BonaFide: A traffic shaping detection tool for mobile networks

With the growth of the mobile Internet customer base we expect that mobile operators may feel tempted to apply certain traffic shaping techniques. Mobile operators may view such traffic shaping techniques as a quick and a cost-effective way of ensuring more “equalized" Quality of Service (QoS). A situation when a more bandwidth hungry application is tamed for the sake of other protocols and applications. As such, customers Voice over IP (VoIP), YouTube or BitTorrent traffic can be shaped or blocked by certain operators. We developed a tool that can detect such traffic shaping manipulations on a mobile network. We also demonstrate that certain traffic manipulations occur both on 3G as well as EDGE networks.