DPI Vendor: 90% of Customers discriminate traffic

[Anakha56]

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news ... mpaign=rss

DPI vendor says 90% of ISP customers engage in traffic discrimination

A single Canadian company sells traffic shaping gear in use on 20 percent of all broadband lines in the world—and nearly all of its clients throttle traffic by application.
By Nate Anderson | Last updated August 3, 2009 4:42 PM CT

In our globalized, post-industrial world, a single Canadian company can shape the Internet experience for 20 percent of the world's wireline broadband users. Sandvine makes deep packet inspection hardware that can identify and then block, shape, degrade, fold, spindle, or mutilate user traffic coming from particular applications such as Skype or BitTorrent clients. The 160 worldwide ISPs who use the company's products love this particular capability so much that a full 90 percent of them employ it to "manage" their networks in a discriminatory way.

According to the company, these 160 ISPs serve 20 percent of the world's wireline broadband connections. If 90 percent of the ISPs shape traffic by application, Sandvine equipment alone may be responsible for the application-specific discrimination that 18 percent of world wireline broadband users face—and that figure says nothing about all the other ISPs who use similar products from other vendors. If you thought that network neutrality was some kind of default position for the worldwide Internet, think again.

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[Ron2K]

Interesting read, thanks. Personally, I don't like the way that this is all heading, but that may be just me.

[Anakha56]

I agree with you Ron, AFAIK there is no way to circumvent DPI .

[Nuke]

Sigh. People always want something to moan about. Or want "sensation" of some kind.

As I said before, QoS is very importent in any network today. Any network admin with half a brain will give priority to media streams(RTP) to give voice better quality. There is also other protocols like citrix that need to have a proper constant data flow. Any proper ISP should give that kind of stuff priority. Torrent's.....sorry if they have to wait, its just one of those sad things. There is no mission critical application to uses torrents AFAIK.

[Sojourn]

I agree with Nuke.
Client's ask specifically end expect us to throttle certain apps / ports / traffic to or from certain destinations.
Within an environment there will allways be a customised prioroty hierarchy.
It is something you will have to make peace with.

[Nuke]

One more thing. Telkom unshaped adsl is also not really unshaped. Tested from an ATM fiber, and I could ping google in less than 200ms. I can't get that even on an unshaped adsl account. The only real unshaped you get is a SDM connection, and they are a few R100K a month, plus you need some interconnect agreements.