Roger$ throttling BT.

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mohammedtaha

2[H]4U
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Oct 14, 2004
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I'm sure many of us here in Canada have been experiencing slow downs with torrents, if you google it, you'll see what I'm talking about here.

This is messed up ... I'm paying for Extreme and d/l @ 5.3kbps right now. I live in a building where most of the occupants are old people but it's quite close to many students within 500m. I can't get my favourite anime without having to mess around searching for a port to use. This is sad, and extremely pathetic. If I pay for Extreme I deserve Extreme connections or do they want me to cancel my subscription and use another ISP.
 
The business model of being an ISP does not like it when users actually use all the bandwidth that they are sold; the industry is based on over-subscription in order to keep prices down. When certain uses (or certain users) throw off the balance, they must be put in check; they can lose one heavy-usage customer (you) and keep another 20 light-usage customers, or vise versa.
 
But I'm not the only one who uses downloads or uploads torrents. To every 1 person that doesn't there are probably 10 that do.

The world today revolves around torrents and I've never heard of anyone experiencing internet slow downs from torrent usage by a neighbour. The problem is they're not just capping it to 50kb/s it's at 0 ... ZERO ... what does this tell you ? I can't d/l using torrents anymore ?

There should be a sticky made for ISP's to make it easier for us to get the right ISP.
 
mohammedtaha said:
But I'm not the only one who uses downloads or uploads torrents. To every 1 person that doesn't there are probably 10 that do.

The world today revolves around torrents and I've never heard of anyone experiencing internet slow downs from torrent usage by a neighbour. The problem is they're not just capping it to 50kb/s it's at 0 ... ZERO ... what does this tell you ? I can't d/l using torrents anymore ?

There should be a sticky made for ISP's to make it easier for us to get the right ISP.
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Just the other way around - for every torrent user there are 100 that can't even spell it. Besides, I've never seen it used for anything but illegal purposes. (I understand it can be used for good, just never seen it)

If you are looking for info about specific ISP's check out www.dslreports.com

 
mohammedtaha said:
I do use µtorrent. It's the best and I don't use torrents for illegal activities. Anime, free software is all I use it for ...
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I see. :) Well, maybe when µTorrent implements Protocol Header Encryption it will fool your ISP enough to let BitTorrent traffic through... ;)
 
Party2go9820 said:
Just the other way around - for every torrent user there are 100 that can't even spell it.
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Agreed. Torrent is awsome, but it's only now that the college kids are really starting to get a hold of it. Up to this point, it's been mostly light techies.

Besides, I've never seen it used for anything but illegal purposes. (I understand it can be used for good, just never seen it)
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The Blizzard updater for WoW uses bit torrent to download large files.

I use it to download linux isos.

There are plenty of good uses for it.
 
Party2go9820 said:
Besides, I've never seen it used for anything but illegal purposes. (I understand it can be used for good, just never seen it
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www.twit.tv
All there video podcasting is done with torrents. There are tons of legal things to do with torrents. There's a reason the author of the BitTorrent client just inked a deal with some movie people. Can you say IP TV on demand?
 
Cripes!

As I said, I knew there were legal items out there to download via BT. I've never needed to as I don't podcast anything, I don't download Linux ISOs and I don't download small indi-type movies. The fact still remains, the majority of files moving around via BT are illegal software, bootleg movies or porn.

More of my point was that while great, BT isn't an industry standard for file distribution (yet) and due to its mostly illegal content, I'm not suprised Rogers is trying to eliminate it from their networks.

.
 
Party2go9820 said:
More of my point was that while great, BT isn't an industry standard for file distribution (yet) and due to its mostly illegal content, I'm not suprised Rogers is trying to eliminate it from their networks.
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What would you consider industry standard?

For example: Almost all linux ISOs come in bit torrent flavors. If one doesn't, people are genuinely confused.

And as mentioned, blizzard uses bit torrent for wow.
 
mohammedtaha said:
If I pay for Extreme I deserve Extreme connections or do they want me to cancel my subscription and use another ISP.
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That might only buy you some time, and more and more ISPs are controlling their bandwidth, which is a precious commodity. They can improve their performance by legitimate users by filtering out the traffic hogging packets from illegitimate use...such as those P2P apps. You state you only use it for "legal" use...well, you are a minority...as the majority of P2P apps are warez seekers and those looking for free music.
 
