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."
Using the truth to bolster a lie (Score:5, Insightful)
This isn't a question about Net Neutrality at all. This is a question about network management. If you asked people this question: "Do you think data being consumed in real time (video, phone calls, etc.) should have higher priority than data being transferred for later use?" the answer from a reasonable person is likely to be "yes". And it's not a bad answer.
The actual Net Neutrality question is: "Do you think Rogers Cablesystem should be allowed to degrade Vonage's VoIP traffic if they don't similarly degrade Rogers' own VoIP traffic?"
The real problems come from confusingly bad articles like these, where people are being mislead to believe network management is the same as net neutrality. That's the lie that is being used to skew the statistics of public opinion. And it doesn't help that P2P proponents try to use the same lie to claim some mythical rights under the guise of net neutrality, either. If a router has a choice between discarding one packet or another, it's disruptive to fewer people if it throws away the VoIP packet. That's traffic shaping 101, and has nothing to do with network neutrality.
AS LONG AS THE CUSTOMERS ARE.... (Score:2, Insightful)
treated fairly.
Kind of a key point there folks. I'm guessing 20 or so percent of respondents said "Yeah, right. They won't "treat us fairly" so what's the point." I'm also guessing the other 15% or so said something along the lines of "I like cheese".
Don't use so many caps in your subject line, it's like screaming at a baby who is hungry.
So, p2p blocks the highway, and youtube does not? (Score:3, Insightful)
I mean, there are a few other things on the internet that use a little bandwidth.
I would suggest that everybody who puts something on youtube that gets more than 100 views has to pay extra tax. In addition, their upload gets downgraded for the next 3 months. That'll teach them for making the internet a popular tool for sharing information!
On a more serious note: I suggest we block all traffic between copyright lobbyists and internet providers... that should solve the problem rather quickly.
Terrible Analogy (Score:5, Insightful)
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.'
I'm not a customer of Rogers but I do know that Comcast and Cox cap you at your cable modem (and I'd bet Rogers does too) ... so a better analogy might be:
'a car that parks in its own lane of a busy highway with a lane for every home at all times of the day or night, clogging that lane for themselves unless they take action.'
And the best analogy would be:
'a single person driving nonstop cars in their own personal lane of a busy highway at all times of the day or night, clogging that lane for themselves because they paid for the lane and they're going to fucking use it.'
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? You don't say ...
It's a more Canadian solution. (Score:3, Insightful)
You know, we're sort of a strange breed up here.
In some cases, sharing music is legal in Canada, and the whole thing is treated as a much different issue than in the US. If you get a letter from the ISP, it's just informing you that there was something downloaded on your connection, rather than a lawsuit. Some time over the next few weeks, in fact, I'll be securing someone's wireless connection because they got just such a letter even though they don't use P2P.
This sort of think continues that sort of idea. Rather than destroy everyone's bandwidth, or charging the p2p folks insane fees, silently controlling when the traffic goes through works for everyone. The regular folks get good internet during peak times, and the p2p people get good internet during the trough times, and they don't get massive bills in the mail.
Re:Why not? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why not? Because I pay for an Internet connection, not a web and email connection. Who are you to decide that my use of the internet is less important than yours?
Here's a better poll question (Score:5, Insightful)
Do you think Bell and Rogers should invest some of the money into increasing bandwidth that they oversold thousand times over, instead of giving hundreds of millions in executive bonuses and lobbing politicians?
Re:Using the truth to bolster a lie (Score:1, Insightful)
do you think that people who think of themselves as l33t h4x0rs but who really just like to download shitloads of pr0n, music, software, gaming-data and movies at the expense of everyone else, should be given preference over those who would like to use the internet responsibly and who cannot believe that such arbitration would necessarily lead to the curbing of the freedom of speech ?
I think I speak for all of us when I say WTF are you talking about?
Re:Using the truth to bolster a lie (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is, that this *is* about network neutrality as well.
What happens when someone wants to start offering cable TV over the net? It's already started, and that's much more bandwidth intensive than P2P. It is also completely legal, to boot! In Canada, you can rebroadcast OTA TV without paying anyone a dime, currently.
What happens when someone starts to offer live video streaming, aka movie downloading, legally?
