DiffProbe: Detecting ISP Traffic Discrimination

The goal of DiffProbe is to detect if an ISP is classifying certain kinds of traffic as "low priority", providing different levels of service for them. DiffProbe actively (and non-intrusively) probes the network path and tries to diagnose the nature and extent of traffic discrimination:

Has the ISP deployed priority-based scheduling mechanisms such as priority queueing or weighted fair queueing (as opposed to treating all traffic as equal)? Is the ISP doing discriminatory buffer management, or in other words, preferential dropping of packets from different flows? Is the ISP rate-limiting certain types of traffic?

These practices are commonly considered to be net neutrality violations by ISPs.

Status:

The tool is in "alpha," early stages of development. We initially plan to support clients on Linux. If you are interested in using DiffProbe, please fill the form below, and we will contact you once we release the tool.

October 20th '09: We have released a module of DiffProbe called ShaperProbe which aims to detect if the ISP is doing traffic shaping. Check out the beta release here!