Why Australian Telco's Plan To Shape BitTorrent Traffic Won't Work 84
New submitter oztechmuse writes "Australian Telco Telstra is planning to trial shaping some BitTorrent traffic during peak hours. Like all other telcos worldwide, they are facing increasing traffic with a long tail of users: 20% of users consume 80% of bandwidth. The problem is, telcos in Australia are already shaping BitTorrent traffic as a study by Measurement Lab has shown and traffic use continues to increase. Also, the 20% of broadband users consuming the most content will just find a different way of accessing the content and so overall traffic is unlikely to be reduced."
Dont need to reduce overall traffic (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem the telcos have is not the total volume of traffic but to use a car analogy the "rush hour" effect. If by traffic shaping they can push the 20% to move some of their downloading outside the peak times, then it means they don't have to buy bandwidth that is going to sit unused 90% of the time.
If the 20% all did their downloading overnight it would not be a problem.
Re:Pareto, I hate you. (Score:4, Interesting)
The car anology is. If I slow down all pick up trucks 24 hours a day, it will improve traffic jams between the hours when children finish school and people go to sleep and that other big burst, the first hour or so of work between say 8:30am to 10:00am. Of course what the fuck does slowing down pickup trucks say 10pm to 7:30am have to do with rush hour traffic apart from ensuring all those pickup trucks are still on the road during rush hour.
The reality is, it is all a lie, to enable overloaded oversold networks and of course via collusion with other major ISPs to ramp up profits. Also if at all possible to force through ISPs being the major content publishers (no throttling on their sales) getting a major percentage of all content sales.