Shaping is teklom's fantastic idea to provide certain internet services with higher priority.
What happens is that when your computer requests some data from another computer, it will request that service using a specific protocol [Port].
e.g. HTTP protocol [Port 80] is almost always the browsing service.
In addition to the HTTP protocol, you also get:
FTP (File Transfer Protocol) [21], SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) [25], POP3 (Post Office Protocol V3 [Guess])[125] and a zillion others.
Teklom has decided that cos most users purchased ADSL to browse with, then teklom must make browsing look fantastically fast, so they spend a considerable fortune implementing a system where all HTTP requests are processed before any other requests. This results in browsing being the most responsive service.
Teklom then gave email (SMTP + POP3) the next line in the priority stakes.
Lastly, FTP [21] was included.
Now, if you request any other kind of service from teklom internet, you are going to have to wait for the other services to be serviced first.
Now - this has very little effect on anything until the internet gets really busy - like during office hours. Now - when you are browsing an international website, that takes say 30 seconds to respond, imagine how long it is taking for johnny to recieve his stock take update on port 2342, which is of lower priority.
So - to allow people like johnny to still recieve their stock reports on port 2342 in a relatively timely fashion, teklom introduced the unshaped service, where none of this priority carp happens and all data is returned and sent on a first come first served basis.
Questions ?
