[Israel]: ISP to Compensate Customers for P2P Traffic Shaping

Two years after a class action lawsuit was filed, judge Ester Shtemer, from the Lod District court, ruled against 012 Smile (subsidiary of Partner Israel), one of Israel largest ISPs for its traffic shaping policy (see the full decision below, Hebrew).

The plaintiff claimed that the 012 did not provide an appropriate speed to its subscribers, when P2P file sharing programs were used, and asked for a compensation of over NIS70M (~$20M).

012 Smile said that they are not committed to provide any specific speed, and they use traffic management policies to prevent P2P program to takeover all available bandwidth, as file sharing is different from interactive web browsing. 012 admitted that file sharing users were discriminated, that they over-subscribe their infrastructure. However, they did not participate in the Glasnost (see "Glasnost: These ISPs are Shaping Traffic!" - here) tests that were presented as evidence by the plaintiff.

[Related post: "Israel: Carriers Must Disclose Broadband CIR" - here and "[Israel] ISPs Respond to the CIR Regulation - What do they Promise?" - here]

012 Smile CEO, Uri Wertman (left the company earlier this year), testified that they have 500,020 subscribers; an estimated 25% were using P2P file sharing applications, and 45% of them were discriminated - a total of 56,252 customers were affected.

The result?

• Smile 012 will provide 9 months of free speed upgrade to each customer asking for it (worth $2/month)
  
• 012 smile will deploy a control system that will ensure that the network will provide 98% of the accumulated demand (95% at peak hours) of all customers. 

Bell Canada and Rogers are still on the World's Top Throttlers List

  

MLabs, a project "funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation" (see "Syracuse University Research on Deep Packet Inspection" - here), published updated information on ISPs found to be throttling data, through DPI, for BitTorrent files sharing traffic.

".. we show the 10 or 11 ISPs who had the highest percentage of tests that yielded a positive result; that is, a result indicating that DPI was used to throttle or block BitTorrent. If an ISP’s result on the chart is 93%, for example, it means that 93 percent of the tests their users conducted using Glasnost produced a result that shows that the BitTorrent application was singled out and manipulated by the ISP using deep packet inspection technology. The chart shows the two-letter country code and the name of the network operator".

Among the the top 10 throttlers for the first quarter of 2012 are two Canadian operators, who said recently they will stop throttling P2P traffic on March 2012 - will we see them the next time?

• Bell Canada - see "Bell Canada will Stop Shape "diminishing" P2P Traffic on March 2012" - here 
• Rogers - see "Rogers Stops DPI/Traffic Management" - here.

See " The world’s top bittorrent manipulators" - here.

Milton Mueller vs. Dan Kaminsky on ISP Traffic Management Detection

   

Few days ago I had a post about Dan Kaminsky's claim to have a new tool that can tell if a certain ISP uses DPI and QoS polices to discriminate traffic flows, based on their content (Google vs. Bing, for example). See "Dan Kaminsky: I Can Tell if Your ISP Breaks Net Neutrality" - here. 

  

Replies to my tweet referring to the post, pointed me to an Internet Governance Project (IGP) post by Milton Mueller (picture), Professor, School of Information Studies, Syracuse University. The article -"The new Kaminsky bug (here)" bashes Dan's announcement (as his tool, n00ter, is not available yet) and the hype it created.

For background on Prof. Mueller activity see my previous posts: "NSF Funds Research on DPI" - here and "New Paper on "Deep Packet Inspection and Internet Governance" - here.

See also "FCC: We Need "Apps" to Monitor Naughty Service Providers" - here which is mentioned in the new post - is that the reason for all this?

Back to Mueller's post: "We found it really hard to get excited about this .. Kaminsky hasn't actually released his tool yet, .. there are at least half a dozen other tools out there already which do the same thing .. Check out Google's MeasurementLab site, for example. There's Glasnost  [see "Glasnost: These ISPs are Shaping Traffic!" - here] and ShaperProbe there .. Our research project on deep packet inspection (DPI) has used the data generated by Glasnost extensively"

" .. the idea of testing for minute differences in web site delivery speed shows that Kaminsky and other would-be net neutrality posses may be a couple of steps behind those cattle-rustling, black hat ISPs. What the more sophisticated ISPs are doing with DPI and traffic-shaping technologies is more focused on monetization than on speed discrimination"

Dan Kaminsky replied with the following tweets: 

• heh! The slides are at dankaminsky.com. The technique is pretty cool, and should give you good data
• the basic idea is to normalize the source and path of data from multiple IPs, down to the ISP
• if the same server and the same path give different qos for different identities, there's policy
• the problem with pure protocol tools is you have no baseline for performance. How fast should a stream be?
• by normalizing server and path, you know unbiased latency and drop rates for which to compare

Glasnost: These ISPs are Shaping Traffic!

   

During NSDI '10 (the 7th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation, held on April 28-30 in San Jose, CA), project "Glasnost" presented its methodology and findings regarding traffic shaping practices by ISP.

Glasnost is a research project done at the Max Plank Institute for Software Systems. Its goal is to "to make access networks, such as residential cable, DSL, and cellular broadband networks, more transparent to their customers." The research, led by Krishna P. Gummadi provides a list of ISPs that were detected to do shaping.

Here is an extract from the paper:

Note that the tests were conducted over a year ago. Since then, lots of DPI/Traffic shaping gear was sold and implemented - also by mobile (3G mainly) operators not covered in the above table.

An interesting finding is that operators tend to shape upstream traffic more than downstream. This maybe explained by a number of reasons, including:

• Upstream has lower capacity in most access technologies, and fills faster with P2P sharing uploads, also is also effecting downloads (as all TCP traffic is bi-directional)
   
• Uploading files serves "off-net" users and does not drive complaints or [expensive] calls to the help-desk

Also, it seems that most ISPs are shaping using DPI as they detect the application (layer 7) rather than the TCP port (layer 4). About half of the ISPs are shaping only during peak hours.

See "Glasnost: Enabling End Users to Detect Traffic Differentiation" - here (paper) and here (presentation)