Canadians Find Traffic Shaping "Reasonable" 291
gehrehmee writes "A recent Canadian Press Harris-Decima poll on ISPs' use of traffic shaping suggests that 60% of survey respondents find the practice reasonable as long as customers are treated fairly, while 22% believe Internet management is unreasonable regardless. The major Canadian Internet and phone service provider Rogers, meanwhile, compared 'person-to-person file-sharing to a car that parks in one lane of a busy highway at all times of the day or night, clogging the roadways for everyone unless someone takes action.' Is there a lack of education about the long-term effects of traffic shaping on free communication? Or are net neutrality advocates just out of touch?" The poll found that only 20% of respondents had ever heard of traffic shaping. The article is unclear on whether the "60%" who found the practice "reasonable" are 60% of all respondents — most of whom don't know what they are talking about — or 60% of the minority who know. If the former, then the exact phrasing of the question is the overwhelming determinant of the response. At the CTRC hearings, which wrapped up today, Bell Canada executives revealed that the company "slows certain types of downloads [P2P] to as little as 1.5 to 3 per cent of their advertised speed during 9-1/2 hours of the day."
Ever worked for an ISP? (Score:5, Informative)
I once did voluntary work at a small community ISP. We only had a few hundred users at most but so many people used napster and then gnutella that we had to implement traffic shaping.
The reality is that if you do not, then badly configured clients with no upload limit set will saturate whatever bandwidth is available if the user is sharing something popular. In our case that number of requests coming in prevented people from being able to access their webmail so we started traffic shaping based on port.
Not a perfect solution since some people put their client on port 80 which we did not shape but largely it worked since we had lots of download bandwidth coming in, but were much more restricted on upload due to using ADSL lines. At the time an ADSL line was too expensive for most people so this way we could all share one and split the cost (£3 per month).
Anyway, we found that without traffic shaping everything ground to a halt, with it we could provide a balanced service for everyone. When you step into the person who wants a cheap net connection and has no need to use tons of bandwidth traffic shaping becomes a reasonable tool to ensure they can always get what they pay for.
Since most ISP's declare they will do this in their terms and conditions and they usually tell you the contention ratio of users to bandwidth I do not see how people can really object. If you want to always use the full possible bandwidth then buy an internet account with a 1:1 contention ratio. I know these are ridiculously expensive, but that is because the vast majority of people do not need this.
Re:Using the truth to bolster a lie (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Terrible Analogy (Score:2, Informative)
"If you can't support 5Mb/s don't advertise 5Mb/s! And don't sell people plans with that written on it if you can't support everyone doing it! Oh? You've discovered people will shell out a lot more money for better connections so you like to be able to advertise 5Mb/s? "
I do not know how this comment got a score of 3 but this is plain stupid. Since the beginning of telecommunications networks have been sized in a statistical fashion. Guess what!, if every mobile phone tries to call at the same time the network can not support the traffic! Wow! Should TelCos stop selling phones because they can't actually support everyone using them at the same time?
Do you think that the backbone of your company/university/high school (probably high school in your case) can support providing 10Mbps to each computer in the network? Nope! Sorry, not a chance.
Re:Ever worked for an ISP? (Score:3, Informative)
The reality is that if you do not, then badly configured clients with no upload limit set will saturate whatever bandwidth is available if the user is sharing something popular
you mean they will saturate THEIR upload that they paid for.
In our case that number of requests coming in prevented people from being able to access their webmail so we started traffic shaping based on port.
so ISP was overbooking so badly it couldnt handle the traffic, that ISP should upgrade, shrink speeds it sells or just die
Re:Ever worked for an ISP? (Score:3, Informative)
"so ISP was overbooking so badly it couldnt handle the traffic, that ISP should upgrade, shrink speeds it sells or just die"
Just to be clear, you really think any ISP is going to be able to afford to have dedicated speed so that every user can max out their connection, all the time?
Residental Internet is nowhere near expensive enough to pay for that.
Plane Analogy (Score:5, Informative)
Re:So, p2p blocks the highway, and youtube does no (Score:3, Informative)
The default for uTorrent is to open only 90 connections. Total. Across all torrents.
Anybody who's got 1000's of outgoing connections has either radically screwed with their settings without having a clue what they're doing, or has a dozen or so computers on a local network, all running uTorrent.
Either that, or they're running uTorrent, Limewire, eMule, and every other P2P client on one computer at the same time.
In all of the above cases, the user is a moron, who has no clue how computers actually work. But they probably think "Hey! I'm 1337! I have a home network!"
Re:Using the truth to bolster a lie (Score:3, Informative)
Perhaps the model of charging X amount for X speed is flawed then.
...
In Canada/USA/Europe and other locations the current model is broken.
