iBurst's feeble effort

ADSL South Africa (Broadband South Africa), 1 September 2007

iBurst’s effort to defend the company’s shaping policies can at best be described as ‘feeble’ when compared to legitimate concerns of iBurst subscribers.

iBurst’s Antony McKechnie has written the following article in defence of iBurst’s shaping policies:

Readers and contributors to the online IT media, in particular, would have noticed that iBurst has recently come under fire for its bandwidth shaping policies. Three aspects of this criticism have stood out. The first is that the criticism has been unusually harsh. The second is that it has not come from a broad spectrum of iBurst subscribers. The third is that the first two points are related.

What do I mean by the latter statement? I mean that the reason iBurst was required to implement bandwidth shaping was because a small minority of iBurst subscribers had historically and perhaps inadvertently monopolized network resources by consuming an astonishing amount of iBurst’s available bandwidth.

The end result was that many iBurst subscribers were regularly experiencing uncharacteristically slow wireless broadband speeds. Shaping simply recognizes that every iBurst subscriber is equal and should therefore have an equal opportunity at accessing available network resources.

Shaping is about acknowledging that Internet traffic is like any other traffic. Different kinds of vehicles represent the various protocols such as VoIP, email, web browsing and peer-to-peer file sharing. In order for all traffic to reach their destinations quickly, Internet Service Providers like iBurst are compelled to police the information superhighway to ensure certain vehicles do not unfairly prevent other vehicles from reaching their destination. There is nothing sinister about shaping and the only reason it exists is to ensure that fairness prevails in cyberspace.

iBurst has even been extremely fair to those subscribers whose actions, deliberate or otherwise, necessitated the introduction of shaping in the first place. It is in fact still possible for these users to run certain applications and engage in file sharing. However, iBurst has by necessity and for no other reason had to restrict the speeds at which all of this can take place. If one is cognisant of the environment in which South African ISPs have to operate as it relates to the high cost and limited availability of bandwidth, it’s clear that iBurst’s shaping policies are reasonable and that criticism in this regard has been particularly unfair.

We’re convinced that determining which network services receive high priority (typically browsing and other applications critical to the majority of iBurst subscribers) and which receive low priority (typically peer-to-peer file sharing) has to a significant degree helped ensure fair and satisfactory network performance that is ultimately appreciated by all iBurst subscribers.

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