Bittorrent declares war on VoIP, gamers
Found on The Register on Sunday, 30 November 2008
Upset about Bell Canada's system for allocating bandwidth fairly among internet users, the developers of the uTorrent P2P application have decided to make the UDP protocol the default transport protocol for file transfers.
By most estimates, P2P accounts for close to half of internet traffic today. When this traffic is immune to congestion control, the remaining half will stumble along at roughly a quarter of the bandwidth it has available today: half the raw bandwidth, used with half efficiency, by 95% of internet users.
The internet is only a stable system because application developers are gentlemanly with regard to the amount of traffic they shove onto the network.
The article is heavily biased and focused on the ISP side. It's true that QoS plays an important role, but instead of only blaming the developers, one should look at the reasons, because usually one doesn't make such a shift just because it's fun. The main reason is the way an ISP sells Internet access to you. You get 100MBit links for a few dollars, but it gets throttled at some point because the QoS wants to make it nice for everybody else too. Now if you max out your 100MBit with eg P2P, your ISP considers that bad because your neighbour wants to use his webmail without lags. Their calculation is based on the assumption that you do not saturate your connection. Basically, they sell the 100MBit and hope that most people don't use it much. If they were honest, they would sell you the bandwidth their systems can handle 24/7. But 1MBit doesn't advertise well...