In the world where people start shaping P2P traffic, we really have a problem. Firstly, how do they actually define peers, and then, how can they actually filter out these peers and restrict their speed? And finally, is P2P traffic filtering actually worth it?
But probably the more important question is whether shaping P2P traffic speeds is actually hampering what the Internet actually is. In the end, its all really just a bunch of computers connected together. Why should some computers not be able to communicate at either a faster or slower speed than others by artifically slowing the speed down? Aren't a lot of developed nations worried about how they're falling behind in terms of end user data transfer speeds?
It wasn't too long ago when Australian ISPs were selling their products and promoting it on the fact that traffic between peers on the same ISP would not have their traffic counted towards their monthly quota. How did this somehow get reversed? It doesn't really make sense at all. Now certain ISPs are starting to count uploads when determining how much data transfer you get a month. Somehow, I think we're going backwards, not forwards in terms of value.
So then wahts a peer? You can't really do it by the host IP address. Thats a bit too open. Nobody is going to know when IP ranges change, new ranges are used for consumers, and a whole bunch of other reasons. The other way a lot of ISPs do it is via port filtering. So all data which goes along a certain specified port is slowed down. Boo Hoo. The savvy people can just change the port they're using. Finally, you could look at the data people are sending. Usually this is quite unfeasible. Most people won't even bother.
This doens't really make much sense. But then, neither does filtering P2P traffic. I don't understand it at all.
