ISP's Confess =Throttle P2P Traffic

[Nflight]

http://www.dailytech.com/More+ISP+Co...rticle9544.htm

As more sophisticated tools for traffic shaping are unveiled, the question soon becomes which service providers aren't throttling customer traffic

Adding itself to the small-but-growing list of ISPs that admit to traffic shaping, Canada-based Bell Simpatico has confessed to using “traffic management” on heavy users “during peak hours.”
“We are now using a Internet Traffic Management to restrict accounts,” wrote an unnamed forum administrator on Bell Simpatico’s support forums. According to the administrator, Bell Simpatico’s traffic shaping affects an unmentioned number of applications and protocols, including BitTorrent, Gnutella, Limewire, Kazaa, eDonkey, eMule and WinMX.
A Bell Simpatico Manager chimed in immediately afterwards, explaining that “there continues to be phenomenal growth of consumer Internet traffic throughout the world” and that “Bell is using Internet Traffic Management to ensure we deliver bandwidth fairly to our customers during peak Internet usage.”
According to the Manager, the bandwidth cap was introduced sometime last year and “doesn't affect the vast majority of [Bell’s] customers.” One concerned user asked if the traffic management will be removed as network capacity increases, to which the administrator replied that he “can’t answer this question,” and noted that it would be decided as the issue arises.
Internet service providers have found themselves under an increasing burden as bandwidth-intensive internet services like online video and file-sharing have proliferated. While the true volume is unknown, many think that 30%-50% of all internet traffic is P2P-related, with a recent survey from traffic-management company Ipoque pushing that number towards an astonishing 90%.

In response to this, many providers have employed a variety of techniques to limit customers who are deemed to be using more than their “fair share,” a tactic that has been the subject of much debate as part of the controversy surrounding “network neutrality.”

While traffic shaping is by far the most common, a few companies have employed more exotic methods: Comcast is thought to impose an invisible 600 GB bandwidth limit on its “unlimited” internet service, and a recent study conducted by the AP found that the ISP impersonates BitTorrent clients for the purposes of interfering with their connections.

[Steve Lux]

They have been doing this for years. If you have only so much capacity you have to throttle back your high capacity users so that you can have more customers with access. There will always be bandwidth hogs and terraced system capacity, with associated capacity charges, are the only fair way to work with them.

I wrote the first GSL load levelling code for our gaming system servers when I worked for Simutronics (GemStone 3 and later GemStone 4). As the system load started to reach the server's maximum capacity a short script that monitored system lag would increasingly reduce background actions in order to protect the customer experience. If it got bad enough it would start to effect customer experience, but mostly in ways that were not easily detectable. Anything was better than a system lag and lock-up, or even a system crash.

Just imagine what kind of internet load there would be if everyone was running MJ-12, full out. The whole net would slow to a crawl - then no one would be happy.

[NeoGen]

My ISP (Cabovisão) is still not on the list of "Bad ISPs"... I'm safe for now

[Lagu]

And Telia too isn´t on the list so far.