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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."
I like cheese too.
Camping on quad since 1996.
This isn't quite the same as the telephone network. In the POTS network, you have two end users, each having (at most) one network. Sometimes that network is the same network. If they want to talk, a connection is set up between the two networks at an exchange, and the communication goes forward.
The Internet is vastly more distributed. If you have two VOIP users, you could be traversing a half-dozen networks. In the POTS setup, both networks are motivated to provide a certain quality of service, because they are directly serving their customers (not to mention-- "having a connection" and "not having a connection" are Boolean in POTS). In the Internet example-- the transit networks are not, especially if it competes with their own services or degrades the quality of service for their own customers. Competition (i.e., the "greedy solution" in the algorithmic sense) here makes the problem worse. They are less motivated, especially if they are providing transit for free, as a part of a transit agreement. This is why you see Cogent getting de-peered all the time; other ISPs think Cogent is flooding their networks for little in return to them.