throttling

Deep Packet Inspection and Consumer Transparency

/ Christopher Parsons

Image by David Clow

Rogers Communications modified their packet inspection systems last year, and ever since customers have experienced degraded download speeds. It’s not that random users happen to be complaining about an (effectively) non-problem: Rogers’ own outreach staff has confirmed that the modifications took place and that these changes have negatively impacted peer to peer (P2P) and non-P2P applications alike. Since then, a Rogers Communications senior-vice president, Ken Englehart, has suggested that any problems customers have run into are resultant of P2P applications themselves; no mention is made of whether or how Rogers’ throttling systems have affected non-P2P traffic.

In this brief post, I want to quickly refresh readers on the changes that Rogers Communications made to their systems last year, and also note some of the problems that have subsequently arisen. Following this, I take up what Mr. Englehart recently stated in the media about Rogers’ throttling mechanisms. I conclude by noting that Rogers is likely in compliance with the CRTC’s transparency requirements (or at least soon will be), but that such requirements are ill suited to inform the typical consumer.

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iPhone Promiscuity

/ Christopher Parsons

Photo credit: Steve KeysI’ve written a fair bit about mobile phones; they’re considerable conveniences that are accompanied by serious security, privacy, and technical deficiencies. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Apple’s iPhone has received a considerable amount of criticism in the press and by industry because of the Apple aura of producing ‘excellent’ products combined with the general popularity of their mobile device lines.

In this short post I want to revisit two issues I’ve previously written about: the volume of information that the iPhone emits when attached to WiFi networks and its contribution to carriers’ wireless network congestion. The first issue is meant to further document here, for my readers and my own projects, just how much information the iPhone makes available to third-parties. The second, however, reveals that a technical solution resolves the underlying cause of wireless congestion associated with Apple products. Thus, trapping customers into bucket-based data plans in response to congestion primarily served financial bottom lines instead of customers’ interests. This instance of leveraging an inefficient (economic) solution to a technical problem might, then, function as a good example of the difference between ‘reasonable technical management’ that is composed of technical and business goals versus the management of just the network infrastructure itself.

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