In any event your fundamental statement is wrong. Based on their terms of service Rogers can do DPI if they so wished. DPI isn’t just a tap on the network with recording, it would only need to look at whether the encrypted streams are working in concert with each other. Also there is nothing illegal about it, not here in Canada in any event. As Michael Geist has pointed out several times on his blog, as he’d like it to be illegal. So with the exception of bad publicity and public confusion there is nothing now in the way of Rogers doing DPI, as bell is now doing.

And i stand by my original argument – net neutrality is not about shaping. its about whether a carrier using shaping to give the carriers products or service a better end user experience then that of a competing offering. IF rogers is shaping to reduce peoples speed of stealing TV shows because its killing my videoskype calls then good on them – if their doing it to slow skype to give a competitive advantage to rogers voip phone offering thats a net neutrality issue.

And surprisingly I have started a discussion, numerous comments on this post here, references at Michaels and Marks sites, subsequent posts also have received a lot of attention … you’re the one who is hiding behind anonymity.

Hahaha… that is so wrong. Rogers shaped ALL encrypted traffic for fear of lawsuits from deep packet inspection. Of course they could shape just this or that protocol, but that would open them up to questions about what data they are “reading”.

About Net Neutrality… get lost. You know darn well you didn’t write this because you wanted to start a discussion about Net Neutrality.

Regrading your DSL comment the benefit of DSL is in combination with existing Packet management techniques down to an indviduals nodes. but you are correct on the central demand distribution issues.

That’s a nice concept in theory but it doesn’t work in reality. Your phone company charges you a flat rate for local the use of your phone. Now if every person in the city was to use their phone all the time at the same time the system would overload but no one complains because these services, all “bulk use services” are based on an expected load calculation. That’s how businesses run. If you only sold what your system could handle peak you would be out of business in no time.

Cell phone systems can’t handle the load if all cells are on at the same time. Hydro companies can’t handle peak demand if every user turns their lights on at the same time. Heck, even the roads you drive on are sized based on peak use expectations.

Complaining that Rogers isn’t allowed to do the same thing on their sales is just silly. It’s how the world works.

Additionally with respect to DSL I find it funny that no one ever mentions the obvious. People think DSL is vastly different in the end service to the user but it’s not. The pipes still merge, they just do it up at the head end. The head end equipment actually has more live segmenting of data to do real-time and this places a demand on the central distribution network. Not to mention that the feeder pipe is only so large in the first place. So yes, on Cable your neighbour 2 doors up can hose you to some extent, but on DSL a guy 1/2 km away on the same segment can do just the same to you. It’s inherent in the distribution process, it just happens at a different point.

Read my more up to date post. (there a back link ahead of your more recent reply.)

In it I essentially say that if you design your service to use P2P protocols in todays environment you can’t claim that you’ve been unfairly targeted. You now that carriers are shaping p2p traffic and you deserve equal blame for designing your technology using that protocol. While I agree that should Youtube become a problem shaping may occur but the level of secondary connections the routers would be involved in pushing would be less.

Or let me say 300Kb from one server using http (for youtube) is not nearly as taxing on the network as for 300Kb of BT traffic. So while both are only using 300Kb its more reasonable to expect BT traffic to be shaped than that of youtube. In the event that youtube may in fact use 500KB and BT only 300Kb this argument could conceivably hold true. where the number of pinging related bandwidth along with peer connections is more detrimental to local traffic than that of the larger connection from just one source.

BTW – I was using encrypted BT on the Rogers network recently, I was getting close 100Kbps consistently so I’m thinking it may have more to do with weather people are grabbing the majority of their connections from off the rogers network. As this file zipped along handily and by reading IP’s I was connecting almost entirely within the Rogers system.

> But the question is: Is Shaping a Net Neutrality issue?

It is to that extent that business models rely on user participation in the distribution like linux distributions, vuze.com or bittorrent.com
It’s still an emerging market but if shaping means that one service is unfairly crippled (downloading 1GB with BT at 5kB/s) compared to similar services (downloading 1GB with FTP at 300kB/s) then it affects said business models.

The only difference between the 2 said protocols is a) that FTP doesn’t work for user-hosted content. if someone has popular files with 1GB then he probably has deep pockets to finance the servers. b) bittorrent consumes upload in addition to the downloaded data. But since most home connections are very asymmetrical the uploaded data often amounts to a fraction of the downloaded data or it is spread over longer periods of time.

So the basic difference is that there’s more content out there via p2p than there is via classical protocols. If tons of content were available via “classical” protocols then the heavy traffic would stem from those and not p2p applications.

Essentially it’s a problem for rogers that there’s actually enough content out there for the users to download continuously. It just happens to be on p2p networks.

So, rogers is short on bandwidth. What would happen if youtube started hosting 60 minute long HDTV videos?
If rogers wouldn’t discriminate but really just ensure QoS for VoiP and other time-critical protocols they’d start shaping youtube too… but they certainly wouldn’t for their own VoD service.

One might argue that the current situation is not an net-neutrality issue. But if one analyzes the root of the problem (rogers lack of bandwidth and the vast amount of content) then it could easily become one.