Shoutbox

Relevant articles:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/click_online/4905660.stm
http://torrentfreak.com/how-to-encrypt-bittorrent-traffic/

What do you think about this?

I personally can't believe this has only recently come to light. I found out about traffic shaping probably 6 months ago while I was hunting for a well priced, useable broadband package, looking through well known and less well known ISP's (I'm british so there is BT for example). More often than not I would see a nice big advert for unlimited downloads on anything from a 512kb-2mb connection for anything from £14.99 - £19.99, but when I looked on their websites they had small print that isn't included in their TV ads, which explained about contention ratios and traffic shaping. Basically an ISP would provide an 'unlimited' service in three different tiers at different prices although they all essentially appeared to be the same thing, but the lowest one would have data heavy traffic slowed down considerably, hence the name traffic shaping.

As for contention ratios I don't really understand as much, all I know is the less reliable connections probably have more people using them at once, whereas services like blueyonder have good contention ratios (for 20-30 pounds a month they should get this).

All of this is incredibly annoying, the ISP's are being very sneaky, and when you provide a 2mb connection that can't actually run to its full potential on some protocol, you do not have a 2mb connection, and the general public are not likely to realise this. My ISP is waitrose, they are actually very good, their tech support page has all of the settings that you need to configure pretty much any router you may want to use instead of the modem they supply if you don't already have one, have a backup dialup account and don't have traffic shaping (I know this because I've got the full potential out of my connection on some torrents). The only downside being there is a 5GB cap, but I can cope with this.

The way I see it is I hope traffic shaping wont be employed for people with a cap because they should be able to use their allocated data transfer any way they like, and in general any connection should be able to fulfill its speed potential for the majority of the time, but false advertising isn't really fair.