Users jockeying for high priority on Net fast lane

[NVMojo]

June 22, 2006

By itself, technology is neither moral nor immoral. But a new way of changing how people and businesses use the Internet is being denounced by some as innately evil no matter how it's used.

"Bandwidth shaping" technology, as it's called, allows Internet service providers to sell priority access for certain activities. Thus businesses might pay more to use collaborative tools or regularly transfer large databases, and people using Internet telephone systems might end up being charged a "quality of service" fee to ensure a clear connection.

The types of tolls on the information superhighway became possible when network specialists, such Sandvine Inc. of Waterloo, Ont., developed "deep packet inspection" technology that can tell whether users are surfing, e-mailing or sharing files. Once traffic is identified and categorized, it's easy to prioritize it and direct some onto the Internet equivalent of an express lane while the rest is sent via the slower backstreets.

It's a polarizing issue. On one side are the Internet carriers hoping to increase revenue through the ability to market individual services such as premium voice-over-IP (VoIP); on the other is a group supporting "Net neutrality," believing ISPs have no business knowing what kind of programs people use.

more...

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20060622.gttwshaping22/BNStory/Technology/?cid=al_gam_nletter_dtechal

[ThomCat]

1. The whole idea of stratifying the internet

solely to find ways of charging people more money is very evil. They are creating roadblocks and obstacles just so they can charge you a fee to bypass them. Unfortunately, I think they'll get away with this.

[evermind]

2. "Deep packet inspection" - rofl.

To differentiate between different types of internet traffic, as described in the article (eg. distinguishing between web surfing and P2P filesharing) doesn't require any "deep" inspection of the traffic. Each packet sent by an IP application (like a web server or filesharing program) has what's called a source or destination "port", in the same layer of data as the source and destination IP addresses. The ports are just numbers that can be used to determine what the type of traffic is. Ever seen a URL like "http://somesite.com:8080/"? The "8080" is the port address (normally web requests go to port 80). There's nothing deep about it - in the sense that you don't need to inspect the contents of the packet.

So the article is completely incorrect where it says

"What we're really talking about," says IDC Canada consultant Lawrence Surtees, "is packet-sniffing, like <U.S. President George W.> Bush is doing.

To do packet-sniffing a la NSA, you need to look at a different layer of the information in the packet - that which contains the actual content. To do bandwidth shaping, you just need to look at the address data. It's the difference between looking at an envelope and looking at the letter inside it. Not that it's very much harder to look at the information content (unless it's encrypted) of course.

The technology to allocate bandwidth on the basis of address data has been out there for years - it's been a standard part of the Linux kernel since about 2001, I think.

I used to admin a neighbourhood LAN in an inner-city area in the UK, and when P2P applications started to get popular we'd find the whole network suffered - web access would become painfully slow because the bandwidth was clogged up by P2P programs. I had no hesitation in using Linux's bandwidth shaping capabilities to preserve a small dedicated chunk of bandwidth for web access, which let web pages load at normal pace again, while giving the P2P programs free rein in the remaining bandwidth. I think a lot of campus network admins will be doing the same.

I'm not saying ISP's should be doing this (though having been a network admin for an ISP, I would have some sympathy with a little light bandwidth shaping on their part, if it made their service more usable for the majority of their customers).

But I think bandwidth shaping based on port addresses has little to do with the actual threat of removing net neutrality.

That has more to do with prioritizing packets over others of the same type - making web pages from google slower than pages from microsoft.com, for example, unless google cough up money to the ISP or network carrier. That is bandwidth shaping based not on the traffic type (or port number) but based on the ownership of the source and destination addresses (ie. is it www.google.com or www.microsoft.com), and that is what all the fuss over net neutrality is about.