Posted: 13th May, 2006 By: MarkJ
Several readers have pointed out that UK ISP
Entanet appears to have implemented a form of traffic management onto their network, which will also impact partner providers:
In order to continue to meet End User expectations now and in the future it will be necessary to implement Quality of Service policies on our current and future BT Centrals. We do not, at this stage, envisage imlpementing a "Fair Usage Policy" on individual End User connections, which is a method of management that is becoming more commonplace amongst other large Internet Service Providers, although we still reserve the right as per our Acceptable Use Policy to take action against individuals whom we believe are deliberately engaging in network abuse.
It is out intention to create a hierarchy of traffic types and rank them in order of highest priority to lowest priority during business hours to ensure that traffic which is necessary for the efficient conduct of day to day business is given priority over traffic that is not considered typical for normal business use.
At the moment this means that Peer-to-Peer (p2p) file sharing traffic (e.g. Bit Torrent, eDonkey, etc.) and NNTP (a.k.a. Usenet Newsgroups) have a lower priority than Web, email, FTP, VoIP, VPN, and other traffic types. The dynamic traffic management means that bandwidth available for p2p and nntp traffic is controlled by demand for other traffic types. During off-peak (non business) hours the policy is removed and all traffic has equal priority *within the limits of the BT Central*There are some suggestions that the new policy may only be a temporary one, however such shifts are rarely the preserve of brief alterations.
It's indicated that the above policy is not yet refined and remains open for revision. Were certainly no fans of traffic management, especially when applied universally.