Sympatico begins traffic shaping (ie. throttling) for many P2P applications

[larry_llama]

i think the real bandwidth issue is email chain letters and facebook notifications, plus replying to emails and leaving a years worth of quoted text in the body every time. if only people stopped doing those things we could download all of the americas next top model episodes we want

[Kanada Kev]

6 gazillion people watching YouTube 24/7.

[phishtaper]

6 gazillion people

wow. thats a lot.

[Kanada Kev]

yup

[FunkyBeats]

The simple point is:

[color:blue]If you pay for bandwidth you are entitled to use it.

If what you are doing is illegal that is a different issue. As far as being "below the radar" I'm all for that. There are solutions that circumvent this problem and when they get blocked there will be another solution. Information is ones and zeroes and we can package it any way we like. The point that should never be lost throughout all of this is that the very essence of what has made the internet so revolutionary is its ability to adapt and be innovative through the collective efforts of individuals. As soon as we allow private corporations to exert control beyond infrastructure and into the control of content we will have lost the greatest benefit of this phenomenon.

FunkyBeats.

Edited May 16, 2008 by Guest
spelling

[Kanada Kev]

Well put.

I also like the explanation on how this wouldn't be an argument for the providing of phone service. So, you pay bell to have a home phone. They then start telling you that you are talking on it tooooo much and that it's affecting the service of other Bell customers. Then, you are told that you are talking about things on the phone that are "illegal" and that because of that you are the root cause for all the telephone problems that Bell is experiencing on a backbone that can't handle it.

Yup, fair

Same thing for TV. You pay for TV service. You watch too much of it, or watch to much of a certain type of programming, and now the provider is going to limit your usage.

[FunkyBeats]

The thing to remember here, Kev, is that you're not using too much. You are using no more than the amount that has been agreed upon at the time the contract was signed. If the contract stated that you could have a certain amount of bandwidth but none of it could be used for torrents then we would be in a different situation. You can have a million torrents open and you will still only use the bandwidth you have bought, no more.

FunkyBeats.

[Kanada Kev]

Yes, and they slip through that logic. They have always had a "cap" in their user agreement, but they didn't enforce it. They don't cut off ALL torrent protocol traffic either. They still let you do it, but at unbearable rates. They are slimey. Why didn't they enforce this all from the get-go? Well, it works perfectly for them sliding into tiered pricing plans now.

Wonder why they don't offer free cigarettes with an account. Get some customers hooked then start charging them for them at any time they feel right. Hey, it's not THEIR problem

Fuck 'em

[phishtaper]

and porn is slow too ...

[FunkyBeats]

That's good, it will make it last longer...

[mattm]

The thing to remember here, Kev, is that you're not using too much. You are using no more than the amount that has been agreed upon at the time the contract was signed. If the contract stated that you could have a certain amount of bandwidth but none of it could be used for torrents then we would be in a different situation. You can have a million torrents open and you will still only use the bandwidth you have bought, no more.

FunkyBeats.

Now you've hit on the real problem, false advertisement and that's what gets me. Your other comment, you get what you paid for, is true, I have no problem downloading constantly right at the cap when using non-p2p protocols.

Here's the other thing that no one wants to mention. Yesterday I started downloading, through rogers, a torrent of osx leopard. I was able to connect to a good 10 seeders and many peers and sat at 30kbps all night netting me 50% of 2.5gigs in one night. I watched it for a bit and at the start it would go up to 150 or so and then back down to average out at 30kbps. That's 2 nights to get 2.5 gigs. Doesn't seem too bad to me. It would be nice if it was faster, yes, but since most people restrict their upload speeds to around 26 (the average point at which your internet stops working due to upload bandwidth over-use) and lots even less than this, and the fact that if you look at the pieces in utorrent, you'll notice that there are a lot of very dark blue lines, some light blue and fewer even lighter blue. This means that all most people have the same pieces as others. This means that if you've downloaded those pieces, and only a few other people have the other pieces, it will be very slow trying to get those other pieces.

Now back to the mac osx story. I get to school. My computer is on the DMZ, I don't have restrictions and the connection is insanely fast. I got the same exact speeds as with rogers last night. Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm, looks like at 30 some odd download through rogers I still wasn't hitting their cap, I was hitting the inherent problem in torrents -> They just aren't all that fast and that's the reason I don't use them. My upload, on the other hand, increased to 600kbps, woooo, that's fun to watch and lucky bastards leeching off me. I tried to get another thing the other day. Took 4 days on a 180mbps connection, which trust me, you don't have at home. It was 750mb.

[AdamH]

That's pretty strange. Is Roger's throttling in effect full-time? My downloading (through Primus, thus through Bell) is capped at 30k/sec from 4pm to 2am.

If I start a torrent in the morning it will usually reach 200 or 300k/sec in a matter of minutes.

[mattm]

sweet, you just pointed out for me how you can get good speeds, just not at peak times which is fine, you could have downloaded my 2.5 gigs from 2am to 4pm easily and I'm sorry but no one will be able to convince me that it isn't fast enough. Unfortunately the seeders weren't there for me so I could only get 30, not from rogers throttle (you didn't even read the post I put up or you have a hard time understanding computers) but from torrent upload throttle. Oh, tracker = demonoid, ratio 1.5 (200 gigs uploaded, 136 downloaded) means I don't get throttled by demonoid (the worse your ratio, the more they will throttle your speed as well to punish the leechers).

Edit: Demonoid does not punish for low ratio, good to know.

Edited May 16, 2008 by Guest

[FunkyBeats]

Matt, you might want to consider that since all of the major ISP's are throttling torrent traffic that the reason your down speed was poor was in fact due to the throttle on your seeders end. Without a throttle on closed groups that enforce ratio's it's obvious that very high download speeds are available.

