Canadian ISP attempts to throttle BitTorrent traffic

Shaw cable has, this year, begun to roll out traffic-shaping technology on their network using technology from Ellacoya. It seems they started using this service in early 2005 in the greater Vancouver area, probably because Shaw’s network is most overloaded in that market.

There have been reports that they are rolling it out to Edmonton, Saskatoon, and Winnipeg. Ellacoya’s technology works by "deep packet inspection" which is a type of firewall that’s super-intelligent. That is, it doesn’t just know about IP and TCP or UDP ports, it can also look inside the packet and see if it’s FTP, HTTP, Bittorrent, kazaa, and etc. Therefore, it’s not affcted by port numbers.

This technology, while impressive, is not perfect. It can mis-identify packets, and requires constant upgrades to keep track of all potential types of data traversing the internet, of which there are many, and the possibility to create a new one today exists.

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