Heck, what about video game patches, add ons, downloads of Linux distros, etc, etc, etc. All of these are entirely legal, and all of them can use P2P.
Bell's silly contention is that P2P somehow causes severe bandwidth issues. In reality, they take objection to ALL bandwidth intensive applications. They've stated so in the past, with comments like "only 5% of users use P2P, everyone else only checks their email and views a few webpages a night". To them, a "few webpages" means looking at Google news, and barely using anything bandwidth intensive like YouTube. The real issue here is that Bell vastly oversells its bandwidth.
Throttling in *any way* causes issues with Network Neutrality. An ISP is a pipe. Provide $x bandwidth, with $y data cap, and GET THE HELL OUT OF THE WAY. Anything else is entirely, completely, and fully dishonest.
Hell, Bell and Rogers sell movie rentals, TV access, cable and the like. To them, any way they can make bandwidth intensive applications look bad, is a big, massive boon to their business.
Competition (Score:4, Insightful)
Ah, good old opinion polls (Score:5, Insightful)
Most of these things are pretty worthless. Last year the provincial government of New Brunswick put out a report about self-sufficiency. They then did a poll about it.
I got called as part of that poll. They asked me if I had heard of the report, with a bunch of answers (read it, read some of it, heard about it, know it exists, never heard of it). I answered "heard about it". The next question the pollster asked was "do you agree with the findings?"
"I haven't read it and thus have no idea what the findings are" would be a pretty rational response, considering I just said that I hadn't read it. Not an option. The options were agree/disagree. I argued with the person on the phone for quite a while over that. Unsurprisingly, the results came out and found that while almost nobody read the report, most people agreed with it. Of course they did, the title sounds like something they should agree to!
(There was a similar story about a question where they asked "do you support more health care spending even if it means running a deficit?" Most people said yes. Later in the poll they asked people what a deficit is. Most of the people who said yes to the earlier question couldn't answer. So, people are quite happy to agree with something when they have no idea what it is.)
This is the same type of nonsense polling. Most of the people asked have no idea what the issue is, but throw words like "reasonable" and "treated fairly" in there, and of course they'll agree with it. If you don't know what traffic shaping is, why would you ever disagree with being treated fairly?
Re:Why not? (Score:3, Insightful)
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
Hey, that's fine by me. Force people to download when it won't affect other people. It's either that or pay a small fortune for a service with guaranteed bandwidth.
You do realize that by using P2P to get my Warcraft patches & Ubuntu ISOs that I am reducing the load normally incurred by going all the way to California for them, don't you?
Look up content distribution networks (CDN) and see how they helped reduce traffic on the internet. Now think about how P2P allows people to be 'kinder' to everyone who uses the internet. By shaping the traffic, you are telling me to go back to the old way when I would request 1 GB of data from across the country and everyone along the way would have to make room for my traffic.
A method was developed to better manage traffic in the big picture. Now ISPs are actually discouraging this technique! ISPs don't want quick efficient traffic on their lines (which is what occurs when you're down the street from me and we're sharing data for a large ISO) so they want to shift the load back out to the entire internet. "Stupid" does not begin to describe this.
Re:Using the truth to bolster a lie (Score:5, Insightful)
And to you I say: Perhaps everyone who pays for X Mbps should be able to obtain it 99% of the time. Minor degradation for 1% of the day is fine, but significantly overselling bandwidth when you *know* the usage patterns of your customers will require a bigger pipe for substantial portions of the day is irresponsible.
When you have unspecified traffic shaping in play, you distort the free market: How do I compare two providers of a 10 Mbps connection when they don't say what the practical speed will be (and largely can't: I've seen cable modems run reliably at 10 KB/s or less in some areas that were massively underprovisioned, while the same company provided 24/7 1 MB/s connections less than a mile away).
Re:Using the truth to bolster a lie (Score:5, Insightful)
20% understand the question.
Re:It's a more Canadian solution. (Score:3, Insightful)
And the p2p people get screwed during peak times because they're considered second class. Like say you need a critical patch for a server during business hours.
Re:Using the truth to bolster a lie (Score:5, Insightful)
Heck, what about video game patches, add ons, downloads of Linux distros, etc, etc, etc. All of these are entirely legal, and all of them can use P2P.
