torrentfreak.com — The Australian ISP Exetel has decided to cut bandwidth for P2P traffic in half from noon to midnight. This move will save Exetel about $45,000 per month, while it only takes $75,000 to implement the bandwidth throttling mechanisms.
Oct 14, 2006 View in Crawl 4
rick2kOct 15, 2006
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Closed AccountOct 15, 2006
This isp is really dumb, who is going to pay the same amount for less bandwidth? I would switch to another proivder. I doubt they are passing the savings down to the customers for sure? Its just like putting everyone on the "light" package and charging the same amount...
geminitojanusOct 15, 2006
"torrent traffic has a very predictable pattern of uploads and downloads, with one type, either UL or DL going through the same port each time"Well then the solution is easy then isn't it? Make it a part of the protocol to rotate ports at random intervals. Send data to different clients through different ports, and at a different rate (such as "hot" and "cold" throttling; send a bunch of packets at once on one torrent, then allow that torrent to "cool" down by only sending one or two packets until it's hot period comes again). There are literally _THOUSANDS_ of different ways BitTorrent can get around arbitrary throttling rules (there are mathematicians developing them right now for sending data over noisy links; the same modulation system that works for your cable modem might be the same way we torrent some day), and in the end, BitTorrent's going to be a lot faster about adopting those ways than any ISP is going to be. Of course, this is a very bad way of going about things (as other applications will suffer as the ISPs try to find new ways to filter BitTorrent), Bram Cohen as much as came out and said that, which is one of the reasons he doesn't support protocol encryption in the first place (it's the "first shot" in the Torrent Filter wars).And mostly, it's an academic argument anyways, as you could (and should) always just boycott the company that sells the deficient product.
t3hxOct 16, 2006
Get onto a decent ISP, come on.www.internode.on.net
diggaddictOct 16, 2006
What about, Adam and Internode, both have decent ADSL2 offerings - I am with Adam with a 40 gig a month plan - my speed is 16 megabits/sec down, 1 megabit up - they are reliable and decent. Internode is more for the business customer and is more expensive but have better shaping methods.
zmerlinOct 16, 2006
They will lose many. Exetel markets only to geeky folks, and has recently implemented an e-mail only support structure to try to weed out folks who call support too much. They encourage people who aren't techy to use a different ISP. The PHP/MySQL/CGI etc etc support that they offer encourages geeks as well.
sk0peOct 17, 2006
@BroccolibobHave you used Exetel? Hmmm... I get exceptional connection speeds with them, consistently getting sustained 57.5kB/sec at all hours.Oh, and P2P is NOT illegal in Australia. It is illegal to share pirated content over P2P. There are many legal uses for P2P.I find it simultaneously hilarious and incredibly frustrating that all these people are saying "Exetel huh? I'll have to remember to steer clear of them". If you actually go to the source and see what they are saying to the customers (in the forums) you will see that they ARE NOT limiting (for example) a 512kbps connection to 256 kbps for P2P. They are limiting overall P2P traffic to 50% of the TOTAL network bandwidth. If the total P2P demand is less than 50% then there will be no impact on your connection.