 
> keep in mind the other side of the coin;  were it not for Torrent, there 
> would not be a need for traffic policing (in the overwhelming 
> preponderance of cases) either way, so it's considered unfair to punish 
> everyone with a bandwidth cap on everything when in reality, it's not a 
> problem if their applications *occasionally* burst to very high levels 
> of throughput.  This is different from using up a lot of bandwidth 
> continuously.
>
> My ISP doesn't care if I chug down a CentOS ISO tonight at close to my 
> DSL line rate.  But if I downloaded them all day long, all day, every 
> day, there would be a problem, but the way to solve that problem isn't 
> by taking away others' freedom to download a CentOS ISO when they feel 
> like it in principle.
>
>   
 Have you checked the FTP and/or HTTP mirrors lately for the DVD iso of CentOS? The only place I've been able to find them is on the Torrents themselves.

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