Vuze About to Prove: ISPs Guilty of “traffic shaping”

It seems that perhaps sooner than anticipated there might be network traffic information to provide evidence that messing with the P2P traffic is very common with the ISPs, Gigaom reports. The proof is likely to come from Vuze, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based P2P company which has been busy putting pieces together since they released a special plug-in they last month.

This plug-in makes possible for the Vuze to watch closely network interference and gather sufficient information to prove that the number of ISPs that are practice traffic shaping is larger than acknowlegded. What the plug-in actually does is measure “the rate at which network communications are being interrupted by reset (RST) messages.”

Vuze General Counsel Jay Monahan made obvious his intention to reveal the real size of “traffic shaping” practise among the Internet service providers. He said in a recent blog post that:

There are over a dozen Internet network operators in America — both cable companies and telephone companies, many of whom are believed to be engaging in their own “traffic shaping” (i.e. throttling) practices.

Allegedly, Gilles BianRosa, CEO of Vuze, has forwarded a letter to AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson in which he made reference to the fact that AT&T is likely to be using the RST messages:

…while we appreciate the methodological limitations of our data, and therefore have drawn no firm conclusions from it, we believe the results show a significant enough difference in the level of resets from one network operator to another, to warrant asking certain network operators to describe their network management practices. In reviewing our data we have identified that the rate of reset activity in the ASN pertaining to your company appears to be higher than many others.

Obviously this issue is far from being done with and we’ll be following its development to further inform you.