Rumours have been buzzing among people who connect to the Internet via cable. Service providers, they claim, are once again mucking about with bandwidth, perhaps going as far as blocking file-sharing services in the process.
It turns out this is partly true.
Rogers Cable, like other cable companies, has in fact been implementing something it calls "traffic shaping," a technology that gives priority to certain on-line activities (such as e-mail, browsing, voice communication) and putting the brakes on other less time-sensitive stuff, such as swapping music files.
In fact, the complaints I received have come from people who noticed the difference when they use peer-to-peer technology specifically to swap music files — and lest we forget, that activity is still legal in Canada, unless and until whichever government we elect next month passes a law banning the activity.
One user, Scott Taylor, a Rogers subscriber in St. Thomas, Ont., has been so upset by the poor performance of software called Limewire, used mostly to swap music files, that he confesses he has made a pest of himself on the issue — so much so that Rogers' legal department felt it had to address him on the subject of his attitude.
His case is interesting because he was not getting the correct information from Rogers, with tech-support people twice denying they use any kind of technology against file-swappers before finally admitting that it's been in place since Dec. 2.
And even that was incorrect. According to a Rogers spokeswoman, the practice has actually been deployed over the past year, which doesn't say much for Rogers' internal communications system. Moreover, it applies only to uploads, which doesn't help out those people who are downloading from other Rogers subscribers, who are therefore uploading.
Moreover, all Mr. Taylor was told is that Rogers is "monitoring bandwidth usage" on peer-to-peer clients, not that it was "shaping traffic."
Not surprisingly, bad information makes for unhappy subscribers.
A more specific case involves Allen Murray, of Cambridge, Ont., who was having the same kind of problem, but it was associated with downloading music and podcasts from Apple's iTunes, a legal service for which Mr. Murray is paying.
Beginning on Nov. 7, he wrote to me, he could no longer connect to the store via broadband. His dial-up connection worked fine with iTunes. He reported that five people he knows in Cambridge are also having similar problems with broadband.
Countless calls to Rogers' technical support, he said, always resulted in "It's not a Rogers problem."
Mr. Murray took the conspiracy position, that Rogers had blocked iTunes because it was pushing its own on-line music service, provided by its content partner Yahoo.
Similar complaints have been aired on various bulletin boards, among them Boing Boing, where one poster got it right ("From what I understand, they are not so much filtering/stopping/blocking downloads as much as capping the bandwidth available to certain protocols"), but failed to stop the rumour mill.
And over at the Apple forums, a reader reported that when trying to reach iTunes, she received a message that says, "iTunes could not connect to the music store. The network connection was reset. Make sure your network connection is active and try again."
Her response was to blame Apple, a reaction that is covered by my Law of Erroneous Error Messages, which states that all error messages are themselves erroneous, and that's why so many computer users have been driven nuts by technology.
Rogers has not been keeping its traffic shaping technology a secret, but has not been very up-front about it either, partly because it's been rolled out in fits and starts. And even then it's been a technology in evolution, and applied haphazardly.
The one thing both Rogers (and all the other cable companies using such technology) should be careful about is how it handles press relations. Any effort to slow down multimedia now will clash with what's coming down the pike for the Internet. We expect a massive increase in demand for bandwidth because Americans are adopting high-speed access in increasing numbers, and multimedia content (movies and music downloads) is increasing exponentially.
Moreover, very large companies — Microsoft and Apple among them — are considering moving to peer-to-peer technology to disseminate operating system security patches and podcasts. Redhat/Fedora, Ubuntu Linux and some television shows are moving to the technology too, and independent musicians who actually want to give away their music are turning to a similar technology, BitTorrent, to spread their gospel.
However traffic shaping shakes out, it's only a temporary measure. When traffic eventually explodes, cable companies will need to either shape it drastically, which will not be good for business, or shape its marketing strategies to accommodate it.
