Rogers Traffic Shaping Making It Difficult For Users To Use Secure Email
from the nice-work dept
Canadian ISPs haven't been shy about using traffic shaping tools to try to slow down the use of things like BitTorrent. This is a lot of what the network neutrality debate is about -- as ISPs would like to shift all that traffic onto the slow lane. Of course, as has been pointed out, this can backfire badly. Trying to slow down BitTorrent traffic will just lead to more people encrypting all of their internet use -- increasing the overhead involved, increasing the traffic and making the attempts at traffic shaping pointless. This is exactly what's happened in plenty of cases. However, Canadian ISP Rogers has taken things to the next level, and apparently decided that all encrypted traffic must be bad and should be slowed down. That means that for folks who happen to do ordinary things like use encrypted email connections (as you should), Rogers can make email nearly impossible to use. It's not clear how this helps anyone. It pisses off users who (hopefully) will jump to other ISPs at the first opportunity (if there is one), and doesn't help Rogers keep bandwidth down on its network. It just makes the system more expensive and more overloaded, while making it nearly impossible for people to do basic things like email. Nice job, Rogers.