Traffic Shaping

[uno]

Yes it is a very interesting document im sure by going on what ignition,bbking and quadplay all very well respected posters say most things seem the same now with most plans seem to be reasonably on track.

[Chrysalis]

lets hope the dual channel downstream is out of evaluation stage now.

[James Henry]

Originally Posted by uno

Yes it is a very interesting document im sure by going on what ignition,bbking and quadplay all very well respected posters say most things seem the same now with most plans seem to be reasonably on track.

Heh I dunno when that document was written the ntl core was about as QOS / MPLS enabled as a baseball bat.

[mcmanic]

Traffic shaping has already beein bypassed by the new Torrent programs by using encryption

Currently there are only a few Bit Torrent clients that uses Transport Encryption or Protocol Encryption. I know Azureus and uTorrent both do.

The encryption prevents your ISP from listening on your bit torrent ports and employing traffic shaping techniques to limit your torrent bandwidth.

[James Henry]

That's an entirely new debate. Amusingly the guy who actually invented BT suggests that encryption is a waste of time, I agree with him.

However the nerds who develop this stuff are wonderfully detached from reality so you'll probably end up with the inevitable escalation where everything gets shaped unless the ISP confirms that it is what it claims it is.

Same kinda story as happened with firewalls, they used to block known dangers but thanks to abuse these days they only let known good stuff through.

[Stuart]

Originally Posted by mcmanic

Traffic shaping has already beein bypassed by the new Torrent programs by using encryption

Currently there are only a few Bit Torrent clients that uses Transport Encryption or Protocol Encryption. I know Azureus and uTorrent both do.

The encryption prevents your ISP from listening on your bit torrent ports and employing traffic shaping techniques to limit your torrent bandwidth.

Fine, so they can't tell for sure what you are doing. They may just traffic shape the encrypted data.

[bopdude]

Originally Posted by Stuart C

Fine, so they can't tell for sure what you are doing. They may just traffic shape the encrypted data.

I'd be interested to know, I use utorrent 1.5 with encryption, if I understand correct, it's meant to show up as 'normal' net traffic, surely they can't shape on that, can they

[Stuart]

Originally Posted by bopdude

I'd be interested to know, I use utorrent 1.5 with encryption, if I understand correct, it's meant to show up as 'normal' net traffic, surely they can't shape on that, can they

I have to admit, I've not really looked too deeply into it, so I could be wrong, but there will be some sort of pattern they can look for, there would have to be, as other bittorrent clients wouldn't recognise it.

[Chrysalis]

Yeah their are other ways.

Traffic coming in via high number of sources, usually p2p
Traffic coming in high pps, usually p2p
Outgoing connection to known tracker ports, shape following traffic assume p2p
If needed just shape all encrypted traffic.

All of these especially the last will catch innocent traffic at the expense of people determined to rape bandwidth.

[Scopeuk]

as has been proved time and again there corprate interests are vastly more important than customer experience next thing well know all but 80 and 21 will be blocked

[James Henry]

End of day encryption is irrelevant really, companies can start throttling the amount of connections / traffic flows each customer is allowed to make preventing them from contacting many sources and resulting in shaping of most P2P anyway.

Bram Cohen, inventor of Bittorrent, accepts the need for give and take between users and their ISPs, sadly the zealots who develop things like Azureus take it as a personal affront that an ISP would dare to tell you what you can and can't do with their network.

http://bramcohen.livejournal.com/29886.html

[brundles]

Originally Posted by James Henry

Bram Cohen, inventor of Bittorrent, accepts the need for give and take between users and their ISPs, sadly the zealots who develop things like Azureus take it as a personal affront that an ISP would dare to tell you what you can and can't do with their network.

I think that's taking it a bit far. The ISPs have a limited supply of bandwidth and do what they need to manage it. The Azureus (and other BT client) developers only do what they need to do to stay ahead of the curve with their product - which is driven by the users. If all users were a bit more considerate of bandwidth limitations (or the bandwidth was their in the first place depending on how you look at it) then the encrytion functionality still wouldn't be in the clients.

[James Henry]

Originally Posted by brundles

I think that's taking it a bit far. The ISPs have a limited supply of bandwidth and do what they need to manage it. The Azureus (and other BT client) developers only do what they need to do to stay ahead of the curve with their product - which is driven by the users. If all users were a bit more considerate of bandwidth limitations (or the bandwidth was their in the first place depending on how you look at it) then the encrytion functionality still wouldn't be in the clients.

That doesn't really make any sense to me. Users were inconsiderate towards ISPs, ISPs fight back with shaping, BT client developers give users the facilities to remain that way.

I don't see how what I said takes it too far. No-one put a gun to the developer's heads and demanded the encryption / obfuscation the developers decided to do this to get around the shaping.

http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=1083

uTorrent dev seems more up for a race with the ISPs than anything else.

Shame he'll lose: http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/71579 encryption won't touch that.

As I said before, worst case thanks to the 'free the bits' devs we'll end up with everything shaped unless the ISP knows for a fact it's not P2P.

EDIT: If anything these guys are really kicking themselves in the nuts, small ISPs who can't afford to shape will have to cap or go out of business, traffic shaping companies will make more money and be kept going by the 'arms race'.

It really is a long term no-win, even if in the short term it means improved performance for some.

[brundles]

I'm not arguing that people trying to bypass traffic shaping is a good thing - traffic shaping is the best way of making sure that the right services get the priority they need without leaving bandwidth left over doing nothing.

I just don't think it's fair to blame developers for trying to bypass it. Any product is made to get market share (even the free ones like Azureus although don't forget they do have a commercial version) which means new features are based on user feedback. And user feedback stated "moan moan whinge whine - my ISP doesn't let me download more rubbish than I can watch/use/listen to".

Like I say, I'm not arguing for them - when the inevitable 'traffic shape anything encrypted' comes in, my VPN connection to the office is screwed . Just trying to say that you should still look to the users rather than the developers - especially for something open source where some people will be users AND developers.

[James Henry]

It's precisely those users that are developers I imagine that initially implemented this stuff. Probably got upset at getting traffic shaped.

While most people were a bit upset at being traffic shaped I doubt there were calls for encrypted clients. Indeed they are still in the minority and the compatibility does indeed suck.