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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.
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!
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
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.
...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!
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
"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.