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Canadians Find Traffic Shaping "Reasonable"
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."
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.
John
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.
Sent from your iPad.
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.
Yeah. Would you choose a neurosurgeon who pokes around people's brains in his spare time? I wouldn't.
People who use car analogies to appeal to people who would otherwise not understand a thing about the topic are demagogues and need to be shut up.
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.
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 ...
My work here is dung.
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.
It's been a long time.
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?
As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.
It's like asking the general public whether it's better to use an oropharyngeal airway or nasopharyngeal airway. There's no way a random group of people get what traffic shaping and net neutrality really mean. I look at our customers, even the ones who can grasp technical topics, you have to keep it really simple. They had to skew those questions to get answers on that topic, there's no way.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Depending on who makes the poll questions and what the questions are you can get different answers from the same group of people.
Do you think the individuals who use most of the bandwidth should be limited so you can afford cheaper bandwidth?
Do you think the government should put a limit on how much bandwidth you use?
Most ideas come with trade offs. Depending on the views of the poll writer you can get their bias in the questions.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I don't see how traffic shaping can really work over the long term especially if the main reason for it is to try to stop an activity like P2P which for the most part is in a legally grey area at best. I could understand the ISP offering to route certain types of traffic with a higher priority (assuming you can identify that type of traffic) but something like P2P traffic could be made to just hide amongst the other encrypted traffic.
I'm sure this is already being done but spotting probably P2P traffic should be fairly easy since the source and destination will probably be in residential netblocks. You could even use the IP address range filter used to stop spamming. Of course this would catch VOIP as well but I don't suppose most ISPs care all that much.
I used to have a better sig but it broke.
Quite simply this practice would go away if our telephone companies actually competed. I live in Halifax and we have excellent but still expensive internet via the cable company. Yet I have never seen an advertisement that really compared the differences between local cable and local dsl (huge around here). It is almost like they are afraid to compete. Prices haven't changed in years except to go up a tiny bit. Yet if the cost of bandwidth and equipment has plummeted why haven't prices plummeted? In a competitive environment this should be a huge opening for someone to come along and get a price war going. If my Cable internet company made any profit when I paid $40 a month ten years ago then their costs should now be a few dollars per month. Plus it seems that there is a huge opportunity to leap frog them with either wireless or fiber.
Baring in mind that most consumers are clueless, mentioning traffic shaping will mean nothing to them, especially if the connection seems reasonably quick to them. You can't miss what you never had in the first place, and with traffic shaping, it makes the network providers get away with a worse service for the same money the consumer pays in subscriber fees. They make lots of profits, and they have zero will to invest in the network because it's easier to fleece the consumers instead. The politicians are guilty of being technologically ignorant and allowing this fraud to take place.
Take Nobody's Word For It.
Well, to put it simply, yes. Certain applications can wreck havoc on the a network. Youtube, while bandwidth intensive, doesn't open 1000's of outgoing connections. Nothing against P2P, but it is a very intensive protocol. Simply capping it to 90% of your max upload speed can keep VoIP humming along just fine.
Would you rather a 911 call be interrupted so that you could upload Rick Roll to someone? The line has to be drawn somewhere now that we have "Triple Play" services with Video/Phone/Internet.
I can't think of any ISP in Australia that offers true unlimited data download. Optus Cable used to be when it was first introduced -- my friend up the road was the only person in the neighbourhood to actually have it, and boy did we get some sweet speeds. We would download at about 2mb/s all day every day, and never heard boo. Then within a few years, new accounts were shaped after 40gb, but he still had unlimited. Then, he was forced to have his traffic shaped after 40gb as well. Soon enough for the same price as unlimited download, your speeds would be shaped to 64kbps after downloading 12gb.
My personal experience is going from dial up to ADSL (256/64) with a 40gb/month limit, with shaping to 64/64 if I went over that. This was with iiNet and was awesome -- we were paying about $55/month, and it was a great and reliable service. Now we pay $65/month to get 150GB/month on an ADSL2+ connection. However, it ends up being 110gb off peak (1am-7am), which is fine if you know how to set up limits for your downloads, but still it begs the question, "Why?" Well, obviously because they're a business who is trying to make the most profit possible while using as little resources as possible, but because of the advertising for the plan, the ISP (TPG) became inundated with customers, and their proxies were over-run accordingly. These issues are all fixed now though, but for a good 6 months, the connection was shaky at best.
