Network management Toolkit

Story: BT says no to traffic shaping

• 
• 

Which class are you?

There are good points and bad points to traffic shaping, for instance a standard user will not see much impact from bandwidth throttling while using common applications.

I think it boils down to the fact that ISPs need to learn how to identify various classes of users and how they use the Internet. Currently there appears to be three classes: light, medium and heavy. While this was an ideal starting point, not much as been done towards expanding these classes to benefit the users.

As pointed out by 201206 gamers are one of the groups impacted by throttling. For those that play WOW the bit-torrent method used to distribute new patches is could flag that user with a P2P tag. Gamers also use voice communication software like Teamspeak or Ventrilo. While traffic from these is minimal, they can still reflect on how you use the Internet with ports

I'm an avid gamer and have experienced bad packet (0.5% - 6%+) loss during peak activity periods (6pm - 11pm) in the past. Now there is no way of telling if this is due to me being bundled with P2P users and getting throttled or high-bandwidth users cause the whole network to slow on my ISP (all other 49 users watching You Tube videos all night).

Either way it sucks to be impacted by actions of users that you have no influence over.

• 
• 

• 
• 
• 

Full Talkback thread