The Upside: Killer Sales Tips from the folks at Glance Networks

Net neutrality is back in the news.  But what you don’t hear about is that the problem already extends far beyond BitTorrent. 

Many “legitimate” businesses are on the verge of becoming collateral damage. These companies see vast regions of the Net –- nearly all of Canada and pockets of communities here in Massachusetts and other states can countries -– as far from “neutral.” ISPs in those regions already employ "traffic management" policies that can unknowingly render many services useless.  These include web conferencing companies (like Glance), photo sharing sites, disk backup services, and more.

The crux of the problem is that many ISPs sold far more bandwidth than their networks can deliver.  They wrongly anticipated consumers would mostly download data from the Internet, not upload data into it.  While the “core” of the Internet – the Net’s massive superhighway – still enjoys plenty of surplus bandwidth, the “last few hundred yards” of some networks can be easily maxed out, particularly by users uploading lots of data.

BitTorrent causes a large fraction of the upload traffic, so a number of ISPs have developed methods to squeeze BitTorrent traffic on their networks to a trickle, freeing up space for other traffic.   

But their methods, called “traffic shaping”, can be like fishing with dynamite.  They may get the bass they’re hunting, but not without killing the trout, pickerel and everything else swimming nearby.

Consider Canada, where the two ISPs dominate – Rogers Cable and Shaw Cable.  They have been traffic shaping for several years to limit BitTorrent traffic.  But their method is astonishingly crude.  It crushes nearly any high speed data stream sent by a customer that uses one of the Internet’s most popular