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?
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
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.
I dont read
And it's not what the ISP is advertising.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
In this morning's free "Metro" newspaper we get in Toronto, there was an article about that. Guess what the title of the article was? And cover page mind you.
"Canadians don't mind Internet traffic cops: Poll"
Well, duh, Internet traffic cop is NOT the same as Internet traffic shaping. Now if they had asked questions like: "would you be affected if your ISP charges you more to access certain content or website?" then only an idiot would say "no". I guess it's all in the wording. If they had shown you this picture, what would you have said?
http://www.enigmacurry.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/09/net-neutrality-as-cable-company.jpg
The article went on to say that "54 per cent said they did not know whether traffic management affected them personally". So more than half had no idea and we use their opinion for legislation?
Full article on Metro Toronto (Flash)
AC
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.'
Close but no banana. There's one severe disparity in that analogy. They're not parked cars. This example makes it look like the resource is being wasted, unused, and entirely withheld from others that need it. I'd go for that comparison if it were a car that was driving on that highway. I might have to concede that they have a rather large gas tank and have been driving in circles around the bypass ring all day long, consuming resources continuously that others need only a small portion of, but the used analogy here is just fraud.
This is just getting back to the people getting kicked out of the all-you-can-eat-buffet for eating too much. Now there's an accurate analogy.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
When it comes to traffic shaping I am a firm believer that the companies should not be overloading their connection. If an ISP advertises a certain rate they should not be relying on most people not using the Internet except during prime time as an excuse to promise service they can't actually provide. P2P has many applications and it's only going to get bigger so the ISPs need to start adapting by either not accepting more customers than they can currently handle during all hours of the day at the maximum advertised connection speed, or upgrading the network to accommodate the uses of P2P technology. Traffic shaping is the primary reason I use DSL. My ISP never throttles my bandwidth even if my upload is running at 80% 24/7.
...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.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
More Propaganda...
Only dogs now what to do with poles...and this one deserves it.
We DO MIND Traffic shaping...
But what the heck can we do about it ?
Month after month our bills get higher and our download cap gets smaller...
We need to open up the market to more competition so badly.
End of Line.
Obviously, they didn't get a proper sample of people because I would imagine more people would disagree with traffic-shaping if they understood it's true purpose was to undermine net-neutrality and keep most of the bandwidth in the hands of the old big-boys club using every Canadian taxpayers' money to build their monopoly infrastructure. There is real injustice going on. That's O.K. though. Given time, all this abuse of power(in this case internet bandwidth controllers) will come to light. When the ISP big boys club put up resistance to the natural flow of information, the BIG BAD ISP CLUB will be smacked right down eventually.
BIG ISP CLUB BOYS...get ready for a global smacking down because I suspect you won't have to wait for long.
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.
Free Martian Whores!
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.
I am officially gone from
What they're saying is that the people that use p2p are expected to wait until 3 in the morning to get a decent connection. I don't think so.
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.
Good.. Bad.. I'm the guy with the gun.
They own the network. They will charge whatever they want, and you will pay it, or go elsewhere. You don't have to like it. All this whiney crybaby bullshit with all the propeller heads thinking they are entitled to god-given unthrottled broadband is starting to piss me off. They own it; you rent it. They are the ones that have invested the money into this backbone. Not you. You are a leech.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hjh13hxehl4
You can get any answer you want out of a survey.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Torrents aren't typically a problem because they're downloading huge files. This is what the network is designed to do, and the end user expects to set-and-forget so it could reasonably have a time frame of 'tomorrow'. The part that's contrary to the design is the uploading of huge files. You're not supposed to be doing that. Chances are, you even signed a contract that said you wouldn't run a 'server' of any kind.
The business model needs to adapt. However, I don't think it is very honest to blame the ISP for expecting you to play by their terms. We should be lobbying for change, perhaps at the legal level or perhaps by seeking/creating alternatives.
You leet's out there need more upstream, and your ISP needs to start seeing you as a data provider, and a lot of this will get better much sooner. Until that happens, please limit your P2P upload rate to something minuscule and give the rest of us a fighting chance to have access to a speedy network.
