p2pnet news Freedom:- | P2P:- If you’re a P2P file sharer, Sandvine CEO Dave Caputo loves you because in his eyes, you’re a ‘bandwidth hog’.

Or so the caption to the CBC pic on the right says.

His interesting observation comes in a story focusing on a CBC Q&A with Caputo at last week’s Canadian Telecom Summit, “highlighted by a panel discussion on net neutrality, the slightly amorphous topic that generally revolves around how much control service providers have over internet access”.

“Whenever you see a corporate product with ‘fair’ in the name, you can be 100% sure it’ll be the exact opposite,” p2pnet said recently, going on, “Canadian digital restrictions management company Sandvine has come out with a product sure to make the likes of Bell Canada and Rogers glow.”

It’s called FairShare which, “automatically responds to the changing network environment and subscriber usage patterns in real-time,” says Sandvine.

It’s all about control. Consumer control, without consumer consent or participation (our words), and, “At the heart of that control is technology developed by the likes of Waterloo, Ont.-based Sandvine Inc., which allows service providers to determine what type of traffic is going over their networks, and manage [restrict] accordingly,” says the CBC in the intro.

To do what it do, Sandvine’s so-called FairShare must be constantly spying on users, said the p2pnet story, going on although DPI (Deep Packet Inspection) isn’t mentioned, “one wonders if it figures in Sandvine’s FairShare”.

DPI, 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) wants the Canadian privacy commissioner to open an investigation because, it says, Bell hasn’t 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.

Drawing the line on what management is

The CBC asks Caputo, whose firm coined the notable phrase ‘policy management,’ “Has the internet always been managed, because this idea of network management almost seems recent?”

After boasting he once had dinner with Vint Cerf, the famed Net guru who’s currently a Google vice president and its “chief internet evangelist,” Caputo says he (Caputo) thinks he (Cert) will be the, “first to admit that he’s surprised and shocked at what his authoring of TCP/IP has meant” and, “The idea of flow control in the internet has been a tenet of it since day one.”

It, “really depends on where you draw the line on what management is,” the Sandvine boss says, going on:

“The service provider has to figure out the business model of how much service they’re going to give a subscriber and how much bandwidth they’re going to provide to the internet. That oversubscription ratio is their business model.”

Of course, ISPs don’t “give” anything to subscribers. Or to anyone else. They sell it. And lately, they’ve been blaming P2P application users for causing congestion they, the big ISPs, claim is forcing them to throttle traffic, in the process acting as corporate censors and shackling the concept of net neutrality.

Ottawa Gal begs to differ, quoting Danny McPherson, CTO of Arbor Networks, who “makes all sorts of network-management and traffic-shaping tools,” used by over 70% of the ISPs around the world, as stating:

• 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.

Below are excerpts from the CBC Q&A with Caputo>>>

‘There’s a ton of malicious traffic out there – worms, spambots, zombies …’

CBCNews.ca: You said during the panel discussion that deep-packet inspection (DPI) has almost become a four-letter word. One of the audience members asked the question of how deep is deep. To add to that – where does privacy start to become an issue?

Caputo: I hope I said it goes as deep as you need to go because there’s no point to going any deeper than you need to. If you can figure out in the first byte that it’s web surfing, get on with your life, there’s another packet coming really quickly. The reason we have to reserve the right to go as deep as you need to go is because there’s a ton of malicious traffic out there – worms, spambots, zombies. You have to go to the level where you can identify them. There used to be this honour system on the internet called “published ports.” Everything on port 80 was web traffic, everything on port 1225 was Kazaa. That became too simple a system for people to put in false ports. If you wanted to block Kazaa in the workplace, you blocked port 1225, if you wanted to block video gaming, there was a published port for Doom.

The gamers, the peer-to-peer file sharers, the malicious hackers figured this out and said, “what’s the one port no one is going to block?” Port 80, because can you ever sell an internet service that doesn’t allow you to web browse? In the workplace, can you have it so that people aren’t allowed to web browse? People would rebel pretty quickly to that, so everybody started masquerading as web traffic on port 80. It’s an antiquated honour system now because there’s plenty of application developers that have no honour.

What deep-packet inspection or broadband intelligence gives you is a way to identify traffic. If you say we’re concerned that we’re going too deep and we limit how deep we’re going, the malicious writers will go one byte deeper than that. Let’s be clear, it’s not trying to figure out what songs or movies people are downloading, they’re not trying to figure out the content on a per-subscriber basis, they’re trying to figure out the growth and behaviours of protocols and how they could optimize the experience for the most number of subscribers.

