The new shape of broadband

From Globetechnology: The new shape of broadband

Rogers Cable, like other cable companies, has in fact been implementing something it calls “traffic shaping,” a technology that gives priority to certain on-line activities (such as e-mail, browsing, voice communication) and putting the brakes on other less time-sensitive stuff, such as swapping music files.

This has been wreaking havoc on such systems as the iTunes podcast subscriptions and bittorrent. I verified this morning that the bittorrent networks are non-functional on this connection and even changed my port numbers to see if that would make a difference. It did not.

This first came to my attention a couple of weeks ago when dria pointed me to this thread on the Apple discussion forums: Rogers and Shaw ISP are the cause of iTunes Problems.

I’m all about quality of service. I want my real-time apps to work as-close-to-real-time as-possible. Voice communications and video games being tops on my priority lists. But I don’t want my other network traffic to suffer either. I’ve got a lot of bandwidth available. I’d have more if Rogers would remove the cap on upload traffic. There is no reason that I shouldn’t be able to download a torrent or a podcast and expect it to work. If this is an attempt to cut down on the still-legal-in-Canada practice of downloading movies and music on the internet, then they are caving to pressure from the media companies they are beholden to and shouldn’t be allowed to operate as an ISP.

Or maybe this is because Yahoo! just recently announced their foray into the VoIP-o-sphere and they want to assure their customers have the best-possible service. How long before Rogers’ traffic-shaping starts to favor Yahoo! users over, say, Skype or Vonage? That would be clearly anti-competitive and should disqualify them from being an internet service provider.

None of this even begins to touch on some of the legal ramifications of what they’re doing. Bittorrent is a hugely popular system and used for all kinds of legitimate purposes from distributing open source software to public domain movies and music to supporting popular video games. Not to mention the podcasts which they were blocking from the CBC and other legitimate sources.

So, I’m giving Rogers a hearty, “You Suck!”. And if it keeps up. I’ll switch. Again.

boolean is listening to: Soul In Lust from the album “War Of The Wakening Phantoms” by The High Dials

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