[fjni]

This is great insight. Thank you for that.

I imagine lots of people are or have spent lots of money and time trying to figure out the type of data or connection from patterns as you say.

A more nuanced and correct statement would have been to say that it's much harder to do than it used to be, when you could just look at the mime-type or similar to figure out what to throttle.

[Meleagris]

If you're interested in learning more, deep packet inspection, and specifically "encrypted traffic classification" are fairly mature in industry. Many traffic shapers are using products like Enea's Qosmos ixEngine or home-grown equivalents which can identify thousands of applications and protocols.

Most providers that use traffic shaping don't care about content, and the encrypted traffic classification is enough to make traffic policy decisions.