I don't like the car analogy. How about this one? An airplane has 100 seats. The airline sells 200 seats. The airline complains when 200 people show up because, clearly, the airplane has only 100 seats and the airline's hands are tied in the matter. However, they do propose a solution, noble and helpful businesspeople that they are. If everyone pays a little more they'll scrap the whole airplane idea and hire a couple of charter buses to get everyone where they need to go.
mmmm...forbidden donut
Also, if I'm downloading media to watch I still need to keep up with the rate at which I'm watching it. So the guy that uses a protocol that streams it to him and pulls 1GB over 2 hrs gets preferential treatment even though I need 1GB every two hours for my watching I do offline? I agree with others in the thread: ISPs should have to provide reasonably close to the quoted speed for your connection. Blaming everything on congestion when the "congestion" is 24hrs a day is bogus. It isn't traffic peaks it is lack of capacity to deliver what you sold.
Wrong. A lot of the money that has gone into the "pipes" (at least in the US) came from the government or from deregulation of fees.
Just because you are paranoid does not mean that no-one is out to get you.
"Pollsters found that most users fully understood how
important traffic lights are to proper traffic shaping"
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!"
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
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.
Hmmm, I wonder why it didn't report on people's views on the use of laparoscopy in cases where the risk of trocar injuries is elevated?
Oh! I know! Because that is a question for surgeon's to answer, not the general public.
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.'
Why P2P? Who not YouTube? Why not all large downloads? Why not all small downloads? What precisely is it about the kind of bits that makes them different than other kinds of bits? If I use P2P to download a 180 meg Debian netinst bundle using bittorrent, is that better or worse than a person who is registered for a couple dozen podcasts on iTunes?
And you, you fools. You keep arguing against capping, against tiering, against anything that would enable ISPs to charge for the number of bits. So they are left with no alternative but the sneaky one that the general public doesn't understand. Argue against them using "unlimited", argue for full disclosure of bandwidth limits, but arguing against the limits themselves is what is causing them (admittedly, happily) to jump back to traffic shaping. This is partly your fault.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
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.
"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.
I'm willing to bet that poll question was a little more suited to the results then they are letting on.
When you qualify that poll question "Is traffic shaping reasonable?" with "as long as the customer is treated fairly" it means something completely different then the reality of the situation. If the ISP's get their way they won't give a shit if it's fair to the customer so long as they don't start loosing business.
So the poll question may be "fair", but the reflection of reality certainly isn't going to be true.
IMAGE VERIFICATION IS EVIL!
A major point that is often ignored: Bell is both an Common Carrier (they own the copper) and an ISP. By making this distinction it becomes blatantly clear that Bell is being anti-competitive by:
- Offering ADSL2 *only* to its own retail customers == (anti-competitve)
- Traffic shaping using DPI on wholesaler networks == (vastly overselling of wholesaler pipes, if we are really to believe congestion is true)
Traffic Management isn't the issue: as mentioned above, basic traffic management is/has to be done by all ISPs for QoS. Control over your own network is the issue. It would not bother me if my ISP throttled my connection, I would simply change ISP (in a trully competitive market). My current ISP (teksavvy) does not throttle but they are unable to offer me the service they want to because Bell sticks their dirty DPI fingers into networks it has no right to manage. This is clearly abusive overreach of their dominant position as both ILEC and ISP.
*PS I worked as an interviewer before for Decima / OpinionSearch and the telecommunication (Rogers/Bell) polls are the most biased BS I've ever seen. Without knowing who commissioned the survey and wrote the questions (ie who the Harris / Decima $cliient$ is) this poll is irrelevant.
Wrong, most of the money that came from the infrastructure was funded by taxpayer dollars.
I am going to ring the bullshit bell. I would not be surprised if this "survey" was done on behalf of the telecommunications industry. As the adage goes you can make statistics prove whatever you like.
First of all what "percentage" of Canadians even know wtf "traffic shaping" is? Second, even if it was explained to them in detail, would understand? Thirdly how was it explained, and with what bias? Considering for a moment that Rogers Communications describes it as "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", then if course people are going to vote that way. Another car analogy? Really?