The difference is that you're not sitting at the end of the pipe watching your P2P bits arrive, while the phone and video and streaming audio users are. If your phone service has to compete with your P2P service, which would you rather have go badly?
If you are downloading a distro, and at the same time you place a VoIP phone call, what do you do if the audio is all broken up? Do you pause the torrent client to get better phone service? I do*. Now, put the torrent client in your neighbor's house, where you don't have have the ability to pause your neighbor's download when you want to use the phone. Is it fair?
And before you cry "but the bandwidth! the bandwidth! I paid for the bandwidth!" bandwidth is NOT the same as capacity. If you want a guarantee of capacity, sign a contract to rent a fiber between you and your server. Otherwise, you have to deal with the fact that it's a multi-use, multi-user network, it's shared, and there will be packet loss when it's saturated.
* well I did when I had Vonage.
LOL (Score:5, Insightful)
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.'
I'm glad I'm not in Canada, because Rogers is either phenomonally stupid or a bunch of lying asshats. Rather than a car parked on a busy highway, it's more like a convoy of SUVs full of people travelling from Chicago to St Louis for the all star baseball games. They're using the highways for what they were designed for. It's not the convoy's fault that I-55 is only four lanes for most of the way, and it's not P2P users' fault that Rogers hasn't kept their infrastructure up to date.
We're not just looking at text-only web pages and sending email on a 33k modem any more, we're streaming videos, downloading Linux ISOs, and swapping files via P2P.
It irks me that the corporates consider P2P to be evil; not all P2P is piracy. I know independant musicians who depend on P2P to get their music out.
Real poll result (Score:3, Insightful)
The most likely real meaning of this poll: about 50% of those surveyed have no clue what the pollster is talking about, but since the poll question says "customers are treated fairly", respondents think that it's reasonable to be fair.
For instance, "Would you be in favor or against reasonable restrictions of the use of DHMO?" often returns an answer that approves of the restrictions not because the respondent knows anything about the restrictions or DHMO but because those restrictions were described as "reasonable" in the question. That's sort of thing is one of the standard techniques for getting polls with the answer you want.
So what you're saying is.... (Score:1, Insightful)
If I pay for a 5Mb/s connection with unlimited downloads, I should be able to GET 5Mb/s no matter what I do at what time. If I want to be a leech for 24/7. Hey, that's what I paid for. For example some days you'll open up a p2p connection to download some new video you heard about when you get home from work, as it's unlikely you'll be able to use my machine off peak hours (Sorry! Work, family and sleep get in the way of off peak times). That download SHOULD take 1 hour and without being slowed down to 5-6 hours.
I expect to get what I pay for at all times. Peak hours are called that because it's when MOST people are awake and home and actually have free to to use their connection. Off peak hours are for vampires and grue's.
If I pay for a 10Mb/s connection with a cap of 100GB usage, that's what I should get. If I want more, I pay more. But I should GET what I pay for. Here's another car analogy.
I'm not buying a corvette to find the engine acts like a pinto during certain hours.
I'm paying for a specific speed. It should be my choice if I want 100GB (1/2 tank gas) or 200GB (Full tank). If I want a faster speed with a lower or higher cap, let those that use, pay, but GIVE them what they pay for.
Re:Using the truth to bolster a lie (Score:4, Insightful)
Perhaps the model of charging X amount for X speed is flawed then.
Originally when it was sold like this it didn't really matter as people noticed the speed when they downloaded large files etc, but lets say they were only using that full speed 10% of the time.. this allowed the ISP to resell at a 10:1 contention ratio with no problems.
Nowdays people are using more and more of that contentioned bandwidth.. sure its getting cheaper for the ISP, but they've started all these plans on the basis that people wouldn't be using their connection to its full capacity, 100% of the time.
Now the ISP is stuck because they have pricing that has to go down to compete, along with user making MORE use of the same bandwidth allowance and you have the ISP wondering "how the hell are we going to afford to upgrade our backhauls now??"
IMHO the data AND speed billing model (found in Australia) works well as there's no need for net neutrality because the end user pays for the data they pull over their link as well as the speed they're given it.
Sorry to drum up an old analogy but think of it this way:
The internet is a series of highways.
The speed you can browse the internet is a car: either a slow cheap scooter or an expensive ferrari.