FunkyBeats.

[mattm]

You're right, it must be that all the seeders and fellow leechers were also being throttled. It sucks ass that I had to wait less than 24 hours to save myself $100 ($129.49 + tax on amazon.ca) bucks or so on a 2.5gig piece of data, and I resign myself to the fact that even though it was less time than the shipping time had I ordered what I wanted (only a measly 90 or so hours saved there), it was still excruciatingly long. I'm angered by the fact that the ISP I use was offended by my illegal activities, how dare they, and that they decided to perhaps hinder (though not much, really, if you actually think about it) my efforts to use their equipment to help me in this endeavor.

Edited May 17, 2008 by Guest

[FunkyBeats]

I may be mistaken, Matt, but did you just admit on a public forum that you have engaged in piracy? If so, I guess you are the problem. Give your head a shake.

FunkyBeats.

[Burnt]

That's pretty strange. Is Roger's throttling in effect full-time?

I'm on Rogers and they stopped throttling me months ago.

[Kanada Kev]

How'dya get that to happen?

[Burnt]

Well when they first started to slow the throttle I got pissed off and switched to ultra-light because I wasn't going to pay for really fast internet if I couldn't use it.

Before you say anything at the time Rogers was the only game in town so I didn't have any choice over my internet provider.

Near the end of last year I noticed my speeds all of a sudden increased a little more then double and that's also when the traffic shaping stopped. Never complained or mentioned anything.

With my connection before they started charging for going over 60gigs a month which just started I was using anywhere from 80-100gigs of bandwidth each and every month.

For the record I download mostly from bt.etree.org so it's almost all legal. Right now I downloading the Wall Of Sound torrents which collect almost every known 1974 source together.

[mattm]

2.5 gigs in less than 24 hours = entire show on bt.etree.org in less than 24 hours and that is just not bad, not bad at all. Beats the old days of sending away for the product in the mail.

There's a better hypothetical situation than the one I mentioned previously.

Burnt: I don't think my rogers is throttled either since even though I might average 30kbps or so on a torrent, it does spike up to much higher speeds. I know they say they throttle but I think the throttle is over 150kbps (that gets you 2.5 gigs roughly 5 hours) but after doing some research it might be closer to 100kbps (still plenty fast enough).

Since virtually all legal downloads with the exception of linux images and bt.etree.org is done via http type protocols, this should not be a problem to anyone except those bt.etree.org folks that might have to wait a day to hear the show they are downloading.

Edited May 18, 2008 by Guest

[Burnt]

When I had Rogers high speed I would upload at around 75kB/s and then when they started throttling it went down to around 3 or 4kB/s up.

Now I can upload around 35kB/s with their supposed ultra-light and download around 65-70kB/s.

[Kanada Kev]

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080625-bell-canada-congestion-numbers-look-low-but-actually-arent.html

Bell Canada: congestion numbers look low, but actually aren't

By Nate Anderson | Published: June 25, 2008 - 01:31PM CT

Bell Canada has made public "confidential" data about the number of congested links on its network, data designed to show that P2P use was so bad that throttling was necessary. Bell's deep packet inspection-based throttling regime doesn't appear to be doing much for local loop congestion; in fact, it's actually gotten worse. Backbone congestion, though, has improved.

The Canadian Radio-television Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) is currently investigating Bell's system, which cap throttles P2P downloads at around 30KB/s between 4:30pm and 2:00am every day. Bell's own congestion numbers, which the CRTC said must be made public and Bell has now provided to Ars Technica, show that as the DPI gear was more widely deployed across Bell's network and eventually applied to Bell's wholesale customers (who promptly filed a complaint with the CRTC), rates of congestion at the DSLAM level increased. Between March 2007 and September 2007, the number of congested DSLAM links on Bell's network averaged 4.8 percent; during the period from November 2007 to May 2008, that average increased to 6.7 percent.

Meanwhile, upstream in Bell's network, congestion has been dropping. Over the same time periods, the average number of congested backbone links fell from 2.9 percent to 1.1 percent.

Source: Bell Canada

In the accompanying letter, Bell buckles up and takes a tortuous metaphor involving roads for a lengthy drive in order to illustrate its point that even low congestion numbers can cause big problems. Visualize a traffic accident at a busy intersection: even though the "network" is congested at only one point, it can still have repercussions for users in the entire area. Just to make sure no one gets the idea that these low percentages are actually no big deal, Bell spells out its message in small words so that we can all understand.

"While these numbers may seem low to the average layperson," says the letter, "they are significant and network traffic engineers such that it is important to consider the number of congested links in the proper context."

Bell also takes aim at the idea that it just needs to spend more on infrastructure upgrades. It points out that it will spend nearly $500 million this year on capital improvements, and that it spent $110 million last year in "additional unplanned capital spending" just to deal with congestion. According the company's projections, if Bell Canada did nothing, as many as 790,000 customers would "be affected by congested links" by early 2009. The level of congestion "would have surpassed the limits of deployment projects that [bell] could address within the appropriate relief time frames given such factors as available manpower, release windows and volume of capital projects." Or, in other words, the only responsible thing to do was start throttling P2P.

[phishtaper]

oh my gosh, that's all way over my head. thankfully Bell is here to look after us.

and now that Teachers has bought Bell, perhaps it too will become as successful as the Leafs.

[Kanada Kev]

It's just Bell bullshit. P2P is NOT clogging their networks.

As for the Teachers' Pension Fund buying Bell, well it'll be just like MLSE. Make shitloads of money, aggravate your customer base, and don't pass any savings on to your pension contributors

[Kanada Kev]

GOOGLE says Bell is being illegal ... Go Google Go!!!

http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2008/07/07/tech-crtc.html