Wednesday, January 5, 2011

Living with Throttling - DPI and Network Neutrality


It is well established that the Canadian ISPs, Rogers, Bell and others, use Packet Inspection (and injection) to manage and shape their Internet services.

I have not had cable TV for almost 2 years and obtain ALL of my media content via a Roger's Cable "Managed" Internet connection.
It is more of a case of learning to live with the throttling and shaping of network traffic than getting up in arms about that it is happening. It is only going to get worse.

We should be concerned that it is being done and demand some sort of transparency from the ISPs, but it is a fact of life and in 2011 we are going to have to live with it.

I have a 95G subscription and have no problem in using this and more in a month. If the shaping were a problem for me I would have difficulty in obtaining the media that I require.
I don't, in fact I have no problem in getting more than I can watch in a given month.

As far as the claims made by TorrentPrivacy and BTGuard that your ISP will not know what you are downloading and how, that they will not throttle as a consequence, has not proven to be the case. Roger's, for one, seem to be smart enough that their packet inspection is still able to detect torrent agents such as BitTorrent, uTorrent, Vuze etc. The claim of "unlimited speed" is a marketing ploy to get you to subscribe.

The ISPs are fully capable of detecting your means of protocol by DPI (Deep Packet Inspection) no matter how you obscure your IP address or encrypt your connection. The heuristics of your data packets will be obvious torrent traffic and throttles will be applied.

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