On top of this what they could vote for is phrased as "reasonable as long as customers are treated fairly". Wtf does that mean? Because we all know that in Canada the telecommunications industry, Rogers and Bell, certainly have a record of treating customers "fairly". Bell was quoted in these CRTC hearings to say basically it was "fair" to degrade network quality to independent ISP's because they do it to their own customers. In essence, they argue the playing field is even because they treat their customers just as shitty as they treat the independents that lease their lines. Bell and Rogers have been screwing it to the customer for as long as I can remember as they have no competition to speak of, and consumers have no choice but to bend over and smile.
The summary points out that only 20% poll had ever even heard of file shaping before, which makes the survey a bit silly. They also make a point that I just did that the people polled is
They will interpret "As long as all customers are treated fairly" to mean that if you block Vonage fro one customer its OK as long as you block it from all the others.
Traffic from legitimate real-time video streaming, which may or may not be sourced by the ISP, is growing. Part of this will be the ISP/Cableco itself providing on-demand videos. This would appear to be the greater 'threat' to bandwidth, and not so easily shaped, as shaping that traffic would likely be very visible to 'Joe Consumer' in the form of stuttering, freezes, etc of their movie stream. Also, you likely get into neutrality legal issues (preferring your cableco division's traffic over outside traffic) if you shape outside streaming traffic vs your own. These ISP's are, one way or another, going to have to improve their capacity. Best get started........
V for Vendetta: People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people.
"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?"
No bias to that statement there. It seems that the people surveyed support fair traffic shaping. I.e., shape based on content, but be agnostic to the source. QoS has been talked about for quite some time without it being political. VOIP/televideo/VoD gets a certain degree of higher priority over things that are fine coming in possibly disordered packets. let customers know this when they buy a plan. But most importantly, do it fairly. If you sell VOIP, treat all VOIP at the same QoS level. Now, if Comcast offers live streaming TV, but degrades ALL non-streamed video delivery, maybe there's a problem. But that should be a treatable problem. As long as it is source/destination neutral, QoS can increase usefulness of a network for everyone.
"...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.
In Canada the standard response to any question is "Ya Hey!" thus the skewed results.
Got Code?
Who the hell did they call for this survey? Did they use extension numbers?
As a Canadian, no. But they didn't consult me, did they?
Nice young lady(NYL) comes up to you.
Obviously you want to create a good impression, you don't want to look a fool, do you?
So she starts asking you some questions:
NYL : Are you unhappy with slow speeds on your internet connection?
You : Yes, of course.
NYL : Would you be acceptable to solutions to solving the congestion problems on the Internet?
You : Yes, of course.
NYL : So you would support traffic shaping as long as customers are treated properly?
You : Yes, of course.
Now, if you wanted the opposite results
NYL : Do you believe that consumers like you should be in control of the internet or your ISP
You : The consumer, of course.
NYL : Do you think Broadband providers should be able to use their Market power to control
online activity?
You: Of course, not.
NYL : So you oppose traffic shaping by ISP's?
You : Yes, of course.
http://users.aims.ac.za/~mackay/probability/survey.html
100% of survey respondents also agreed that if given the choice between their current ISP service and one that offered one hundred times the bandwidth for one-tenth the price, they'd choose the latter. So be sure to lobby the government for laws that support this position as well.
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
Net neutrality has nothing to do with shaping P2P traffic. And any such tie is just another leacher trying to masquerade as legitimate use. I dunno about you guys but I have downloaded ISOs for Linux distros and its' always been from mirrors directly using FTP or HTTP, never P2P. I'm not saying P2P is bad, but it *is* essentially only used to distribute copyrighted materials.
Net neutrality though is more about peering between hosts than clients. Like being able to go to google.ca with my Rogers cable modem even though Rogers is a "yahoo" partner. That's what neutrality is about. Not about whiny kids trying to leach off P2P.
And frankly shaping is fair. Why should my once-in-a-while traffic be slowed down because some ass with a pile of torrents wants to download [or upload] 24/7/365? We're both paying the same monthly fees, yet I get less of the service [which is finite in capacity] because they're being a hog. It'd be like going to a buffet and filling your plate with all of the awesome crispy chicken wings. Sure we both paid the same to get into the buffet, but you're still an ass for taking more than your share.
On the other hand I'm having a hard time feeling bad about Rogers margins. This is the same company that charges $7/mo to show you the number of who is calling you. That's essentially a 99.99% profit margin for what amounts to very cheap over-the-air traffic.
Either way, neutrality is not about P2P so stop pretending.
