stormbrew

Traffic Shaping

On Monday, Canadian ISPs Rogers and Shaw went up in front of the CRTC to discuss traffic shaping. Traffic shaping is the practice of altering the way packets move through the network in order to (in theory) provide a higher quality of service. If you want to consider the tired analogy of the internet as a highway (super or otherwise), what ISPs do when they traffic shape is roughly equivalent to adding bus/carpool lanes. Common targets of this are things that need to happen very quickly (VoIP — internet telephony services, games, etc.) and things that they don’t want to happen at all (torrents).

ISPs catch a lot of flack over this practice. It often allows them to do fairly shady things. For example, Shaw could (and even might) slow down Skype (a common third party provider of VoIP services) and speed up their own “Shaw Home Phone Service.” But the thing that gets them in the most hot water with consumers these days is disrupting torrent use. At the moment, Shaw in some areas at some times will slow down torrents to a 10kB/s upload speed. And until this Monday, refused to admit they were doing it.

How Traffic Shaping Can Be A Good Thing

There are good reasons for Shaw to do this. Specifically, Shaw is actually giving you your bandwidth at a bit of a discount. A business user paying for a 10Mbit connection will pay substantially more per Mbit than a consumer. This is because business users tend to be saturating their connection most if not all of the day, while consumer users are not. ISPs overcommit their networks because, on average, it makes things better for the user.

If you use 10Mbit in bursts, and someone else does too, and you don’t overlap, Shaw gives two people a 10Mbit connection for the price of one. They charge less than business rates to each customer, but still make more overall than they would guaranteeing each user 10Mbit all the time. This is just good business sense and until recently has worked really really well. People who were around for the halcyon days of telephone modems may recall they did the same thing with phone lines. Every now and then during peak service you’d get a busy signal. Eventually, this got a lot worse until cable and dsl internet came along.

The problem is torrents change this game. Users running torrents are often saturating their connections 24hours per day. If not their download, then their upload. On cable, especially, that upload is shared among all users on the same node as you and performance *does* degrade for those other users. When people suggest that there’s no good reason for Shaw or any other ISP to be concerned and even act to limit use of your full bandwidth 24 hours a day, they are just plain wrong. There are good reasons.

But…

However, this is where the good sense ends. In their statements, Shaw and Rogers insisted not only that consumers unhappy with the shaping of their traffic would move to competitive services (this is true — I did, for example), but that they should be under no obligation to inform their customers of their traffic shaping practices. I hope I don’t have to explain the absurdity and insanity of this position. For consumers to make informed decisions about what product they use, they must have this information. For a provider to blatantly lie about their shaping practices is absolutely unacceptable. For them to insist that there should be no obligation for them to not lie is violently anti-consumer.

And it’s clear that customers are not informed of what they may be in for in the future. I’ve had discussions with people regarding my leaving Shaw for Telus where they insist quite strongly that they are not shaped by Shaw, and that that means Shaw is still the most competitive product out there. The reality, at the moment, is quite far from that, and Shaws ads are at best only slightly deceptive. It may be the fastest service per dollar, but only if you use the services Shaw wants you to use when you use them.

I hope the CRTC sees sense and requires ISPs to inform customers about their traffic shaping policies. I also hope they require them to wholesale their service to smaller ISPs without these restrictions (to allow for true consumer choice). And while I’m at it, I hope restaurants are someday required to put caloric information on their menus, but that’s another blog post.