Slashdot Mirror
Georgia Tech's ShaperProbe Detects ISP Traffic Manipulation
An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from Ars Technica: "Two researchers at Georgia Tech can tell you exactly how American ISPs shape Internet traffic, and which ones do so. Bottom line: of the five largest Internet providers in the country, the three cable companies (Comcast, Time Warner, Cox) employ shaping while the telephone companies (AT&T, Verizon) do not — though that fact is less significant for the user experience than it might first sound."
Their network runs on public land. They are also granted exclusivity by local governments. I think that regulation is in order.
I work for a college, and we shape / police traffic to / from the Internet.
This was a necessity on our 3Mb link of many years ago, but has still been useful on our 1Gb link of today.
This policy has greatly improved the user experience. Interactive protocols have low latency, bulk transfer protocols get sent to the end of the line. Where we do slow down things, it isn't really noticed by most folks. After first implementing this many years ago, we immediately got positive feedback. Now it is just "how things are."
Hell, I shape / police traffic at home to my cable modem. VOIP and interactive ssh are still usable even with huge downloads going on now, and users hammering the public wifi I provide to my neighborhood.
Is shaping the same as throttling?
Sort of.
Online, shaping and throttling are something network companies do to customers. In meatspace, throttling is what customers want to to to network company executives.
HTH.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Is shaping the same as throttling?
Shaping is when they give you a rate and enforce it. (The faster burst at startup is because you had accumulated some credit by not using your bandwidth in the immediately preceeding time.) There may be separate shaping mechanisms for different protocol families and there may also be shaping on aggregates - like total bandwidth across multiple users of a common DSLAM.
Throttling is when, after they notice that you've used a lot of bandwidth lately, they turn down the rate on the shaper ("traffic manager").
Shaping is mainly about things like keeping protocols from interfering with each other (by giving different classes of them separate allowances) and avoiding congestion and queue-too-full latency (by limiting the traffic sent to a following box to the amount it can handle.)
Throttling is about keeping a user's resource consumption down by slowing him down after he's run fast for a while.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way