Anthony Boynes wrote: 
On Wed, Jan 28, 2009 at 2:06 PM, Stephen P Rufle
<stephen.p.rufle@cox.net> wrote:
  
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/01/cox-opens-up-throttle-for-p2p-non-time-sensitive-traffic.ars
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Hrmm.  Here are the types of traffic that will be delayed at the
beginning of the trial.

    * File Access (Bulk transfers of data such as FTP)
    * Network Storage (Bulk transfers of data for storage)
    * P2P (Peer to peer protocols)
    * Software Updates (Managed updates such as operating system updates)
    * Usenet (Newsgroup related)


Why the heck would they want to delay OS updates? That seems rather silly to me.
How can they tell the difference between something like yum or apt grabbing stuff from a repo via HTTP, and normal web usage? Or do they just assume everyone is running windows and throttle everything hitting the MS windows update farm?

I also wonder if they plan on doing this throttling for people who pay for the "premium" service. After all, isn't it likely that the reason you are paying for more bandwidth is exactly so that you can do "bulk transfers of data", etc? I would be pissed if I paid for the premier service just for the 2MB upload, just to have them shape it because they want to reduce "file uploads".

Of course they say that they wiill only throttle during "network congestion", but since they decided what congestion is and how much, they can throttle at will. They already throttle *everything*, except for the first few seconds, and call that "powerboost". I guess if I wanted to download a large file(s) I could just write a script that uses prozilla to spawn 24 sessions for a few seconds at a time :P

-Charles