Interesting article found on wikipedia about Plusnet
Hi there.
This is a subject which crops up on these boards every once in a while. I totaly understand the concerns, but there is nothing sinister about our E30 deployment. We've been doing this since 2004 and have been very open and upfront about what we do and why we do it.
We use the Ellacoya E30 for traffic management. It only looks at the header of the packet, it doesnt look at the payload. This means that whilst we can identify the type of traffic, we have no idea what it contains, nor do we want to know. Any router routing your traffic will read that header because its reading the destination and source of the traffic. An example of this would be if you are downloading something, every router along the path needs to read that packet to know where to send it to. We make one change to the tcp header which is part of the TCP/IP specification. The differentiated services field, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differentiated_services is widely used within QoS rules which can be applied to any router at wan or lan level.
The crux of this issue is "the man in the middle" interception of the traffic.
This does not happen. The only data feed we get is the total usage per category, ie what you see in VMBU and even then thats is not fool proof.. We do not see the payload nor do we obtain any information about our customers activities and there is certainly no need, ability or desire to do this. The E30's are on our network, under our control and no-one outside of Plusnet has access to the data feed. From a personal perspective, ISP's are not the internet police. To utilise diff services or DPI in the manner you have discussed, imho, would open up a whole can of worms for any ISP with regards to "knowing" what a customer is doing.
DPI to layer 3 or 4 is more than adequate for our needs, pushing that to 5 and above is a whole other story and we can't do that with the E30's.
I hope that alleviates your concerns. QoS rules have been around for a long time, as have differentiated services. Many home routers will use the same facilities where QoS rules or routing is applied. Ours simply do it on a grander scale and more efficiently.
Mark
This is a subject which crops up on these boards every once in a while. I totaly understand the concerns, but there is nothing sinister about our E30 deployment. We've been doing this since 2004 and have been very open and upfront about what we do and why we do it.
We use the Ellacoya E30 for traffic management. It only looks at the header of the packet, it doesnt look at the payload. This means that whilst we can identify the type of traffic, we have no idea what it contains, nor do we want to know. Any router routing your traffic will read that header because its reading the destination and source of the traffic. An example of this would be if you are downloading something, every router along the path needs to read that packet to know where to send it to. We make one change to the tcp header which is part of the TCP/IP specification. The differentiated services field, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differentiated_services is widely used within QoS rules which can be applied to any router at wan or lan level.
The crux of this issue is "the man in the middle" interception of the traffic.
This does not happen. The only data feed we get is the total usage per category, ie what you see in VMBU and even then thats is not fool proof.. We do not see the payload nor do we obtain any information about our customers activities and there is certainly no need, ability or desire to do this. The E30's are on our network, under our control and no-one outside of Plusnet has access to the data feed. From a personal perspective, ISP's are not the internet police. To utilise diff services or DPI in the manner you have discussed, imho, would open up a whole can of worms for any ISP with regards to "knowing" what a customer is doing.
DPI to layer 3 or 4 is more than adequate for our needs, pushing that to 5 and above is a whole other story and we can't do that with the E30's.I hope that alleviates your concerns. QoS rules have been around for a long time, as have differentiated services. Many home routers will use the same facilities where QoS rules or routing is applied. Ours simply do it on a grander scale and more efficiently.
Mark
Interesting viewing on the subject can be seen here (if you've got 40 mins to kill)
Interview with Dave Tomlinson - part One
Interview with Dave Tomlinson - Part Two
(Sorry Dave ;D)
Very good viewing, puts things into real laymens terms.
if the current govt. had their way tho, im sure they would be
Interview with Dave Tomlinson - part One
Interview with Dave Tomlinson - Part Two
(Sorry Dave ;D)
Very good viewing, puts things into real laymens terms.
Quote ISP's are not the internet police
if the current govt. had their way tho, im sure they would be