Over the past couple of years, a bunch of ISPs have started (usually quietly) applying traffic shaping efforts to slow down your high bandwidth applications like BitTorrent. This is part of what the whole network neutrality debate is about, but this has more to do with the ISPs trying to keep out services that use up more bandwidth then they budgeted for. What it really represents is the inability of ISPs to recognize a simple fact: if you offer people bandwidth, they’ll figure out ways to use it. The ISPs got into this big race with each other, and all promised unlimited bandwidth at cheap prices, making the calculation that the demand for bandwidth wouldn’t increase very much, and most people wouldn’t use very much at all. They were wrong. But, rather than admit that they made a mistake, they suddenly pretend that the “all you can eat” broadband they sold you is something different — one where they can arbitrarily limit what you can do with that bandwidth. They sold you one thing, with the belief that you wouldn’t actually use it, and now that you are, they’re shoving in place temporary fixes to stop you from using what they sold you.
The funny thing, though, is that whether or not it really is a burden, the idea of using traffic shaping is absolutely going to backfire. As we’ve already discussed, the more ISPs try to snoop on or “shape” your internet usage, the more that’s going to be a great selling point for encryption. People are going to increasingly encrypt all of their internet usage, from regular surfing, to file sharing to VoIP — as it makes it that much more difficult to figure out what kind of traffic is what and to do anything with it. Broadband Reports today is moderating something of a debate on whether or not encrypting BitTorrent is a good thing, with Wired taking the bad side and TorrentFreak (not surprisingly) taking the good side. Of course, it’s really all a matter of perspective. It may be good for some people or bad for the others — but what’s most amusing, is that encrypting all of this traffic will simply add a lot of overhead for the ISPs to deal with. That means, for all their talk about how file sharing traffic was a burden on their network, by trying to slow it down with traffic shaping, they’re only likely to increase the burden as everyone shifts to encrypted systems making it more difficult and more costly for them to do anything about it. Add to this that the traffic shaping hardware costs money that could have gone into simply upgrading their overall network, and it seems doubly problematic. They’re left with an expensive solution that doesn’t solve the issue and actually makes it worse, when they could have just spent more on upgrading their network to handle more capacity.
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