Re: The status of consumer rate limiting?

Since some p2p programs now use well known port numbers allocated to other things eg port 80, is it even possible to block/rate limit them? And have folks attempts at blocking caused this move to use such port numbers which imho is not a good thing..

As long as there are some bits in the stream that give away the ultimate application of that stream it´s possible. Using SSL / IPSEC / some proprietary protocol will degrade the detection to look for "elephant flows" but still allows for some bandwidth regulation when neccessary. To look beyond the packet you either need more sophisticated hardware or reasonable speeds, like in the gigabit range, not 10G/40G. Pete