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As more sophisticated tools for traffic shaping are unveiled, the question soon becomes which service providers aren’t throttling customer traffic

Adding itself to the small-but-growing list of ISPs that admit to traffic shaping, Canada-based Bell Simpatico has confessed to using “traffic management” on heavy users “during peak hours.”

“We are now using a Internet Traffic Management to restrict accounts,” wrote an unnamed forum administrator on Bell Simpatico’s support forums. According to the administrator, Bell Simpatico’s traffic shaping affects an unmentioned number of applications and protocols, including BitTorrent, Gnutella, Limewire, Kazaa, eDonkey, eMule and WinMX.

A Bell Simpatico Manager chimed in immediately afterwards, explaining that “there continues to be phenomenal growth of consumer Internet traffic throughout the world” and that “Bell is using Internet Traffic Management to ensure we deliver bandwidth fairly to our customers during peak Internet usage.”

According to the Manager, the bandwidth cap was introduced sometime last year and “doesn’t affect the vast majority of [Bell’s] customers.” One concerned user asked if the traffic management will be removed as network capacity increases, to which the administrator replied that he “can’t answer this question,” and noted that it would be decided as the issue arises.

Internet service providers have found themselves under an increasing burden as bandwidth-intensive internet services like online video and file-sharing have proliferated. While the true volume is unknown, many think that 30%-50% of all internet traffic is P2P-related, with a recent survey from traffic-management company Ipoque pushing that number towards an astonishing 90%.

In response to this, many providers have employed a variety of techniques to limit customers who are deemed to be using more than their “fair share,” a tactic that has been the subject of much debate as part of the controversy surrounding “network neutrality.”

While traffic shaping is by far the most common, a few companies have employed more exotic methods: Comcast is thought to impose an invisible 600 GB bandwidth limit on its “unlimited” internet service, and a recent study conducted by the AP found that the ISP impersonates BitTorrent clients for the purposes of interfering with their connections.

Source: Dailytech.com

Author’s opinion

So will the ISPs in Singapore cap/throttle bandwidths so as to give a fair share of internet bandwidth to all its customers during peak hours? Only time will tell. There are several complains/distressed users (Hardwarezone forums) saying that their BT download speeds have been very sluggish lately.

However, it can be quite difficult to measure the actual speed of BT downloads because of the way P2P networks work. Assuming all necessary ports are forwarded and the client is tweaked to optimize download/upload speeds, a popular torrent doesn’t always mean higher download speeds. There’re the factors of low upload speeds of your connected peers, internet traffic congestion and so forth. Thus, measuring download speeds through P2P networks can be contested as there’s no direct prove of a dedicated amount of data served from your connected peers. But if you are usually getting high download speeds with your BT and suddenly experiencing sluggish downloads lately, there could be a reason to believe that bandwidth throttling may be the cause.

Other than Anime and overseas TV show downloads, Linux users may face a huge problem from such a move by these ISPs. Most Linux distros make available torrent downloads (on top of ftp and http links) for their latest release. P2P networks usually gives the best download speeds but with the throttling of bandwidth, this could affect the mode of distribution of the new Linux distros.

The reason behind throttling is to protect users who are sending/receiving small data packets so as to get the best quality of service (QoS). This is usually done in the expense of the “Big downloaders”. However, with the increasing number of people relying on P2P for large file transfers, ISPs may have to look for creative middle-way solutions to ensure that these growing consumers, who use P2P, get their fair share of bandwidth too.