7th
Don't Shape My Net Bro
I have always been, and plan to remain, fiercely of the opinion that ISPs should never be involved in traffic shaping at the application/layer 7 level. It is completely antithetical to the spirit of the network (stupid network and all that) and I think in the long run it is very bad business for ISPs.
If a customer wishes to do their own shaping to maintain quality of service (e.g. prioritizing interactive ssh sessions over retrieving web pages) more power to them. Such tools are available.
If an ISP wants to do shaping of the the total bandwidth any single endpoint gets across a switch, that makes pretty good sense.
But: If the ISP starts digging into packet headers and even packet bodies to do shaping they are introducing a huge cost for themselves. On the one hand their switches much do greater work. On the other hand there is now a presumption that the ISP knows or can know the content that is traversing their network and can be held liable for producing data about that content or controlling that content.
I get the impression that this latter point about liability is already a lost cause in the UK, which is a damn shame.
If BT or any other ISP is selling 8mbps connections to customers, then the customer should be able to expect that level of service for any type of content they get across the wire. If BT insists on being so oversubscribed that they can’t support that level of service at all times, they should shape total usage, not specific protocols or applications.
It’s interesting to me that BT would want to perform any kind of shaping. BT has an effective monopoly on the physical infrastructure that provides these services. By encouraging more and more intensive use of the internets they increase the demand for the infrastructure they provide.
Disclaimer: I do contract work with Osmosoft which is part of BT. These are my opinions. I’m sure there are lots of people within and without BT with lots of different opinions on this matter.
