Cybersmart CEO Laurie Fialkov said that the terms “prioritized gaming traffic†and “unshaped services†do not belong in the same sentence.
True
Speaking to MyGaming, Fialkov said that all products that use IPC – irrespective of which ISP you are using – should have basically the same experience, assuming the IPC is not full.
Disagree. Firstly gaming isn't just local...so the quality of the international data (which differs by ISP) matters. And even on a local level there are sizable difference in latency and jitter between ISPs. On top of that it depends on which server your using. i.e. Generally IS accounts will have an edge on IS game servers.
He added that because of the rapid rate at which new games and updates are being delivered to consumers, it is almost impossible to effectively shape or prioritize gaming.
huh? You can certainly prioritise the bigger ones - they don't change the underlying networking code all that often (CSGO, WoW etc)
“We are throwing away our shapers in the next 3 months. We have already decommissioned one of the six we have, and the rest will follow soon,†said Fialkov.
That makes little sense. Even with old signatures it should still have a positive effect on prioritising. This sounds more like a marketing move to me - unshaped sells better than shaped.
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Which brings me to a bit of a rant (general rant, not directly CyberSmart related). Gather round kids...you might learn something.
People don't get that
well executed shaping is superior to unshaped. If you're downloading something from usenet it makes little difference whether that data arrives in 20ms or in 2000ms...as long as the throughput is high it doesn't matter one bit on user experience. Other protocols are time sensitive though (gaming, skype etc). So on a very basic level it makes sense to prioritise these ("shape") - it results in the best overall use of ISPs resources and then best bang per buck for the users.
Unfortunately SA ISPs (and other country's ISPs) are bastards that saw shaping as a way of squeezing more profit out of users. Simply put they piled too many users (income) onto too little capacity (expense). Naturally that killed performance across the board. To make that shtshow somewhat bearable they rolled in shaping - that forces the time sensitive protocols back into territory that is usable...but does so by shaping everything else straight into the ground. Thats why shaping has a bad rep...because ISPs used it to cover up the fact that they're overselling their capacity massively.
