ISPs Down with Uploads

Filed in archive Technology on January 24, 2007

susan Crawford nicely ties together a few different pieces on asymmetric download and upload rates for residential DSL subscribers. P2P constitutes up to 70% of all ISP traffic. It's inherently symmetric as users directly transfer from one to another.

But ISPs have architected their networks for their own business plans to sell video. So DSL has data speeds that are much faster for download. Upload services like P2P don't generate money.

ISP issues are exacerbated by P2P blocking that can't discriminate between legitimate and unauthorized P2P downloads and new services like the always-on The Venice Project that continually transfers video and quickly exhaust typical ISP bandwidth caps.