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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."
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.
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.
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.
That's your take on it, but it's not necessarily the right way to look at the problem. Some of us think ISPs should not be allowed to unfairly degrade specific protocols. It's one thing to shape traffic in a way that guarantees reliable service for all users, but some ISPs like to degrade P2P in ways that are not in proportion with actual impact on network resources.
I recall seeing a post by an ISP employee who bragged about degrading P2P performance down to unusable levels (something like 1% of available bandwidth shared among all of the ISPs users) and laughing at the fact that customers might think the problem was on the peer's side rather than the ISP's side. I find that despicable, and a true violation of the principle of net neutrality.
"In prison you just have to shut your eyes and take it. Here you have to shut your eyes and give it."
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.
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.
That, right there, is very sad. And scary. Seriously, can we institute some kind of comprehension requirement before people are allowed to vote? And I don't just mean in phone polls.
"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.