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Maybe they can get these guys to make it. They seem to have experience with all that protocol/prioritization crap.

I find that cFosSpeed helps a lot with this problem.

Disclaimer: I'm on what is considered a very good plan for Australia. Optus Cable, 20GB peak/40GB off-peak (off-peak is 12 midnight to 12 noon), 10Mbps down/256kbps up (though in practice it's really about 7Mbps down). After all my peak usage is used I get shaped to 64kbps down/up (and my extra off-peak becomes unavailable). If I use up all my off-peak it starts taking from my peak usage. No free sites - all traffic counts towards my usage no matter the source. I pay about AU$70/month for this service (which BTW is very reliable - my only real issue with it is the pitiful upload speed). It's a grandfathered plan - you can't get it anymore but I'm allowed to stay on it - the new plans are much less friendly (value for money for net access has been trending downwards in Australia over the last few years).

I find your definition of "application" strange - I would have thought "application" would refer to type of traffic, rather than source.

I want ISPs to prioritise traffic based on type, just I do at my end. I use cFosSpeed to prioritise real-time applications (VOIP) highest, things requiring low latency (e.g. web browsing) next, and things which aren't particularly time-dependent lowest (e.g. downloads, P2P).

Most of the time, P2P runs at full speed, because there's nothing else going on. But as soon as something else starts using the net, P2P slows down - and then quickly speeds up again as soon as the higher-priority activity stops.

I'd love ISPs to do the same thing, so my VOIP calls were at the highest priority end-to-end. ISPs should never prevent any type of traffic, but I'm very happy for them to reduce the performance of applications that are not significantly time-dependent so that significantly time-dependent traffic is preferred. I'll still get my downloads - it'll just take a little longer.

I'd also be in favour of per-megabyte charging, so long as it's at a reasonable rate (not $150/GB as Telstra charges for excess usage!), and that you can set a cap after which you get shaped to low speeds, at which point you have to go to a secure web site and set a new cap for that month only (or something along those lines).

Install a bandwidth management tool like cFosSpeed and you will see that latency drops down to essentially the same levels as you have without BitTorrent running without reducing the torrent speed whatsoever. This doesn't even require any of the fancy prioritization features of the bandwidth manager tool - just avoiding overloading the transmit queue.

In other words, your DSL line is perfectly capable of handling an uplink that is actually used for more than an occasional HTTP request without bogging down. The reason it doesn't do it is poor engineering of the DSLAM. With better tuning and queue management algorithms like RED (Random Early Drop) they will cooperate with TCP congestion control to avoid overloading the uplink buffers. Your DSL line will work just fine without a third-party bandwidth management tool.

Why is the DSLAM poorly engineered? The simple explanation is incompetence. Conspiracy theorist would probably claim that it's intentional because ISPs don't want you to use bandwidth-intensive applications. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle: the original flaw was a combination of lazy engineers and the fact that most users don't really use their uplink so much. It's not being fixed beacuse it serves the interests of the ISPs.

Definitely look at DD-WRT if your router is supported (depends on the version).

As an alternative, or additional measure, if he is running Windows, and if he will let you install something on his PC which will not significantly affect his downloading (and might improve it overall), but will definitely improve things for the rest of the network, download the 30-day trial of cFosSpeed and install it on his machine (running in multi-computer, non-cooperative mode).

http://www.cfos.de/speed/cfosspeed_e.htm

BTW, I paid for cFosSpeed after having it installed for 2 days - it's well and truly worth the 9 euros IMO, even if you've already got a traffic-shaping router (it tends to reduce the load on your router).

One way to get him to agree to try it is by telling him that it will allow him to play online games and do other online activities while downloading (this is true) and at the same time will allow him to increase his maximum upload speed in his P2P program (since cFosSpeed prioritises TCP ACKs).

If he's running linux, you can set up local traffic shaping yourself, but you'll have to go searching how.

The main thing for this though is to point out to him that this will improve the internet connection for everyone, including himself.

Interesting - I hadn't thought of that (I don't play WoW).

If that's the real cause, it should be fixable by using cFosSpeed: http://www.cfos.de/speed/cfosspeed_e.htm or some other QoS that prioritises ACKs. cFosSpeed makes a huge difference for my normal torrent downloading - don't need to set any limits, torrent traffic is given the lowest priority, and ACKs are the highest priority.

Are you using Windows? If so, I *highly* recommend cFosSpeed:
http://www.cfos.de/speed/cfosspeed_e.htm

It performs QoS on every connection to/from your machine - and in particular, it gives the highest priority to ACKs. They've got a 30-day uncrippled trial - I only needed 2 days before I paid for it (a whole 9 euros!). If you're the first person to use it with a particular ISP you can even get it for free (but chances are someone's already done that on your ISP ...).

I can now download torrents with my upload bandwidth unlimited, and browse the web at the same time with the highest torrent download speeds I've ever achieved (still not great of course - I've got a 12Mb down/256kb up cable connection). Previously, I'd had to cap at about 50% of my upload to be able to do any browsing, and even then lots of pages timed out. Hell - I can even carry on a Skype conversation with no loss of quality while torrenting.

It only works properly if all your traffic is going through one machine, so I'm using ICS on my server and all traffic is going through that (and then through my router). It's really interesting to watch the torrent uploads and downloads dip when requesting a pile of web pages all at once, then quickly climb back up when the pages have all been retrieved.

A *very* happy customer - the best-value thing I've bought in a long time.

Cfosspeed is a great little program for Windows XP+ that gives an incredible ammount of control over quality of service. It detects a large number of standard protocols (http,ftp,nntp,dns...) and can set priority on a per program basis for games, voip and p2p. I reccomend it especially if you have an ADSL connection prone to a high ping while downloading. You can setup cfosspeed to prioritize your connection for low ping or high bandwidth. Unfortunately it doesn't work as intended if you have multiple computers on a router because it shapes the traffic independent of other computers, but the developers are working to add multi computer support.

I've used it for almost 6 months and its given me the highest most stable download speeds I've ever seen on my DSL. My pings while downloading are almost as good as they can be. It's also very lean on CPU overhead.

here's the developers explanation on how it works
http://www.cfos.de/traffic_shaping/traffic_shaping _e.htm

With good traffic shaping you can easily play FPS while downloading. I used cFos Speed to play CS:S and got in-game pings between 60 and 80 ms (vs 30 to 50 without a download). Not perfect, but quite playable. Unfortunately there does not seem to be any free alternative to cFos Speed - I searched without luck.