Bandwidth Shaping explained by Rogers

Bandwidth shaping has become a largely debated issue lately and not always what the term actually implies is correctly explained and understood. It seems that this confusion determined Rogers Cable, Canada's leading Internet service provider, to set a special news conference Monday to make clear for everyone their practice.

According to Roger’s chief strategist, Mike Lee, there is a misinterpretation of the term network management (a more nice-sounding word for routing traffic on the Internet) which many take it to mean blocking p2p file-sharing traffic. Lee explains that rather than performing a “deep packet inspection” to establish what is being transferred or differentiating between encrypted files, Rogers monitors traffic at the upload level - “Peer-to-peer traffic is isolated so as not to overwhelm other traffic,” he declared.

Furthermore, he explained that the solution to the problem of file-sharing traffic is not, in contrast to what is generally believed, increasing network capacity.

“We can increase capacity and the network will be overwhelmed the very next day,” added Dermont O'Carroll, Rogers' senior vice president of engineering and network operations.

O'Carroll specified that the reason for this is the nature of file-sharing applications which are developed to continually search for most favorable sources for their shared files, emitting regular requests to locate a better connection or more sources for files. According to him when the P2P program “feels” there is more space on a network, that space will be invaded by these requests. It seems that Rogers manages almost 800 terabytes of traffic on its own network.

Lee said about the p2p software that “it's actually designed to overwhelm other traffic”.

According to Derek Kuhn, vice-president of America’s strategy for Alcatel-Lucent, p2p traffic will increase three times within the next four years.