I ♥ Traffic Shaping… NOT!
A few months ago, the news broke out on Ars Technica that a Bell Sympatico employs traffic shaping to control the flow of traffic on the Internet. They claim that it is only in use during peak hours, and call it “Traffic Management”. I have always tried to stay clear of the tiresome Net Neutrality debate hoping Canada would be spared from this cancer. As with all good things they often come to an end way to early!
I’ve noticed the first effects around mid-December and it seemed to affect mostly BitTorrent traffic. Basicly, as soon as it turns 6PM, the upload and download speeds of BitTorrent is capped at 30kb/s up and 30kb/s down, making the downloading of large files unpractical. However, the purpose of such measure does not really prevent the bandwidth to being used, because it’s still available, at the same time as they apply bandwidth caps in their peak hours, I’m still able to download shows from revision3 at around 500+kb/s.
I could imagine that their network was not created with the intent of distributed information sharing, and it’s easier for them to have a big downstream then to have multiple connections sharing bandwidth. They claim they do this to make sure everyone has their equal share of the network, and I intend to have it. Overall the only issue I have with this practice is that it discriminates a specific type of traffic. Why should my use of BitTorrent be slowed down when my neighbor is using just as much bandwidth on YouTube?
One could say that if you’re not happy with your ISP you just have to pick an other one. That was a good option until it was recently revealed that Bell Canada applies it’s throttling to the third party ISP it provides bandwidth for. All those local DSL providers are brought in the fold against their will. Internet is all about access to information, and if you put a certain type of data ahead of an other the equal chances that were given by the Internet dissapear.
Lets say you make a short film and you want everyone to see it. You don’t have the money to pay for an expansive web hosting plan that would allow millions of people to see it. One solution would be to use BitTorrent to help distribute the content you have. I am sicken by the behavior Sympatico has taken in the matter and after a chat with a customer service representative I know that this decision has been made by higher management as a way to reduce their cost and build of their profits.
That turkey is you… that man is your ISP. It’s meat is your money!
Tags: isp, net neutrality