Traffic shaping is a bandwidth management technique used on computer networks which delays some or all datagrams to bring them into compliance with a desired traffic profile. Traffic shaping is used to optimize or guarantee performance, improve latency, or increase usable bandwidth for some kinds of packets by delaying other kinds. It is often confused with traffic policing, the distinct but related. Traffic shaping (also known as packet shaping) is bandwidth management technique that delays the flow of certain types of network packets in order to ensure network performance for higher priority applications. Traffic shaping essentially limits the amount of bandwidth that can be consumed by certain types of applications. It is primarily used to ensure a high quality of service for business.
An ISP should treat your traffic transparently and not care about its contents. There are ISPs out there however that will rate-limit (shape) certain traffic like NNTP (usenet) or P2P (torrents). So how do you find out if your ISP is doing this?
Go to Policy & Objects Traffic Shaping Policy and select Create New to create a shaping policy that will set regular traffic to high priority. Under Matching Criteria, set Source, Destination, Service to match your Internet Access policy.
- The traffic is forwarded at layer 2 by the layer 2 MS, or the MX, depending upon where 192.168.22.22 is located in the network. If traffic is destined to 192.168.32.14 The traffic is received by the MX with a tagged VLAN ID of 2 and processed by the MX.
- Shaping: Traffic Shaping is the process of delaying packets to limit egress traffic to a maximum rate or smooth bursts. Policing: Traffic Policing is the practice of dropping, marking or ignoring ingress packets that don't comply with user-defined criteria. Filters: Filters are used by classful QDiscs to determine which class a packet will be queued to.
There’s an application called ShaperProbe that will test this for you. It’s available for Windows, MAC and Linux and it can detect if your ISP is shaping traffic or not. To give it a test run I decided to install it on my Linux machine and check if Ziggo (my ISP) is shaping anything..here’s how to install it on Linux:
First we’ll download the source files, now let’s extract it:
Now open the folder and compile it:
Now let’s run it and see what happens:
As you can see my ISP is not shaping anything. Another cool method to test if your ISP is shaping is Glasnost. From their website you can test a number of different applications like bittorrent, NNTP or even Youtube:
Traffic Shaping For Macular Degeneration
Above you see some of the applications that you can test. My ISP isn’t shaping NNTP traffic as you can see below:
Traffic Shaping For Machine Learning
How about your ISP? Is it limiting your traffic?