Traffic shaping is a common practice among broadband providers, or at least it has been up until the last few years, since the level of data transfer rates have gone up considerably around the world, with streaming media becoming the normal standard. It is also known as packet sharing, and is really nothing more than the control of computer network traffic in order to optimise or guarantee the performance for consumers through improved latency and increased amount of bandwidth through the manipulation of data packet transfers, provided that they meet certain criteria. In layman’s terms this is simply an action on a stream or flow of information where additional delays are imposed upon those packets so that they conform to a predetermined constraint. This basically means that the ISP can control the volume of traffic being sent to their network during a specific period of time or by controlling the maximum rate at which the traffic is sent.
Traffic shaping can be encompassed in a variety of ways depending upon the broadband company. It is generally seen in use at the edge of the network to control the traffic that enters, but it can also be applied directly at the traffic source, such as at the computer network card. It is a common enough practice because broadband providers in the past have signed on more customers than their network can handle, with the assumption that not everyone will be accessing their full potential at any given time, but streaming media is beginning to make traffic shaping a thing of the past.