[100218] in North American Network Operators' Group

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Re: Comcast blocking p2p uploads

daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Sean Figgins)
Fri Oct 19 16:50:18 2007

Date: Fri, 19 Oct 2007 14:06:19 -0600
From: Sean Figgins <sean@labrats.us>
To: Nanog <nanog@nanog.org>
In-Reply-To: <4719059A.9030407@rockynet.com>
Errors-To: owner-nanog@merit.edu


Mike Lewinski wrote:

> I wonder what happens to these network police appliances (Sandvine, 
> Packeteer etc) when the P2Ps implement encryption and tunnel it all over 
> 443/tcp?

Most vendors claim to be able to look into the payload and determine 
that  it is p2p traffic instead of http/https traffic.  I know I have 
looked at several of these vendors myself, and most of them did not have 
hardware that was even safe or reasonable to deploy, as certain traffic 
would send the unit's CPU towards 100% with only a measly 1 megabit of 
traffic.  I personally eliminated on of these vendors from consideration 
this way.

Sandvine seemed to have a pretty decent hardware solution when I was 
still in that space 2 years ago, with only a few concerns.  I'm sure 
that they have vastly improved.  They were also less "religious" about 
99% of the internet traffic being p2p, like some vendors were.

Still, while I support the ISP's right to manage and shapre traffic, I 
still think this is a poor tactic.  This is like your telephone company 
hanging up your call, regardles if the content of the call was a drug 
deal, a call to grandma, or a call to e911.  It's just not morally right.

  -Sean

Sorry about the double post.
(Please respond only through the list)

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