Caught In The Throttle - Rogers and Shaw Are Traffic Shaping

[blahblohblah]

Caught In The Throttle - Rogers and Shaw Are Traffic Shaping

By Julie Fortier, Ottawa Business Journal Staff - Sep 4, 2007

Small businesses and teleworkers could see high-speed Internet slowed to a
crawl

Having the highest-quality Internet connection is a must in today's world of
teleworking and home-based businesses. Many businesses and workers rely on
their Internet service providers to provide them with the high-speed service
they pay for, but are ISPs delivering what they promise?

As more and more Canadians begin using their high-speed Internet for
applications that use a large amount of bandwidth, some ISPs are starting to
pick and choose who gets full use of their high-speed access, while limiting
or "de-prioritizing" others.

The battle so far has been fought over users' abilities to download and
upload torrents.

Torrents work like this: A website will host a list of films, software or
music and connect the individual who has the file on their computer with the
person who wants to download it. Files for a feature-length film are very
large, typically around 700 megabytes. These torrent sites have become so
popular that they are causing massive amounts of bandwidth to be used.
Several ISPs in Canada and around the world have claimed that roughly 10 per
cent of users can take up to 90 per cent of bandwidth through peer-to-peer
(P2P) file-sharing programs.

In Canada, Rogers and Shaw in Vancouver have responded by reducing the high
speed of users downloading and uploading (or seeding) torrents. Rogers
admitted to what it called "prioritizing" "real-time use" such as surfing
and e-mail transfers ahead of large file transfers in a December 2005
article in the Globe and Mail.

"I think Rogers' position on this has been very clear," vice-president and
general manager of Rogers high speed Internet, Tom Turner told OBJ. "To make
sure we have optimized performance for our customers, time sensitive and
immediate uses such as web surfing and e-mail are given priority. We don't
traffic shape."

However, according to multiple definitions, including one by Cisco Systems,
which designs traffic-shaping software, "The primary reasons to use traffic
shaping are to control access to available bandwidth, to ensure that traffic
conforms to specific policies, and to regulate the flow of traffic in order
to avoid congestion."

Users have tried to get around traffic shaping, also known as "throttling"
by encrypting their files so ISPs can't tell what they are downloading or
uploading.

It was soon suspected by University of Ottawa technology law professor
Michael Geist in his tech law blog (and subsequently printed in the Toronto
Star), Azureus' wiki site (Azureus is a popular torrent-hosting program) and
countless message boards that Rogers is one of the few ISPs to simply
degrade all encrypted traffic, legal or not.

"Many people in the technical community have noticed that many of the
services out there that engage in traffic shaping are rather blunt in their
approach, which has led some to mistake legitimate traffic for torrent
traffic," said Mr. Geist. He noted that BitTorrent itself is not illegal in
Canada and many legitimate files being swapped are being caught in the mix.

From personal experience he cited the massive slowdown of e-mail transfers
at the University of Ottawa. The U of O set up its own legitimate encrypted
channel for e-mail and he speculated Rogers' packet-shaping technology
assumed the encrypted traffic was a file-sharing program.

[blahblohblah]

His concerns were answered in a letter in the Toronto Star in which Ken
Engelhart, vice-president of regulatory affairs at Rogers, said the company
does not degrade all encrypted traffic. Mr. Engelhard said in the case of
the University of Ottawa e-mail channel, Rogers had "not been able to detect
any performance issues."

Mr. Geist took that to mean that Rogers was not denying that it limits the
amount of available bandwidth so these applications do not perform in an
optimal way.

This is a big problem for small business owners and teleworkers, as Rogers
doesn't make it known on its website that they use traffic shaping. Mr.
Geist said a significant number of people came forward after reading his
article on Rogers' practices to share similar experiences. "When using
encrypted channels for Voice over IP or different kinds of services, they
found them almost unusable with Rogers' high speed," he said.

The news of file transfer prioritizing came as a shock to Bob Fortier,
president of the Canadian Teleworkers Association (CTA), but it was not the
first time he had heard of ISPs making assumptions about what users are
doing. When working from his Manotick home, his small local ISP blocked his
newsletters to the 1,500 members of the CTA, claiming he was "spamming" his
own members.

