I discovered a problem with my download speed while trying to recover my un-responsive IPAD.  Apple’s solution required me attach my IPAD to my MAC, and then to download a new  IOS image from the Internet, through the MAC and onto the IPAD.

Speed should  have been no problem, with my, Business Class, 20 megabit connection from a well know provider right?

So I thought.

When I started the IOS download,  the little progress  timer immediately  registered 23 hours   to go. Wow that is long time to wait , and I needed my IPAD for a trip the next morning.  I tried a couple of speed tests in parallel , and everything looked normal.  The question remained where was the bottleneck on this IOS download ? Was it on Apple’s end or my provider?

Over the years I have learned that IOS  and Windows updates are the bane of many Internet Providers. They are constantly looking at ways to prevent them from gumming up their exchange points.  They will try to identify update  traffic either by using the source IP, or if that does not work they can actually examine the download data to make a determination. In either case once they have tagged it as an update , they will choose to slow it down to keep their exchange points clear during peak traffic hours.

To thwart their shaping and get my speed back up near 20 megabits as promised, I simply had to hide my intentions. This can be accomplished using any number of consumer grade VPN applications.

I turned on my  IPvanish which automatically encrypts the data and original source of my IOS update. Once up and running with my VPN,  my IOS update loaded in 23 minutes. A 60 fold speed increase from my previous attempt

Here are  a couple  of other posts about ISP’s throttling

There is something rotten in the state of online streaming.

How to get access to blocked Internet Sites.

Good luck!

By Art Reisman
CTO http://www.netequalizer.com

Over the years I have written a few articles on the perils of investing in deep packet inspection, and its coming obsolescence . One of my main points has been that, tech savvy users in the US, can by-pass attempts to identify their traffic using encryption, thus reducing deep packet inspection firewalls into semi comatose paper weights.

Sources  for my blog articles came mostly from talking to hundreds of customers based in the US.  I  have had scant information on China. My understanding of Chinese bandwidth shaping  comes mostly from what I read in the papers. I have read about government sponsored censorship plus,  a few of my US ex-pat customers in China have told me  that there are many Websites where they have been blocked .  They  also have to be careful about what they say on-line.  I really had no idea if the average Chinese citizen resisted  Internet censorship.

That was until a chance meeting last week.

On a plane flight from Denver to Charlotte,  I had the privilege to sit next to a recent Chinese College Graduate who is currently teaching Chinese at a school here in the US. She was not a techie by any means , but obviously familiar with all the electronic social media tools that we use in the US. I asked her if there was any problem with Internet censorship when she was in china, and before I could finish my sentence, she shrugged and half scolded me for being so western stupid. “ We have very easy way to by-pass the censorship, we use the …. she stammered trying to come up with the English word… “ and then I finished her sentence . “ You mean the VPN”, and then I showed her the VPN icon on my computer and she said “yes yes everybody does this.”

Wow what a windfall of a data point, she obviously had no idea I had been preaching  that layer 7 was dead because VPNs cannot be easily cracked.

Even though this was just one data point and one person, I think I can infer that the use of VPN tunneling is probably wide spread to avert China’s censorship. Another nail in the coffin of Deep Packet Inspection technology.

If you went to sleep in 2005 and woke up 10 years later you would likely be surprised by some dramatic changes in technology.

• Smart cars that drive themselves are almost a reality
• The desktop PC is no longer a consumer product
• Wind farms  now line the highways of rural America
• Layer 7 shaping technology is now clinging to life, crashing the financials of a several  companies that bet the house on it.

What happened to layer 7?

In the early 2000’s all the rave in traffic classification was the ability to put different types of bandwidth traffic into labeled buckets and assign a priority to them. Akin to rating your food choices  on a tapas menu ,network administrators  enjoyed an extensive  list of various traffic. Youtube, Citrix,  news feeds, the list was only limited by the price and quality of the bandwidth shaper. The more expensive the traffic shaper , the more choices you had.

Starting in 2005 and continuing to this day,  several forces started to work against the layer 7 paradigm.

• The price of bulk bandwidth went into a free fall, much faster than the relatively fixed cost of a bandwidth shaper.  The business proposition of buying a bandwidth shaper to conserve bandwidth utilization became much tighter. Some companies that were riding high saw their stock prices collapse.
• Internet traffic became invisible and impossible to identify with the advent of encryption techniques. A traffic classifier using Layer 7,  cannot see inside HTTPS or a VPN tunnel, and thus it is essentially becomes a big expensive albatross with little value as the rate of encrypted traffic increases.
• The FCC ruling toward Net Neutrality further put a damper on a portion of the Layer 7 market. For years ISPs had been using Layer 7 technology to give preferential treatment to different types of traffic.
• Cloud based services are using less complex  architectures. Companies  can consolidate on one simplified central bandwidth shaper, where as before they might have had several on all their various WAN links and Network segments

So where does this leave the bandwidth shaping market?

There is still some demand for layer 7 type shapers, particular in countries like China, where they attempt to control   everything.  However in Europe and in the US , the trend is to more basic controls that do not violate the FCC rule, cost less, and use some form intelligent based fairness rules such as:

• Quota’s ,  your cell phone data plan.
• Fairness based heuristics is gaining momentum, lower price point, prevents congestion without violating FCC ruling  (  Equalizing).
• Basic Rate limits,  your wired ISP 20 megabit plan, often implemented on a basic router and not a specialized shaping device.
• No Shaping at all,  pipes are so large there is no need to ration bandwidth.

Will Shaping be around in 10 years?

Yes, consumers and businesses will always find ways to use all their bandwidth and more.

Will price points for bandwidth continue to drop ?

I am going to go against the grain here, and say bandwidth prices will flatten out in the near future.  Prices  over the last decade slid for several reasons which are no longer in play.

The biggest driver in price drops was the wide acceptance of wave division muliplexing on carrier lines in the 2005- present time frame. There was already a good bit of fiber in the ground but the WDM innovation caused a huge jump in capacity, with very little additional cost to providers.

The other factor was a major world-wide recession, where businesses where demand was slack.

Lastly there are no new large carriers coming on line. Competition and price wars will ease up as suppliers try to increase profits.