How to tell when your data takes the scenic route
18 August 2006
From New Scientist Print Edition.
Celeste Biever
 
 
If you support net neutrality - the principle that all data packets routed
around the internet should receive equal priority - soon you could help the
cause personally by donating your spare computing power.
 
Imitating the popular SETI@home project, which harnesses 150,000 home
computers worldwide to help search for signs of alien life, a group of
politically minded bloggers and techies is planning to enlist a similar army
of PCs to monitor the net for non-neutral data routing. Each PC would use
its idle power to test whether broadband providers are deliberately slowing
data down.
 
US broadband providers, such as AT&T and Verizon, which ferry data packets
along fibre-optic cables, have recently started selling services such as
video and voice-over IP (VOIP), sparking fears that these companies could
slow down data packets from competing providers such as YouTube and Skype.
However, there is currently no way to monitor whether deprioritisation is
actually occurring, and a US Senate committee recently rejected draft "net
neutrality" legislation that would outlaw deliberate "packet
deprioritisation", in which packets get bumped down the transmission queue
(www.newscientisttech.com/article/dn9435.html).
 
Deliberate deprioritisation is hard to detect because there is always a
chance packets can be shunted to the back of the queue non-maliciously when
there is heavy traffic, says Tom Evslin, a technology consultant based in
Stowe, Vermont. His solution is to use the distributed approach to single
out deliberate deprioritisation.
 
Each volunteer would download software that triggers their computer to send
out test packets called pings to various websites. Because pings
automatically trigger a return packet, they can be used to measure the speed
of a connection between two computers. Each probe PC reports its results to
a central server that can then work out from all the ping times whether
packets from certain websites are being deprioritised, and if so by which
broadband providers, says Evslin. He outlined the idea at the Harvard
Berkman Center for Internet and Society in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on 8
August.
 
 
>From issue 2565 of New Scientist magazine, 18 August 2006, page 26

 

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