Either way, it will be a major change.
http://www.globetechnology.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20051208.gtjkcolumndec8/BNStory/Technology/
It turns out this is partly true.
Rogers Cable, like other cable companies, has in fact been implementing something it calls "traffic shaping," a technology that gives priority to certain on-line activities (such as e-mail, browsing, voice communication) and putting the brakes on other less time-sensitive stuff, such as swapping music files.
In fact, the complaints I received have come from people who noticed the difference when they use peer-to-peer technology specifically to swap music files — and lest we forget, that activity is still legal in Canada, unless and until whichever government we elect next month passes a law banning the activity.
One user, Scott Taylor, a Rogers subscriber in St. Thomas, Ont., has been so upset by the poor performance of software called Limewire, used mostly to swap music files, that he confesses he has made a pest of himself on the issue — so much so that Rogers' legal department felt it had to address him on the subject of his attitude.
His case is interesting because he was not getting the correct information from Rogers, with tech-support people twice denying they use any kind of technology against file-swappers before finally admitting that it's been in place since Dec. 2.
And even that was incorrect. According to a Rogers spokeswoman, the practice has actually been deployed over the past year, which doesn't say much for Rogers' internal communications system. Moreover, it applies only to uploads, which doesn't help out those people who are downloading from other Rogers subscribers, who are therefore uploading.
Moreover, all Mr. Taylor was told is that Rogers is "monitoring bandwidth usage" on peer-to-peer clients, not that it was "shaping traffic."
Not surprisingly, bad information makes for unhappy subscribers.
A more specific case involves Allen Murray, of Cambridge, Ont., who was having the same kind of problem, but it was associated with downloading music and podcasts from Apple's iTunes, a legal service for which Mr. Murray is paying.
Beginning on Nov. 7, he wrote to me, he could no longer connect to the store via broadband. His dial-up connection worked fine with iTunes. He reported that five people he knows in Cambridge are also having similar problems with broadband.
Countless calls to Rogers' technical support, he said, always resulted in "It's not a Rogers problem."
Mr. Murray took the conspiracy position, that Rogers had blocked iTunes because it was pushing its own on-line music service, provided by its content partner Yahoo.
Similar complaints have been aired on various bulletin boards, among them Boing Boing, where one poster got it right ("From what I understand, they are not so much filtering/stopping/blocking downloads as much as capping the bandwidth available to certain protocols"), but failed to stop the rumour mill.
And over at the Apple forums, a reader reported that when trying to reach iTunes, she received a message that says, "iTunes could not connect to the music store. The network connection was reset. Make sure your network connection is active and try again."
Her response was to blame Apple, a reaction that is covered by my Law of Erroneous Error Messages, which states that all error messages are themselves erroneous, and that's why so many computer users have been driven nuts by technology.
Rogers has not been keeping its traffic shaping technology a secret, but has not been very up-front about it either, partly because it's been rolled out in fits and starts. And even then it's been a technology in evolution, and applied haphazardly.
The one thing both Rogers (and all the other cable companies using such technology) should be careful about is how it handles press relations. Any effort to slow down multimedia now will clash with what's coming down the pike for the Internet. We expect a massive increase in demand for bandwidth because Americans are adopting high-speed access in increasing numbers, and multimedia content (movies and music downloads) is increasing exponentially.
Moreover, very large companies — Microsoft and Apple among them — are considering moving to peer-to-peer technology to disseminate operating system security patches and podcasts. Redhat/Fedora, Ubuntu Linux and some television shows are moving to the technology too, and independent musicians who actually want to give away their music are turning to a similar technology, BitTorrent, to spread their gospel.
However traffic shaping shakes out, it's only a temporary measure. When traffic eventually explodes, cable companies will need to either shape it drastically, which will not be good for business, or shape its marketing strategies to accommodate it.
Either way, it will be a major change.
http://www.globetechnology.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20051208.gtjkcolumndec8/BNStory/Technology/