Shape my traffic - seriously - I HAVE NO BANDWIDTH ANYWAY - in Canada I've given up an arm, a leg, my right eye, and a kidney for 15Mbit -- most of the time this is reliable and I can get UP TO that speed and when I am getting that speed it is usually trying to download something from Netflix or update my Linux Iso's.
I am sick and tired of Canadian ISP's providing crap for bandwidth - overcharging for this bandwidth - then complaining when I use it.
From what I've read in previous comments it's that this survey is more alarmist than anything. "hey you know your neighbor is downloading movies off of the internet, which makes your internet slower. how would you feel if we made his internet slower so you can get your mail faster".
GIVE ME A BREAK!
"i lost my dignity on a slippery wiener"
Unlike radio/tv broadcasting, the Internet suffers from bandwidth limitations so I guess traffic shaping is something we should expect sooner or later. But the issue is, ISPs sell "unlimited" access packages and that's misleading. They should clearly indicate that for this and that particular software they apply traffic shaping.
What I do with the bandwidth is my business and none of the ISPs.
John A. downloading the latest Debian should get the same bandwidth and responsiveness as Fred B. using Skype to phone his mum.
If Bell doesn't have the capacity, then they should not offer the bandwidth. The same goes for all ISPs.
This is really an argument about favouring the services which the ISP and the paying corporate clients offer for money. Let them get away with it and you can kiss your freedom goodbye as more and more paid for tripe gets pumped into your home.
Forget the cars and planes and bus queues and stuff.
It's all about the organisation which offers you a supply route along which a number of services can be delivered. The supply route provider wants to give priority, on the branch of the supply route which you are paying for, to a third party's services, not because you want them to have priority, but because it is more profitable for the supply route provider to do that - because it means that they do not have to enhance the supply route network to cope with the increasing traffic.
I'm inundated with advertisements that don't mention price or even the speed of the product. I will "save hundreds!!" and get "blazing fast internet!!", but even the fine-print will just mention that both of these are variable. The reality of capitalism is that competition is very limited, with companies either forming monopolies or cooperating closely with their competitors to avoid zero-sum scenarios.
I was ready to post and hang my head low and apologize for all fellow Canadians. However, I just flipped to my local city major newspaper and the online poll question is "Should Internet service providers be allowed to manage and prioritize online traffic?". Currently out of 688 votes, the result is a resounding 85% 'NO'. Maybe there is hope for us yet.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
I actually took this phone survey. When they asked about traffic shaping, I told the interviewer that the question was extremely misleading. At the end of the interview, I emailed the polling company to express my alarm that they were using such misleading questions. I would recommend others who took this survey do the same.
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?"
If my quake packet arrives before my HTTP one, yay!.... But if my Facebook content arrives slower than MySpace, because myspace paid my ISP more... that's bad.
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!
Meanwhile, as my 4 gig torrent download screeches to a halt, the neighbor to my left downloads a DVD from Netflix, and the neighbor to my right masturbates while streaming porn to his computer, both at 8 Mbs.
That's the whole point, though: They want to get a high "I'm ok with it" percentage. If they had asked if they would be alright with their internet speeds dropping to almost zero depending on what they are using it for, nobody would agree with that. This way they can say the percentage who don't like it are just the "bad guys".
There is another poll, put up by one of my local papers (The Winnipeg Free Press) as a result of an article the published today in regards to this "poll"
If you want to voice your opinion on traffic shaping, feel free to go to [url]http://www.winnipegfreepress.com[/url] and scroll down about a page, it's in the left column.
I would link to the article, but it's just rehashing the topic of this post. It is a misleading article that confuses traffic shaping and bandwidth limiting with net neutrality, and it really seems like nothing more than a PR piece put out by some of the largest ISPs in Canada.
Their court filings showed that the amount of time they were at capacity was like a couple of percent of the time.
WITHOUT throttling.