You are misinformed, Rogers already uses a "data and speed billing model". E.g. Their regular plan has a 60GB monthly cap with overage charges. (I'm a customer). So now, with the cap system in place, they need to back the f*** off the traffic shaping agenda.
Re:Charging by the Gigibyte... (Score:5, Informative)
...would give the ISPs a financial incentive to speed your music and video downloads along. But you'd never support such an outrage, would you? Because then you'd actually have to *pay* for downloading all your "tunes" and movies, watching Youtube, browsing webpages, playing online games, and downloading free software.
There, fixed that for ya. Not everyone who uses gigs a month are downloading music and movies. Some of us just use a lot of bandwidth for normal internet activities and even some work related activities that involve downloading large ISO files.
This solution is a win for the cable TV companies, a win for Hollywood, and a win for some of the ISP companies, but would be a big lose for a lot of internet users, and I'd bet its way more than the 5% number that they like to throw around.
The ISP companies had a chance to increase capacity in preparation for this internet boom years ago, with government breaks no less, and they chose to ignore the issue and take the money anyways. This became even more apparent to me recently when someone described some of the newer optical networking technology is out now and just how much data can really be sent over a single strand of fiber when using it for multiple channels... its an insane amount and much more than I had been led to believe by the information the ISPs have been putting out about the evils of Youtube/Hulu and file sharing (legal or not but, of course, it serves their purpose and Hollywood's to "educate" the masses with the idea that ALL file sharing is wrong) and how they're at "max capacity" and must consider other billing methods or risk the meltdown of the intertubes.
Re:Using the truth to bolster a lie (Score:3, Informative)
You have a nice, fast car that can do 300km/hr. You're driving down a highway where the speed limit is 110km/hr. And you're coming up to a bend in the road during the winter where it's icy, and the safe speed around the bend is 50km/hr. Which one gets honoured?
Seriously? You have to ask? It's the lowest speed, of course. I pay for my 15Mbps bandwidth. But the guy I'm downloading from only has 1Mbps available to me. So I'm going to get 1Mbps. It's not hard. Of course, that means I have approximately 14Mbps for downloading from other site(s). Thus far, downloading from Microsoft, IBM, and various educational institutions have all been pretty fast. Heck, I even get 15+Mbps downloading over the VPN from work. It sucks when what I want is from a site with only 1Mbps. But, in general, those aren't large files anyway. It's when I'm downloading the KDE snapshots (~370MB) - that's when I want to get from someone who has a fat pipe.
Re:Using the truth to bolster a lie (Score:4, Informative)
Essentially your argument is "You should not be using the full speed your modem provides".
No, that isn't the argument at all. The point of traffic shaping (a.k.a. Quality of Service) is that some kinds of traffic need to arrive in a timely manner, while for other kinds of traffic there won't be any noticeable effect if the packets arrive a second or two later. Voice and video streams become practically useless if there's significant delays or packet loss, while your Linux disc image will work just fine even if the download finishes 15 seconds later than it otherwise would.
As for your arguments about ISP's overselling their bandwidth, well yeah, we all know that, and we all know about the near-universal lack of competition, but those issues are generally separate from Quality of Service and Network Neutrality.
WTF? (Score:1, Informative)
I can add a few points here having worked for one of the ISP's in question for a number of years. First they DO massively oversubscribe their bandwidth. All ISP's do it to some extent, but few to the extent that Bell does for example. That company alone has literally received billions of dollars in federal government subsidies over the last decade (Broadband Task Force ring any bells?) and has invested very little in the actual infrastructure so they are to blame for the current bottlenecks. I am not going to waste time with analogies at all though.
The problem lies in the service they advertise ~vs~ the service they are providing, and the argument they are making for traffic shaping . They currently only focus on P2P, an I cannot say that is a terrible thing. The problem is they are trying to set a precedent for free control over what they allow to consume the advertised speeds, and what they do not. They have touted their service as blisteringly fast for a decade, and enticed would-be customers with images of an internet full of rich content for the whole family in their early advertising campaigns. This brought them the majority of their subscribers. Now that such content exists they are starting to scramble. For anyone who has actually read the 2008 submission to the CRTC they already know that the real bandwidth hogs were not using P2P at all as it accounted for less than 20% of their upstream bandwidth (the stuff that goes to other providers and costs them per GB without a peering agreement) yet it still affected other bell users as they even oversubscribed the distribution network (the part that feeds the dslam from the core) this is irresponsible network design and greedy management plain and simple. That being said if they establish a precedent here then they will be free to throttle what ever they choose in the future and that should scare the crap out of any subscriber. This is not about movie sharing and stealing from Hollywood (sorry for anyone who thinks so but you are misinformed) this is about money!