"If you work in a company as a teleworker and part of your role is to send
documents to more than 25 people, you are basically forced to take an extra
step (to) subscribe to a higher business account," Mr. Fortier said. The
difference between a personal account versus a business account might be
twice as much per month, something many small home-based businesses might
not be able to afford. He found the news that Rogers prioritizes file
transfers troubling.

"I can see many situations where you would have a legitimate worker sending
large files. Say you work in IT and you need to send your backup files to
different locations," said Mr. Fortier. "If you're working for a small
organization, they may not have the resources that large organizations have
so they may not pay for your equipment or Internet access."

"Whether for personal purposes or small business purposes or teleworking
purposes, Canadians have a right to at least transparency in the services
they are purchasing, specifically when these services are marketed as being
high-speed and enabling all kinds of activities that it may not be able to
meet," Mr. Geist said.

Ashwin Navin, president of the San Fransisco-based BitTorrent Inc., worked
closely with BitTorrent's creator, Cram Cohen, to bring torrents into the
mainstream. He works with several ISPs and major studios like Warner
Brothers and Twentieth Century Fox to bring their products to users.
According to Mr. Navin, the issue comes down to ISPs not wanting to pay to
provide the service they promised to their users.

"It is cost, fundamentally. What ISPs have is a gym-membership business
model which is they sell more subscriptions than they have capacity to
provide. They would love it if people didn't use their broadband
connection," he said. "File sharing, YouTube, all these applications are
using up the pipes and that is in conflict with the gym-membership model."

The solution, he said is to have customers vote with their pocketbooks.

"The filtering initiatives are pretty short-sighted, in my opinion. I think
what people want is more capacity for the applications they thought they
were going to get for the price they paid," Mr. Navin said. "Unfortunately
in Canada it is a pretty monopolistic environment and it would be great for
someone like Bell Canada to step up and win all these users. There is
definitely a need for competition."

[bionicbadger]

blah, blah, blah.
Read your contract that you signed. It specifically says you cannot run a file server and thats effectively what bit torrent is.

[dark169]

blah, blah, blah.
Read your contract that you signed. It specifically says you cannot run a file server and thats effectively what bit torrent is.

a server is exactly what a torrent is not.

[demanche]

Switch to a non-rogers connection, there are tons of 3rd party dsl companies that do not use the rogers/bell network, and will not get throttled.

[chickenbones]

Switch to a non-rogers connection, there are tons of 3rd party dsl companies that do not use the rogers/bell network, and will not get throttled.

Actually most of those 3rd party ISP use either Rogers or Bell networks.

[corrupt123]

Actually most of those 3rd party ISP use either Rogers or Bell networks.

Yeah, I dont see who else they'd use unless they're doing it via satellite or something, which I doubt.

If there is a legit ISP in the Toronto area that is not using Rogers, Bell, or any other Throttling parent provider, please, do tell.

[weedb0y]

Actually most of those 3rd party ISP use either Rogers or Bell networks.

except 3web, I dont know of any CABLE ISPs? even

[trucanuck]

Cram Cohen lol.... wtf
Some other mistakes in the article as well...

[direct-x]

Anyone who values their business, home base or not should not be subscribing to a residential type service.

[mcg]

Teksavvy DSL... =)

[mlerner]

Actually most of those 3rd party ISP use either Rogers or Bell networks.

No they do not, Bell provides wholesale services (i.e. you buy the right to use the copper lines and supply the bandwidth) and 3web has a similar arrangement with Rogers.

[demanche]

Actually most of those 3rd party ISP use either Rogers or Bell networks.

Actually 3rd party dsl companies use bells infrastructure, ie. their phone lines -- but all network traffic is routed through the 3rd party's infrastructure and routing.

I know this because my current isp has had a slowdown latly, and all 3rd party dsl companies are not affected.
(they did not have as much throughput from the bell network as they should have had but have admited it openly)

So from the phone line to the 3rd parties network, you are on bell, but otherwise you are not -- throtteling on bells network will not affect 3rd parties as traffic is routed as tunneled L2DP packets to the 3rd parties network from bells infrastructure. (teksavvys explanation on this topic on another forum)

[bionicbadger]

a server is exactly what a torrent is not.

pull your head out of your rear.

You are serving/sharing [parts] of a larger file with other users on the network who request it from you. The only difference from a file server is that the file is divided into parts, otherwise its EXACTLY the same as a file server.

[YnD]

Rogers is garbage... they are also NOT the "most reliable network in Canada"... like they claim to be... network busys galore...