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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.
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.
People who use car analogies to appeal to people who would otherwise not understand a thing about the topic are like that asshole in the white Escort who sat in front of me at the light this morning yapping away on his cell phone, too oblivious to notice that the light had changed.
This guy's the limit!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
You do realize that by using P2P to get my Warcraft patches & Ubuntu ISOs that I am reducing the load normally incurred by going all the way to California for them, don't you?
Look up content distribution networks (CDN) and see how they helped reduce traffic on the internet. Now think about how P2P allows people to be 'kinder' to everyone who uses the internet. By shaping the traffic, you are telling me to go back to the old way when I would request 1 GB of data from across the country and everyone along the way would have to make room for my traffic.
A method was developed to better manage traffic in the big picture. Now ISPs are actually discouraging this technique! ISPs don't want quick efficient traffic on their lines (which is what occurs when you're down the street from me and we're sharing data for a large ISO) so they want to shift the load back out to the entire internet. "Stupid" does not begin to describe this.
My work here is dung.
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.
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
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
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.
That is the nail, right there, taking a knock to the head. I have no problem at all with ISPs imploying traffic management, if they are honest about the way that they do it. Unfortunately there is a competitive disadvantage being honest - if an ISP sells "5Mbit, with the following traffic management" then they'll lose customers to the ISPs that claim "5Mbit completely unlimited" even if said other ISPs are managing traffic the same way.
Basically the ISPs need to stop selling contended services as if they are dedicated services. But that won't happen until they are forced to because no one ISP will want to risk being the first. The only way to make them all do it at the same time is to legislate which would in itself be a waste of time because they'd find a loophole next week and their customers would be back to square one.
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......
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.
"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.
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.
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?"