Joe Fleming dot net

Many ISPs these days employ traffic shaping to make their networks run smoother. In the most basic sense, they give priority to more critical traffic, like VoIP for instance, and slow down less important traffic, like HTTP and Torrents. Lately, many ISPs have been doing their best to slap down any peer-to-peer (p2p) traffic, especially Bittorrent, because users are are consuming more bandwidth than the ISPs can handle. This is a result of the ISPs grossly overselling their networks and expecting most consumers to use a tiny fraction of their connection, a practice that worked great until more and more users became heavy consumers thanks to sites like YouTube and technologies like BitTorrent.

Now, I’m not saying that ISPs are doing anything wrong in overselling per se, but I do have a problem with them not properly planning for the future. Now that they have this bandwidth problem, instead of expending their networks to try and meet demands, they are using more and more restrictive filtering, sometimes even resorting to hacker-style packet injection in their traffic, nearly crippling whatever technology it is that people would like to use (and pay to use). Not only is this a very shady thing to do on their part, but in nearly all cases, they hide this fact from consumers and outright deny that anything is going on. They get away with all of this thanks to their monopolies in their select markets. But I won’t get in to all of that.

As in any other situation where one party tries to control another party, people are finding that there are many ways to get around this type of filtering.