DirecTV's Network Neutrality Collision Course > It's pretty sweet

reply to dbmaven

Re: It's pretty sweet

We're talking about entirely different things.

D* is limiting the outbound bandwidth - kind of like a valve at a dam that only lets a certain amount of water out at a time. That may be so that they can simulate the expected download times when the service is generally available. Imagine if they didn't limit it now, and the few users that are using it got the full pipe ? Those users would be spoiled, and when the load ramped up, they'd be screaming about how "the downloads suck now - they're taking 15 times longer than they used to !"

I'm describing an enhancement on the HR2x receivers that allow a user to specify:
•when to allow DOD downloads by hours of the day
•how much of the target connection bandwidth to use. If I have a 6mpbs connection, I want to limit what DOD uses to one-third of that, or a max of 2mbps. Effectively, it's a form of QoS for the receiver. And since the download appears to be taking place over ports 80 and 8080 (straight old http or https), it would be difficult to throttle that in your router.

It's not hard at all. I have a policy set up that any connections initiated by my HR20 is limited to 4mb/s GBW and 6mb/s MBW. That still leaves me 4mb/s to play with when I'm downloading and want to surf/usenet/etc.