The data you use while browsing the internet is fuel for your vehicle.. having a faster vehicle doesn't mean you're going to use more data/petrol than a slower on, but you definatly have the ability to.. and if you want to drive everywhere at top speed thats no problem as you're the one paying for the fuel.
In Canada/USA/Europe and other locations the current model is broken.
The ISP is the one that is putting the fuel in your car for you.. you just pick a car and the ISP says they provide a fast car and unlimited fuel, back 5 years ago hardly anyone was driving around at top speed ALL the time. Yet over time the usage has increased and the ISP is having to hand our more and more fuel while the cars are expected to cost less.
Anyway, long explanation but I hope it explains the difference between the data and speed vs just speed model.
Re:LOL (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm glad I'm not in Canada, because Rogers is either phenomonally stupid or a bunch of lying asshats.
Thankfully, that's an "or", not an "xor", because there's no reason to think that they aren't both true.
Re:Charging by the Gigibyte... (Score:3, Insightful)
This would be a good idea, if the charges were reasonable. Charging $1/Gb is unreasonable. Charging something like $0.05/Gb would be reasonable and I suspect would be widely supported.
Re:Using the truth to bolster a lie (Score:1, Insightful)
Perhaps everyone who pays for X Mbps should be able to obtain it 99% of the time.
How far downstream does that X Mbps go? This is exactly what the net-neutrality advocates are against: the idea that some company could pay for connections to their site to get better performance than connections to some other company that paid less. Every connection has two end-points, and both of those ends has paid for a level of service. Which one gets honoured?
Re:So what you're saying is.... (Score:3, Insightful)
If I pay for a 5Mb/s connection with unlimited downloads, I should be able to GET 5Mb/s no matter what I do at what time. If I want to be a leech for 24/7. Hey, that's what I paid for.
That is the nail, right there, taking a knock to the head. I have no problem at all with ISPs imploying traffic management, if they are honest about the way that they do it. Unfortunately there is a competitive disadvantage being honest - if an ISP sells "5Mbit, with the following traffic management" then they'll lose customers to the ISPs that claim "5Mbit completely unlimited" even if said other ISPs are managing traffic the same way.
Basically the ISPs need to stop selling contended services as if they are dedicated services. But that won't happen until they are forced to because no one ISP will want to risk being the first. The only way to make them all do it at the same time is to legislate which would in itself be a waste of time because they'd find a loophole next week and their customers would be back to square one.
Re:Using the truth to bolster a lie (Score:5, Insightful)
Essentially your argument is "You should not be using the full speed your modem provides".
That's all you're arguing. I could saturate that speed using torrents, using edonkey, using netflix, using youtube, simply clicking on a download link for a webpage, or even updating security patches to a new XP box! It's an invalid argument, hands down.
Plain and simple, Bell oversells its bandwidth. Most dialup ISPs used to have a 1/10 ratio when selling to subscribers. Good ISPs used to have 1/5. I suspect Bell is somewhere in the 1/1000 range, or even 1/10000.
If Bell was *really* concerned about their client's experience, they'd use packet shaping to ensure that P2P had a *lower priority* over SIP and other protocols. They don't, however, because they have a vested interest in ensuring that bandwidth heavy traffic is not used on their network, because:
1) it competes with all of their other businesses! Bandwidth usage = competition with TV, Video downloads, etc
2) it would require them to invent in technology upgrades
3) it makes sure that other ISPs can not compete with Bell as effectively
Keep in mind that there is almost NO competition here in Canada. If Bell was *competing* for subscribers, they'd to their best to ensure that their service was better than the next door over. They don't, because their only competition is the cable company, who also does not compete.
After all, with only two players in the market, why compete?
The same sits true for cellular services in this country, which is replied to with absurd statements of how we are 'spread out'. Absurd, the have a few low-grade, old tech towers strung in the open places, but other than that, our population density is just as high as any place else.
This is about a lack of competition, pure and simple.
Re:Using the truth to bolster a lie (Score:3, Insightful)
what do you do if the audio is all broken up? Do you pause the torrent client to get better phone service? I do*.
I do what all Competent IT/Networking people do. I set up my router to give VoIP top priority so it self throttles, I never have a problem with P2P breaking up my VoIP or web-surfing.