The problem with this is why do companies promise what they can't provide?

If everyone in NA used their free evening minutes on their cellphones and were on theie cell phones for HOURS, would evening minutes start getting capped too ?

What we should do is complain since we just caught the company red-handed trying to provide something that's inexistant.

How would you feel if your cpu does not work at it's maximum speed because AMD/Intel didn't think you'll use it to it's max, and they then started capping how much software you can have running at the same time.

I might as well call them and tell them I wanna go down to Hi-Speed Starving since the gains of Extreme are non-existent except when d/l software through my browser.
 
Is aliant doing the same thing man?? I've never tried it... but I have ultra aliant, and it rocks.... 8mb/768k way up north here.... if you tell me how to 'torrent' I will try it for ya, and perhaps you could switch??

QJ
 
mohammedtaha said:
The problem with this is why do companies promise what they can't provide?

If everyone in NA used their free evening minutes on their cellphones and were on theie cell phones for HOURS, would evening minutes start getting capped too ?

What we should do is complain since we just caught the company red-handed trying to provide something that's inexistant.

How would you feel if your cpu does not work at it's maximum speed because AMD/Intel didn't think you'll use it to it's max, and they then started capping how much software you can have running at the same time.
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Yes, I would bet cell phone companies would start doing that... in my college town, they stopped offering unlimited nights and weekends because of that (instead they give you like a 1000, which is enough for most users).

The CPU issue is apples-to-oranges; your CPU's speed isn't shared with other users.
 
XOR != OR said:
What would you consider industry standard?

For example: Almost all linux ISOs come in bit torrent flavors. If one doesn't, people are genuinely confused.

And as mentioned, blizzard uses bit torrent for wow.
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Standard? Good Ol' FTP or Web file transfers. The problem with using BT to distribute most anything other than Linux stuff is that the software companies loose the ability to control the distribution. Most software companies spend tons of money making sure that the only way to get XYZ software is from the company itself. They don't want you able to download their software from a BT peer because then they feel like they've lost control of their product. It may be irrational and the tradeoff in bandwidth costs might show otherwise, but its a major hurdle for BT to becoming a standard for file distribution. (Linux is the exception since its already in the private domain and can be distributed freely).

And as far as porn being legal vs. illegal - the porn itself is very legal (thank you first ammendment!), but distributing copywrited pictures/movies without permission is very illegal, thus it gets lumped in with the warez group.

 
QwertyJuan said:
Is aliant doing the same thing man?? I've never tried it... but I have ultra aliant, and it rocks.... 8mb/768k way up north here.... if you tell me how to 'torrent' I will try it for ya, and perhaps you could switch??

QJ
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I doubt aliant is doing it since DSL and Cable are different... Cable has it's limitations although it's a LOT faster than Cable even when both offer the same bandwidth and this depends on the area you're in. DSL doesn't suffer the same way cable does, atleast, as far as I'm concerned. DSL is a direct connection to the POP where as cable is a neigbourhood network so if everyone is d/l using torrents everyone suffers.

The best way to solve this problem is by increasing speeds so files are downloaded faster and the neighbourhood is stressed less. I'm also thinking about switching to Business.. would that be better since there aren't many businesses in this area?

I don't get it .. capping torrents does not affect anyone since I never experienced any problems with the internet in this area. I've been recently experiencing disconnections from MSN though. Illegal or not, people are gonna d/l if it's capped or not. The more money they spend on hardware to stop us the more software invested in finding different ways to evade and software is cheaper when it's open source.

Companies are fighting a never ending battle, it's like fighting every disease out there. It's impossible and they're losing more money fighting it than allowing it. I'm sure most people that love a certain movie buy it whether it's downloadable or not. The problem that the movie and music industry should try to get rid off is wack movies and shitty music albums. The less money invested into those the more money you save and the more albums sold. They're also making lots of money through Napster and Itunes ..

On topic, Rogers is stupid and they're trying to fix something they can't fix, next thing is d/l right through port 80 .. then what ?
 
mohammedtaha said:
Illegal or not, people are gonna d/l if it's capped or not. The more money they spend on hardware to stop us the more software invested in finding different ways to evade and software is cheaper when it's open source.

