Bell Responds To CAIP: So Much BS, It Stinks!
P2PNet has the latest filing by Bell in response to the Canadian Association Of Internet Providers. I’ll leave it to you to read the full document, but there’s one quote that jumps out at me:
“It is called “Deep Packet Inspection” because it looks beyond the routing and transport headers, deeper into the application packet headers, to determine the type of application that is communicating, but not the content itself”
Too bad that that description is wrong.
Take a look at this description of deep packet inspection. here’s how it actually works:
“DPI devices have the ability to look at Layer 2 through Layer 7 of the OSI model. This includes headers and data protocol structures as well as the actual payload of the message. The DPI will identify and classify the traffic based on a signature database that includes information extracted from the data part of a packet, allowing finer control than classification based only on header information.”
The rest of this document is full of more half truths and fudging of the facts. There’s a huge discussion of this over at DSLReports.com where posters are just tearing this document apart. Take a look at the discussion and you’ll see what I mean.
There simply can be no way with the BS that Bell is trying to shovel in this document can be viewed as being valid by the CRTC. If Bell had any sort of honor, they’d just do the honorable thing and drop throttling now. Now I’m not naive enough to believe that they will do that. So it’s up to Canadian Internet users to crank up the pressure on their politicians and on the CRTC to make Bell fold up like a cheap suit. Or perhaps Google will come to the rescue of Internet users in Canada.
July 13, 2008 at 7:14 pm
Concerning DPI, Bell’s description is acceptable, you can actually make a DPI system which identifies application level headers to determine what protocol it is using without actually analysing the data. Still, it’s like if Canada Post or Feedex looked into your mail to see what kind of content is in it (letter, paycheck) to choose which enveloppes to deliver first. That’s the kind of things I don’t expect my ISP to do…
July 13, 2008 at 7:23 pm
It is acceptable to a point. What I object to, is that Bell says that DPI doesn’t look into the payload.
Besides there’s no way that Bell is using a header only DPI system. If that’s the case, they’d have a difficult time figuring out what is P2P traffic and what is VPN, or VOIP traffic for example.