Sandvine FairShare traffic throttling
p2pnet news | P2P:- Whenever you see a corporate product with ‘fair’ in the name, you can be 100% sure it’ll be the exact opposite.
Apple’s FairPlay DRM is a shining example, and now ace Canadian digital restrictions management company Sandvine has come out with a product sure to make the likes of Bell Canada and Rogers glow.
Sandvine, which coined the notable phrase ‘policy management,’ is now touting Sandvine FairShare to, “enhance its suite of Traffic Optimization solutions”.
For ‘Traffic Optimization’ read bandwidth throttling, and Sandvine’s new consumer control technology ‘empowers’ ISPs, enabling, “fair usage in the shared access network” with “advanced techniques” to “ensure equitable allocation of network resources during periods of congestion,” it says.
And it’s “fully application-agnostic,” meaning BitTorrent isn’t the only P2P file sharing application it’ll target.
Sandvine claims “Innovative developments in new and popular Internet applications and ongoing investments by broadband service providers are fueling dramatic growth both in broadband adoption and overall traffic levels.”
That isn’t, however, how the OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) sees it.
“An OECD official has singled out Canada’s ongoing ISP traffic shaping scandal for special mention in a report on the country’s eroding position as a “global broadband internet leader,” says an earlier p2pnet story.
Denmark leads OECD countries with 35.1 subscribers per 100 inhabitants, followed by the Netherlands at 34.8 and Iceland at 32.2, it says, going on:
“But Canada had only 8.6 million broadband subscribers as of December 2007, “or about 26.6 per 100 inhabitants, “enough to rank 10th among the 30 developed countries that make up the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development”.
Now, “Keeping pace with these broadband successes, Sandvine is introducing FairShare to augment its widely deployed Traffic Optimization solutions with new and enhanced congestion management capabilities,” says the company.
Pesky five percenters
Bell, Rogers and other ISPs are accusing P2P file sharing of being responsible for “traffic congestion”.
In Canada, 5% of users are said to be wholly and entirely responsible for forcing Bell and other major ISPs to “manage” user bandwidths.
However, noted p2pnet’s Ottawa Gal last month, Danny McPherson, CTO of Arbor Networks, which “makes all sorts of network-management and traffic-shaping tools” used by more than 70% of the ISPs around the world:
- 20% of traffic comes from P2P applications
- During peak-load times, 70% of subscribers use http.
- Only 20% are using P2P
- Http still makes up most of the total traffic, of which 45% is traditional web content including text and images.
- Streaming video and audio content from services such as YouTube account for nearly 50% of the http traffic.
- Streaming content such as TV shows and YouTube is on the rise.
Meanwhile, “FairShare automatically responds to the changing network environment and subscriber usage patterns in real-time,” says Sandvine.
To do that, it must be constantly spying on users and although DPI isn’t mentioned, one wonders if it figures in Sandvine’s FairShare.
DPI = Deep Packet Inspection which, says the Wikipedia, “enables advanced security functions as well as internet data mining, eavesdropping, censorship, etc”.
CAIP (Canadian Association of Internet Providers) said in a submission to Canadian regulators, “Bell is using DPI to sequester or ‘hijack’ certain data packets as they pass through the network, and hold these packets hostage until certain pre-conditions are met …”
And CIPPIC (Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic) is asking the Canadian privacy commissioner to open an investigation because, it says, Bell has not only, “failed to obtain the consent of its retail and wholesale internet customers in applying its deep-packet inspection technology, which tells the company what subscribers are using their connections for,” it’s using Deep Packet Inspection to, “find and limit the use of peer-to-peer applications such as BitTorrent, which it says are congesting its network”.
Sandvine says, blandly, its FairShare, “collects subscriber usage metrics from various sources and analyzes the data according to sophisticated, configurable parameters”.
Then it, “dynamically modifies policies to balance available bandwidth and resources among subscribers”.
It actively throttles bandwidth, in other words.
Stay tuned.
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UPDATE, May 23 — Click here for Sandvine menaces p2pnet.
Jon Newton – p2pnet
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May 21st, 2008 at 10:51 am
They can keep saying, “Relax! It’s actually chocolate!” all they want.
As long as it smells like shit, looks like shit, and tastes like shit every time they force-feed it to us, we’ll always know what it really is.
May 21st, 2008 at 11:51 am
Actually it is because Comcast is in bed with the entertainement industry that they are trying to block BT.
Also Comcast is also a TV cable Operator and of course Internet and of course BT is a massive competitior.
The argument that BT is using too much traffic is of course BS.
I am done with comcast and I droped my TV cable for the Dish network and my comcast Internet cable for Verizon DSL.
Guess what? Both work better! Thank you comcast for helping me see the light!
May 21st, 2008 at 12:47 pm
The alarming fact is that Comcast isn’t the only one getting into bed with the MAFIAA, and spreading the “Bandwidth Hogs” propaganda in an attempt to justify DPI and become Copyright Police.
(Can you say “Weapons of Mass Destruction”?)
May 23rd, 2008 at 7:09 pm
Jon added:
“UPDATE, May 23 — Click here for Sandvine menaces p2pnet.”
make that
http://www.p2pnet.net/story/16019