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Plusnet have been the worst British ISP at traffic shaping, which is why I, and a lot of other users, left their service in droves. To be replaced by their target customer of someone who uses only web and mail... What was most infuriating was the amount of backtracking they did about traffic shaping, and the "unlimited" service they were previously marketing. Ftp, usenet and p2p apps were targetted, but the traffic shaping technologies used (ellacoyas) seemed to have a knock on effect to other usage patterns. Besides the fact that people object to being told what to use their connection for, unless that message is communicated very well. Which, in the case of plusnet, it wasn't...

For those who are interested, the people who supply Shaw (who happens to be my ISP) their traffic shaping software (or is it an appliance?) is Ellacoya Networks. This bit of info was from some forum that I found when I first noticed that my maximum BT upstream got cut by about 60%.

FWIW, for those who aren't traffic shaped yet, don't be surprised if you are next if you are on a cable ISP -- the nature of the shared network means that the throughput gets choked for everyone when the upstream traffic gets too high (and ACKs get delayed). DSL providers don't really care about upstream as much, they worry more about total traffic which they can throttle in other, cheaper, ways.

no
you idiot,
what is actually happening is your being ignorant.

it happens to me as well.

dont just spot discount things as people being stupid. Shaw.ca does this to me. I can download a file from any big website (Microsoft, adobe, macromedia, etc) at 7 MEG DOWN. thats 700 kps in firefox. I can download at 7 meg from my workplaces FTP server at a colo. a 10 meg file takes about 10 seconds to download. I run BT 24/7. I have never seen it climb more than 20kps . most of the time it hovers around 4 kps.

I have a linux router. I run my own DNS (before that it would randomly drop me like grand parent). I can play any game with no lag, no packetloss download huge files but BT maxes out at 4-20 kps.

But perhaps you would liek some evidence, OK so i shall point you in These Various Directions.

From the last link:
"Instead of spending the big bucks to upgrade capacity, the company allegedly green-lighted the use of an Ellacoya switch to limit Bit Torrent traffic at various hubs on the Shaw network. While the idea started in the Cordova area of Vancouver, the source claims, it has now been applied to the entire Shaw network in order to regain some of their "lost" bandwidth."

Here is the press release from ellacoya

Ill probably get modded down for being agressive, but so many people discount people as having no knowledge instead of actually listening to them.

no
you idiot,
what is actually happening is your being ignorant.

it happens to me as well.

dont just spot discount things as people being stupid. Shaw.ca does this to me. I can download a file from any big website (Microsoft, adobe, macromedia, etc) at 7 MEG DOWN. thats 700 kps in firefox. I can download at 7 meg from my workplaces FTP server at a colo. a 10 meg file takes about 10 seconds to download. I run BT 24/7. I have never seen it climb more than 20kps . most of the time it hovers around 4 kps.

I have a linux router. I run my own DNS (before that it would randomly drop me like grand parent). I can play any game with no lag, no packetloss download huge files but BT maxes out at 4-20 kps.

But perhaps you would liek some evidence, OK so i shall point you in These Various Directions.

From the last link:
"Instead of spending the big bucks to upgrade capacity, the company allegedly green-lighted the use of an Ellacoya switch to limit Bit Torrent traffic at various hubs on the Shaw network. While the idea started in the Cordova area of Vancouver, the source claims, it has now been applied to the entire Shaw network in order to regain some of their "lost" bandwidth."

Here is the press release from ellacoya

Ill probably get modded down for being agressive, but so many people discount people as having no knowledge instead of actually listening to them.

You could try using a different port, since traffic shaping looks for activity targeted a specific ports only. If you're using the default Bittorent port you'll likely be slowed, but pick a port that's commonly used for something else that they don't throttle. (snip)

Nope. Shaw uses Ellacoya based traffic shapers. These units work very close to the application layer, and thus recognize BT traffic, no matter what port you use. They aren't your simple port-based throttlers most ISPs use. Of course, it would be very expensive to scan every packet, so I'm fairly certain it scans only TCP connections, and like a stateful firewall, ignores or shapes traffic.

Of course, Shaw's also got some interesting "usage" scenarios... the "average" user consumes 2-3 GB of traffic a month (they have a 20-30GB soft limit for the standard package). I used to do that when I was on dialup... The unfortunate reality is that our DSL provider (Telus) has a 10GB cap...

Try this: ellacoya

A more reasonable solution, that some ISPs are looking at is to throttle P2P traffic so that it never takes up more than say 30% of their bandwidth. They use layer 7 packet inspection from guys like P-Cube and Ellacoya .

The rationale? always-on users want to use their P2P stuff, but are not sensitive about the speeds that they get it - they'll just queue up a load of files and come back next morning.

It seems to me like the least worst approach, and is certainly better than hard caps. One benefit for the customer is Web traffic will usually still fly, even though P2P is crawling. I believe Telenor in Sweden is using this stuff.

Ellacoya Networks also makes a switch that, like the packeteer device, uses signature detection to determine if a flow is p2p or not.

Before we started to use their switches, p2p traffic accounted for 65% of our network traffic (both inbound and outboud). By placing p2p limits on the upstream (or outbound) portion of internet pipes, we were able to reduce that to 40%.

When Ellacoya introduced signature detection in their 5.0 release, we were able to catch Kazaa2 flows which reduced our p2p usage to 30%.

Not only has this saved us a tremendous ammount of money (we don't have to keep buying pipe), but we were able to keep the cost down for our customers that don't use p2p, or care.

Another use for the switch is usage-based billing. People scoff at usage based billing, but it evens the billing field. Look at the grandmother that uses her connection to send emails to her kids, and then look at the kid down the street. Both pay the same ammount, but one uses 95% more bandwidth. A recent study that we did here concluded that 5% of our users use 90% of the available bandwidth.

So, what is fair? Limiting bandwidth-hungry applications to the point that they are no longer useable, or charging the customer that wants to use that application his fair share of the costs of delivering the service?