It seems the reality is that most of these Cable broadband companies are simply lacking in competent IT, networking and Executive staff.
Well (Score:3, Insightful)
If it is slowing down downloads etc a bit to make sure voip and other things works then I really don't care.
As long "a bit" isn't slowing things to a crawl 27/7 perhaps like 20% during peak hours. Then I'd rather have a cheap throttled internet connection where time critical packages are getting through fast.
Of course in the real world until now, what I have seen from a few ISPs is that traffic like unencrypted bittorrent are barely getting through 24/7, until you force encryption on or run it through a VPN tunnel.
My former ISP had a acceptable speed on my 20 megabit ADSL. But still when I forwarded all traffic in a VPN to a hosting center the speed on all protocols increased, torrent, http, ftp etc. even though most of the destinations had more routes to go through.
So I guess in theory it could work but the implementation is often much different.
The other shoe... (Score:4, Insightful)
"As long as all customers are treated fairly in the way they are affected, most believe that traffic shaping is a reasonable approach for ISPs (Internet service providers) to take," said the survey.
That first clause, "As long as all customers are treated fairly", is the tricky bit.
Re:It's a more Canadian solution. (Score:3, Insightful)
On second thought, if it's that critical, download it with your business internet connection, rather than your 29.99 home dsl line.
Re:Using the truth to bolster a lie (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Ever worked for an ISP? (Score:3, Insightful)
"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.
There is overbooking and there is overbooking.
Poster complained about upload. Upload is usually a measly 1/10 of download speed. That means even overbooking 20:1 will let half of your clients stream at full speed into the internet. Even at peak times its rare to see above 50% customers online, and even then below 30% uses their connections extensively.
Yes, shit does hit the fan if you overbook 100:1 and never upgrade your infrastructure.
Buffering is not a dirty word (Score:4, Insightful)
"...as shaping that traffic would likely be very visible to 'Joe Consumer' in the form of stuttering, freezes, etc of their movie stream."
Here's a solution. . . *larger buffers*. Buffering got a bad wrap a few years ago, when most Internet connections were much slower, and computers had fairly limited hard drive and memory space. Here's an idea though - if you *combine* high speed internet with reasonably large memory and disk buffers, you can effectively eliminate stuttering while still traffic shaping.
Video 'streaming' should be approached like a Tivo/DVR. . .
If you have good buffers, does it matter if the video stream is delayed 1/2 a second or even a minute now and then, if you've got several minutes of video already buffered and waiting to be played?
Heck, for HD content, I'd be willing to wait 5 or 10 minutes while it pre-buffers the first 10 or 20 minutes of video.
Like a Tivo/DVR, keep the video on the computer/set-top box, locally, after it's been received, so that when users rewind, they don't have to be *re-sent* the same video content. If they pause (or rewind to already buffered content), keep streaming into the buffer, so that when they un-pause, you have plenty of conent in the buffer for smooth playback. Then, eventually delete the content off disk once the user hasn't watched it for several days.
Smoke and mirrors (Score:3, Insightful)
Push Poll (Score:3, Insightful)
I believe the term we're looking for to describe this survey is a "push-poll".
The question goes as follows:
"Do you think the ISPs should be able to use traffic shaping to limit access to child pornography, terrorist websites, and illegal economy-hurting piracy, or do you support the criminals?"
Re:Charging by the Gigibyte... (Score:3, Insightful)
It's not infinitely renewable and free.
Any bandwidth you use is immediately available for reuse. There is no limit to how many times you can do this. To me, this means it's infinitely renewable. Yes, there's a limit to how much we can use at any given time, but you can say the same about any renewable resource. And it is free, it costs the same to use bandwith as it does to leave it idle.
It would be completely reasonable to allow cheap/unmetered downloads after midnight while severely capping large file transfers (or charging a high fee for them) from say 3pm to midnight so more people can get surf the web, play games and check their email when they get home from work without having to build more infrastructure, which definitely is not free.
What's the point of charging users if you're not going to build more infrastructure? We should not design incentives for ISPs to sit on crappy decade old infrastructure making greater and greater profits for doing nothing, as demand increases.
If there is severe contention for a link, it does make sense to have some transfer costs, but only if that money goes to improving the infrastructure.