I read this story earlier today and could not believe the throttling practices of Bell, whom as far as I know are the backbone to all the major ISP's in Canada. Most of us in Canada have fibre sitting SO close to our homes but of course it gets down graded before entering. Those stats... well... you know they could be accurate or they could be terribly phrased. I know that at my IT job I've recieved so many surveys where you get questions like "Do you find Microsoft office to be more innovating than before or is still just the same as always, the industry standard?" Then you see a headline like "90% of IT specialists agree, Microsoft Office is the industry standard!". It's terrible how the ISP's are making you pay for a service and not keeping up with their end. If I pay for 16 Mbps, who are they to tell me what I can and can not do with it. If they can't support this, then they should not offer it. The internet was designed on bursty traffic a LONG time ago. Now we have streaming, downloading, p2p, and remote connections galore. Perhaps it's time to leave the stone age of the internet and move beyond bursts, peaks, and spikes in traffic and accept that it's going to be consistent high bandwidth usage!
Give each user their allotted portion of the pipe, and let them auction their portion off when they aren't using it. Let the users adjust the amount they are willing to pay for this (based on QOS data) on a per-packet basis.
If we're getting rid of Net Neutrality, I suggest that we also get rid of Electricity Neutrality. Because things like cable modems and routers increase the load on the electric system, cable companies should have to pay extra money for all the electricity that they consume.
No, I will not work for your startup
My ISP is Rogers... my biggest complaint is that while the Download speed has increased over the years, the upload speed has actually seriously DECREASED... that's what pisses me off... Rogers and Bell both have had periods of having Monthly caps (or not having them), generally they've both had (or haven't had) them at the same time. There was a period where Bell didn't have caps caused me to consider switching, until they announced they were getting caps too... Overall, my standard connection with something like a 10 Mbps Download and 512 Kbps Upload with a 60 Gig monthly cap isn't terrible, except that as a power user I end up getting really near my cap and sometimes passing it. Warning, incoming wall of text about my opinion on the root cause of the problems and to what I object about with the filtering: What I object to is the traffic shaping and the way they decide how to prioritize the internet connection when I, as a smart competent user that knows what he's doing, has already decided how I want my data and when I want it... I understand however that as most users don't know what they're doing, don't know how to change and manage settings and applications and just want things to work and the fact that most applications have terrible defaults, that the ISP needs to get involved and needs to make sure that the service they sell doesn't get used in a way that users aren't expecting (aka the user passes his monthly cap in a matter of days because a P2P app manages to use it up, viruses and other such things...). I have seen how people can easily use up their service without realizing it, but in the end, it's caused by their own actions... what the ISPs should be investing in is more education for the general public... we're really at a situation where the general public is too stupid in what it knows or understands about the computer world (or often, doesn't care, unfortunately) but is smart enough to be dangerous and to be able to cause problems... This is why it's problematic, because as an ISP, they have to deal with all the people out there who just don't know better, not the relatively small amount of users out there who actually have enough of a clue out there to not be serious problems (and that's totally ignoring the INTENT of everyone... never mind just accidental/standard behavior). If people actually knew what was allowed, and possible, they'd probably find that most people would behave properly after getting properly warned and educated after the first period of problematic usage/behavior... the problem is, people are now going to rely on having the filtering reducing the amount that people have to think and know to control their behavior and be good net citizens...
BlueBadger
Obviously the analogy in the article (parking a car on the street) is very poor. It's more like moving a large volume over the road (semis or tons of cars). Well, various municipalities *do* restrict semi traffic or commercial traffic during rush hour.
The ISPs should suck it up and build out to cover usage. But, there's always been a recognition of priorities throughout internet history, generally with bulk, normal, and a high-priority setting. Bulk can be delayed to keep other services working in a timely manner. Normal is normal. High-priority can "jump the queue" or ortherwise prioritized above normal, this was usually used for control messages or the like. FTP would use bulk. e-mail would use bulk. I wouldn't say most FTP or e-mail use would be bulk any more, but really.. bittorrent (and other p2p) is bulk. The ISPs should build out to cover most usage, but I would rather have my bulk usage slow down at busy times of day, than have my whole connection crap out because fully unmanaged usage is causing congestion collapse. I think also there shouldn't be caps, but if they insist the caps should be soft caps -- don't threaten cancellation, put unexpected charges on the bill, etc... slow a "too heavy" user down for the rest of the month, with a "Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead!" option to pay for more unthrottled use.
Fuck you, Frank!
For those of you who aren't Penn & Teller's Bullshit fans:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=If9EWDB_zK4
I'd like to know who they asked. I work for an ISP, and I have many friends who work for others within Atlantic Canada - Not one of us heard of this survey, and I would flat out call them liars.