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.

* Menthix is glad to be living in the Netherlands when it comes down to internet access.

There are just a few ISPs here that have datalimits and even fewer that will do traffic shaping. Probably 80% of all offers is datalimit-less and unshaped.

I'd rather be traffic shaped than be capped at 5GB (per month??) btw. Even if i wouldn't download warez at all I would still do more than 5GB .

Yes, it's per month, but many people I know have a 2GB cap which is much much worse. I'd agree Britain is quite unfortunate for broadband, it is a little overpriced. I'm finding that I download less programs, but more tv shows now, and I can keep just under 5gb a month. It's a pain in the arse and I'd love an uncapped service. I also read on http://www.pcpro.co.uk/ that Britain is beginning to become the most traffic intensive user of the internet. To put my data useage into comparison - my friend is on telewest for (I think) £29.99/month and does about 100GB transfer in a month. Some of this goes on seeding, but a lot on gaming and downloading. I manage to polay quite a bit of cs 1.6 and stay under my limit, and if I go over, rather than experience a worse service, I'm charged an extra £2 per GB.

quote:

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Originally posted by tomfletcherman
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).

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contention ratios is really a non issue.

Basically, most home users (in the UK) will get a 50:1 contention ratio (a few home users, and most business users will get 20:1).

Basically it means that you and 50 users will share the same connection.

While on the surface, this looks bad, its not too much of a problem as it is very unlikely, that anyone else will be downloading at the EXACT same moment. So most people get the full download speed they play for.

For users with isp that use traffic shaping, uTorrent, Azureus and BitComet now have Encryption, so they encrypt all the data that flows out so the isp doesn't know it's torrent data, and they can't throttle it

I can't live with a 5 GB cap , I'm downloading about 20 GB every month.

Well I'm just going to have to live with it if I could download more, I would...