[Article] Cox ready to throttle P2P, non "time sensitive" traffic

[Charles Jones]

Anthony Boynes wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 28, 2009 at 2:06 PM, Stephen P Rufle
> <stephen.p.rufle at cox.net> wrote:
>   
>> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/01/cox-opens-up-throttle-for-p2p-non-time-sensitive-traffic.ars
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>>     
>
> Hrmm.  Here are the types of traffic that will be delayed at the
> beginning of the trial.
>
>     * File Access (Bulk transfers of data such as FTP)
>     * Network Storage (Bulk transfers of data for storage)
>     * P2P (Peer to peer protocols)
>     * Software Updates (Managed updates such as operating system updates)
>     * Usenet (Newsgroup related)
>
>
> Why the heck would they want to delay OS updates? That seems rather silly to me.
>   
How can they tell the difference between something like yum or apt 
grabbing stuff from a repo via HTTP, and normal web usage? Or do they 
just assume everyone is running windows and throttle everything hitting 
the MS windows update farm?

I also wonder if they plan on doing this throttling for people who pay 
for the "premium" service. After all, isn't it likely that the reason 
you are paying for more bandwidth is exactly so that you can do "bulk 
transfers of data", etc? I would be pissed if I paid for the premier 
service just for the 2MB upload, just to have them shape it because they 
want to reduce "file uploads".

Of course they say that they wiill only throttle during "network 
congestion", but since they decided what congestion is and how much, 
they can throttle at will. They already throttle *everything*, except 
for the first few seconds, and call that "powerboost". I guess if I 
wanted to download a large file(s) I could just write a script that uses 
prozilla to spawn 24 sessions for a few seconds at a time :P

-Charles
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