

Glasnost: Test if your ISP is shaping your traffic - drey
http://broadband.mpi-sws.org/transparency/bttest-mlab.php

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MattBearman
My results for Flash:

Your ISP appears to rate limit your FlashVideo downloads. In our tests,
downloads using control flows achieved up to 6723 Kbps while downloads using
FlashVideo achieved up to 9345 Kbps.

Your ISP appears to rate limit downloads on port 8080. In our tests, downloads
on port 8080 achieved up to 9487 Kbps while downloads on port 42507 achieved
up to 6723 Kbps.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding the tests, but if my flash downloads where being
rate limited the control would be faster, not slower?

In case anyone's interested, I'm in the UK, my ISP is Virgin - it's a 10mbit
cable line.

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naz
In this case, Virgin is giving higher priority to streaming video or lower
priority to everything else. Traffic shaping works both ways.

~~~
MattBearman
Interesting, the shaping only seems to occur on port 8080 - standard port 80
traffic generally runs at near enough 10mbits for me.

Also the bit torrent test came back unshaped, I'd be interested to see what
other Virgin UK users have.

~~~
ZoFreX
Virgin have transparent caching proxies between you and the web, which may
explain why some HTTP results were faster - they didn't have to leave the
Virgin network.

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nitrogen
Is it supposed to keep alternating between "Time to finish: 500 seconds" and
"Waiting for transfer to finish"?

~~~
neuroelectronic
I think you can safely say that is "traffic shaping" or actually, this sounds
like packet insertion. Comcast does this. They insert FIN packets into your
stream which makes the host think that the client has terminated the
connection and the stream is dropped. It's really %^#$^^ stupid because then
you just reopen the connection and try again from the start, using more
bandwidth.

Obviously, their concern is not bandwidth usage, but file sharing, which
conflicts with their own content services.

~~~
nitrogen
Strangely enough it was doing that for the YouTube and SSH tests.

~~~
neuroelectronic
YouTube: competing media

SSH: can't deep packet inspect because it's encrypted, shape it just incase.

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windsurfer
Requires Java, for those on mobile.

~~~
nailer
On desktop, but still not launching a Java app. Latency kills my browser.

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chopsueyar
You can also create your own tests for Glasnost.

Instructions here:

<http://broadband.mpi-sws.org/transparency/createtest.html>

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neuroelectronic
emule - "undetermined" [http://loki08.mpi-
sws.mpg.de//bb//glasnost.php?protocol1=eMu...](http://loki08.mpi-
sws.mpg.de//bb//glasnost.php?protocol1=eMule&protocol2=control%20flow&port=4662&port2=58543&dir=0;1&flow0=288;522;551&flow1=371;137;207&flow2=237;218;298&flow3=376;193;594&flow4=2386;2174;2415&flow5=2584;2110;2587&flow6=2643;2221;2300&flow7=2415;2398;2432&details=yes)

bittorrent - "no packet shaping" [http://loki08.mpi-
sws.mpg.de//bb//glasnost.php?protocol1=Bit...](http://loki08.mpi-
sws.mpg.de//bb//glasnost.php?protocol1=BitTorrent&protocol2=control%20flow&port=6881&port2=50593&dir=0;1&flow0=891;916;812&flow1=613;847;775&flow2=833;732;884&flow3=883;883;891&flow4=2154;2155;1950&flow5=1917;1604;1693&flow6=1959;2403;2262&flow7=2157;1950;2232&details=yes)

This is run from my Sprint cell phone in a 4G area. Pretty damn impressive,
IMHO.

