M-Lab Tool, Shaperprobe, Reveals Traffic Shaping Among Major ISPs

Developed by Georgia Institute of Technology researchers Partha Kanuparthy and Constantine Dovrolis, a new measurement program called ShaperProbe is the first of its kind to detect traffic shaping over end user connections to the Internet.

Through a large sample test deployment on the Measurement Lab (“M-Lab”) platform, the researchers found that several major ISPs are actively shaping end user traffic over their Internet connections. The research conducted by Kanuparthy and Dovrolis achieved three objectives: 1) the development of an active end-to-end mechanism for detecting traffic shaping, 2) the deployment of ShaperProbe technology over the M-Lab platform and resulting analysis, and 3) the subsequent modification of the ShaperProbe detection algorithm for passive deployment on the traffic of any TCP-based application. Viewed in the context of recent debates surrounding truth-in-labeling requirements and network capacity, the findings raise concerns about the reliability of ISP advertised speeds and statements about network congestion.

The ShaperProbe research primarily underscores the need for better transparency among ISPs. Although the research does not indicate that traffic shaping practices of many of the providers are nefarious, they have the effect of substantially obscuring what actual data rates consumers can expect on their broadband service. The research found for example that in at least one instance, a company was actively shaping in 80% of the tests conducted without any explicit mention or explanation of traffic shaping to consumers in its Service-Level Agreement (“SLA”).