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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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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
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!