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."

Comments

Re:Using the truth to bolster a lie

[Adrian Lopez]

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?"

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.