CBCNews.ca: Do you even need to use DPI to detect peer-to-peer traffic? It’s the only internet application that is disassembled and reassembled from a large number of sources?

Caputo: One of the things we’re very proud of in our technology is that we can identify traffic by behaviours, signatures, mathematics of cross packets. Everybody is lumping that in and calling it deep-packet inspection – we prefer “intelligence” – but we look at what is the cheapest way, mathematically, to identify something.

Quite often, applications that are trying to hide understand the computational resources needed to identify them and often times it’s cheaper for us to identify them on a behaviour basis. We absolutely have that capability, it’s inherent in our solution.

And >>>

CBCNews.ca: Some people have a negative view of Sandvine – one keynote speaker at a security conference last year referred to your company as “evil.” How do you react to that perception?

Caputo: Here we are, a company founded on improving the quality of the experience of the internet and trying to make the world a better place. I absolutely, categorically reject anyone who makes that characterization. I would say it’s someone who truly doesn’t understand what we’re doing.

One of the biggest ironies is that people who might not be too happy with what we’re doing are often the largest benefactors of it. Ultimately, I don’t let that bother me. As to whether all packets are created equal, you can read a ton of blogs – and there is a fringe minority – who believe that. I believe they’re painting the service providers into a corner. If all packets are created equal then it’s equal utility and we should be charging on a per-packet basis, and I don’t think anybody wants to go there.

When people are saying we need a law called network neutrality and it should be vigorously enforced, well there’s other laws, copyright laws, and should those be vigorously enforced as well? I have a feeling it’s the same group of people who are saying ignore these laws but create this law and vigorously enforce it.

I think the beauty of it is the net neutrality debate is something that is going to be solved in our lifetime and, like I said before, I think it’s going to be laughable in the next two or three years that people used to say all packets should be treated equally.

And >>>

CBCNews.ca: Is there a possibility of two internets emerging, where one is reserved for peer-to-peer traffic while the other runs everything else?

Caputo: It could evolve in a way where people provide services where they say these applications are optimized on this tier and these applications are not optimized on this tier. In fact, let’s look at the Amazon Kindle. It’s a little e-book where you don’t pay a monthly subscription but every time you buy a book, you pay either $9.99 or $5.99. It doesn’t take too much imagination to understand that it’s a computer and it’s using the internet to deliver [books], yet there’s no monthly subscription fee. So how does that work? You pay Amazon, and Amazon pays the service provider right then and there for providing [the content]… Is that a different network? People don’t think of it that way. It’s an internet that only delivers books that you buy and newspapers that you subscribe to. People won’t call it a separate internet, but here’s a device that only does this.

CBCNews.ca: So theoretically an internet service provider could sell customers a dedicated peer-to-peer router?

Caputo: Conceivably. The beauty is to let the market figure it out, and it will.

And >>>

CBCNews.ca: But Bell Canada has applied to the Supreme Court to get rid of that regulated wholesale competition because it says there is enough competition. Most people wouldn’t consider a choice between two providers as healthy competition.

Caputo: I’m moving right now and I’m having to pick my service provider, so there’s Bell and Rogers and Barrett Xplore satellite and there’s Execulink in Waterloo. There’s a host of ISPs ready to sell, most of them are wholesale. There are WiMax providers coming out.

CBCNews.ca: But satellite is really expensive and those other ISPs wholesale from Bell.

Caputo: Hey, I’m happy for more competition.

CBCNews.ca: Okay. Going back to the issue of the ISPs’ image – some have labelled heavy internet users as “bandwidth hogs,” yet you call them “consumption kings” because they are snapshots of what the mainstream user is going to be in the future. Can you expand on that?

Caputo: The subscribers that use large amounts of bandwidth are the leading adopters of what everyone is going to be doing on the internet. They’re the first people on YouTube or Facebook. We can learn a lot [from them] and we certainly love consumption kings as they’re very good for Sandvine’s business.

Stay tuned.

. .Stumble It!

CBC – Internet monitoring a necessity: Sandvine, June 19, 2008
p2pnet – Sandvine FairShare traffic throttling, May 21, 2008
begs to differ – Bell Canada’s ‘5% of users’ claim trashed, April 25, 2008

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This entry was posted on Monday, June 23rd, 2008 at 5:01 am and is filed under Freedom, P2P. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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