Network management Toolkit

Story: BT says no to traffic shaping

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But what kind of traffic shaping?

Well, this is where it gets interesting. Any ISP which says it doesn't use traffic shaping at all is lying, unless it simply doesn't have enough subscribers to fill up its pipes. A lot of ISPs certainly throttle P2P during peak hours to avoid congestion, which messes with things like VoIP. Of course, it's the transparency issue that gets up people's noses here.

Now, what Beal was talking about was the deliberate degradation of rivals' content in favour of one's own. Whether BT is indeed doing this is an argument in itself - after all, P2P is the basis for things like Skype, and what happens if BT throttles a competitor to its own VoIP service? Is it then doing good traffic shaping, or bad traffic shaping...?

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