Telstra To Trial Throttling, Packet Inspection To Stop Piracy


Heads-up all you naughty pirates: Telstra is coming for you. It’s coming to slow down your P2P traffic and analyse your traffic to stop rampant online piracy.

Piracy has always been difficult for ISPs; you only need to look at the iiTrial to understand that. To combat pirated material traversing Telstra’s pipes, the telco has announced plans to throttle peer-to-peer (P2P) network traffic while also inspecting network traffic for pirated material.

It’s only a trial at this stage for a group of customers in Victoria (of which they can opt out), but Telstra is investigating the viability of the two anti-piracy methods to see if it would work across the whole network.

The telco said on its Exchange blog this morning that the packet inspection technology wouldn’t be able to tell what was actually being downloaded, it would only be able to track the “signature” of the traffic to finger it as infringing material.

The technology being used looks at characteristics of the data packet to identify the type of the traffic present. Any inspection that takes place is used only to identify the signature of the traffic; it does not identify the content (eg whether this is a movie, the title or any other details).

This trial does not involve any monitoring or tracking of the sites visited by our customers, and the trial’s findings, including customer feedback, will be collected in accordance with our Privacy Statement.

Telstra will also shape identified peer-to-peer content to slow down pirates:

One of the variety of options being examined under this trial is the shaping of specific services (including some peer to peer (P2P) services) in certain circumstances, to determine what impact this has on total overall customer experience of time critical experiences for real time entertainment.

Victorian customers involved in the trial are being contacted about their involvement.

Are you on the trial? Let us know how it’s going in the comments. [Telstra]


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