February 26th, 2008
FCC hearings: Comcast versus Vuze
The FCC held its hearing on Comcast’s Network Management practices at Harvard University yesterday. Vuze executive Gilles BianRosa whose company filed one of the two FCC complaints against Comcast reportedly told the FCC yesterday that BitTorrent does not hog bandwidth. Since most Internet experts would dispute that claim, I generated the following hard data on the bandwidth consumption of various applications that run on the Internet.
Note: Richard Bennett who was an expert panelist at yesterday’s hearings informed me that BianRosa claimed that BitTorrent didn’t exceed the contracted limit. That however ignores the explicit “no server” clause in the terms of service and no broadband service was built to be fully saturated 24×7. This is why commercial grade T1 lines that offer less than half the speed of broadband connections costing 8 times less are $400 per month.
Bear in mind that the data below is in reference to upstream (upload) bandwidth consumption in kilobits per second since that is the focus of these FCC hearings. Also note that applications like web surfing hardly use the upstream at all since it’s primarily your clicks and URLs that are being transmitted to tell the web server where you want to go.
The following is a graph of the above chart
* Corporate VPN telecommuter worker using G.722 codec @ 64 Kbps payload and 33.8 Kbps packetization overhead
** Vonage or Lingo SIP-based VoIP service with G.726 codec @ 32 Kbps payload and 18.8 Kbps packetization overhead
*** I calculated that I Sent 29976 kilobytes of mail over the last 56 days averaging 0.04956 Kbps
It is interesting to note that before the advent of P2P applications, Broadband users were primarily downloaders and rarely did they ever upload. It is for this reason that Broadband networks were built asymmetrically and heavily favored the downstream. Servers in data centers with commercial-grade Internet connections served and transmitted content and consumers consumed that content by downloading them.
If you’re downloading video from a service like Apple iTunes, Microsoft Xbox Live Marketplace, Netflix, or YouTube, you’re only downloading and not uploading anything. Those services pay a lot of money for their own datacenters filled with servers, their own bandwidth, and/or they pay services like Akamai to cache and distribute their content over the entire Internet.
Vuze on the other hand uses a different business model where they don’t pay for their own bandwidth and they expect their users to contribute their upload bandwidth to make the service work using the BitTorrent protocol. Vuze basically gets free distribution because they enlist their own customers to be their servers and bandwidth providers using their own computers and broadband connections. So instead of paying for commercial distribution, Vuze offloads their bandwidth on to the broadband providers.
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Disclosure: Many people have asked me for the source of the data so I will put out the following disclaimer. As I already indicated in the first paragraph of this article, I am the original source of those charts and graphs. I’ve written extensively on VoIP bandwidth consumption as the former Technical Director of TechRepublic. Before TechRepublic, I built and designed networks for a living. I worked on the routing, the switching, and the traffic engineering of Intranet and Internet based networks. The in-use bitrates I cited are detailed and include packetization overhead and they can be independently verified.
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George Ou is Technical Director of ZDNet. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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