said by Raff :

I think with this entire news item, most people seem to be assuming bell is a giant evil corporation.

The root of the problem in my eyes, is traffic. Bell claims there is too much, most of you state otherwise. As such, Bell has initiated a "throttling" procedure to reduce problematic bandwidth usage. Not only for their own customers, but wholesalers as well. The problem with traffic shaping as a whole is fairly obvious to most network oriented folks.

The Internet functions on a "Best effort" basis. What this means is that every packet is given the same priority when passing through a router. The flaw with this system is that routers can become flooded with packets, and their buffers fill up. In this situation any additional packets sent to said router are simply dropped. This results in poor "Internet performance".

The issue at hand involves throttling Peer-to-Peer connections. By the very nature of this protocol, a user must establish MANY times the normal amount of connections to the Internet. When one user is flooding a network with a disproportionate amount of connections it in effect "games" the best effort routing system. Since they are using 10-100 times the amount of CONNECTIONS (notice I do not say bandwidth, which is a separate issue) they are in effect given priority by their local router, and ISP. The amount of routing power needed to transfer 500 KB/s via one connection is significantly less than 500 KB/s via 100 connections. This is because 100 connections generate MANY times the number of packets that 1 connection at the same speed would.

Picture this:

Ted is torrenting the latest and greatest TV show from last night. His computer is currently connected to 100+ other peers and he is using 500 KB/s of bandwidth.

Ralph on the other hand is downloading the latest service pack for Windows Vista, at around 500 KB/s of bandwidth and one connection.

Since Ted is using 100+ connections and 500 KB/s of bandwidth and Ralph is using ONE connection and 500 kb/s of bandwidth, the math, and routing logic state that ted will receive 100 times the priority that Ralph will from the ISP routers.

IF EACH PACKET AND CONNECTION IS TREATED THE SAME, then a router AUTOMATICALLY gives priority to the person(s) initiating more connections.

If you wish to hear a more in depth explanation of this concept, I highly suggest you listen to this podcast, by Steve Gibson
»media.grc.com/sn/sn-139.mp3

It does a VERY good job of explaining why connections, not bandwidth is the issue.

I thank you for reading this, and apologize if this is a tad off topic. I just don't see anyone mentioning any of the above information

Regards Raff