Companies are fighting a never ending battle, it's like fighting every disease out there. It's impossible and they're losing more money fighting it than allowing it. I'm sure most people that love a certain movie buy it whether it's downloadable or not.
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The point is that ISP X pays a lot of money for bandwidth, peering agreements, and everything else that goes into getting an ISP off the ground. And sure, they give all users Y amount of bandwidth (5Mbit/sec download, whatever) - but part of the bandwidth calculation is the amount of users expected to utilize the full bandwidth at all times.

If an ISP is losing massive amounts of money because suddenly their upstream provider threatens to drop them, due to massive bandwidth use, the ISP will do anything it can to keep that agreement - even if it means shaping the hell out of your P2P traffic. Now, there's certainly a lot of legitimate uses for P2P, but proportionately speaking, I'd imagine something hideous like 90% or more of all P2P traffic is illegal, especially over residential broadband.

If you want to complain, you can vote with your wallet - switch to a different ISP. However, I think that all ISPs will, sooner or later, start shaping P2P traffic in one form or another, merely because they can't afford not to do it. Changing what port you run the P2P traffic over won't help either, as most of the good traffic shaping algorithms/hardware inspects the packet payloads & headers to figure out what protocol it's using (such as BT, FTP, HTTP, AIM, DNS, etc.) instead of simply going "Oh, it's running over port 80, must be HTTP" - and so you'll still get hit.
 
UMCPWintermute said:
Changing what port you run the P2P traffic over won't help either, as most of the good traffic shaping algorithms/hardware inspects the packet payloads & headers to figure out what protocol it's using (such as BT, FTP, HTTP, AIM, DNS, etc.) instead of simply going "Oh, it's running over port 80, must be HTTP" - and so you'll still get hit.
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Yep and that's how they zap VOIP. There is nothing you can do to get around it.
 
Well, I'm reviving this thread thanks to Torrent clients that provide encryption, Rogers can not stop the D/L and U/L. As of 2 days ago I'm back on the torrent scene doing my thing. I wonder if Rogers will figure out a way to stop us. It would take them a lot of computational power to decrypt the packets to figure out if it's a torrent or not.

Anybody else try the new Azureus ?
 
Many torrent clients are switching to allowing encrypted headers. That along with broad support for non-standard ports makes throttling torrent traffic nearly impossible.
 
Dew said:
Many torrent clients are switching to allowing encrypted headers. That along with broad support for non-standard ports makes throttling torrent traffic nearly impossible.
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Yeah, uTorrent have a beta release which, I believe, allows encrypted headers.

This means that the money Rogers spent trying to block the traffic has gone to waste.

It's a good thing I held back, I was about to switch to a different ISP but there's no need to now. ;)
 
in the first place, P2P swapping of anything at all is legal in canada. perhaps not for long, but the most recent court rulings have been that it's kosher.

in the second, it's the role of law enforcement agencies to enforce the law, not private companies.

the current practices of many ISPs constitute false advertising and themselves border on being illegal, at least in canada, so i think that some people should get off of their high horses with regard to what .torrent traffic is used for.

it's up to users to keep the internet an open medium for exchange of info regardless of it's form and free of censoring. law enforcement exists to catch and prosecute those who use the internet for truely heinous (produccing and distrubuting k-pron, for example) rather than petty theft from large companies. if we leave internet regulation and law up to the companies, the internet will be a pathetic shadow of what it now is, and of no use to anyone trying to do something that pen, paper telephone and television can't do better.
 
DFI Daishi said:
in the first place, P2P swapping of anything at all is legal in canada. perhaps not for long, but the most recent court rulings have been that it's kosher.

in the second, it's the role of law enforcement agencies to enforce the law, not private companies.

the current practices of many ISPs constitute false advertising and themselves border on being illegal, at least in canada, so i think that some people should get off of their high horses with regard to what .torrent traffic is used for.

it's up to users to keep the internet an open medium for exchange of info regardless of it's form and free of censoring. law enforcement exists to catch and prosecute those who use the internet for truely heinous (produccing and distrubuting k-pron, for example) rather than petty theft from large companies. if we leave internet regulation and law up to the companies, the internet will be a pathetic shadow of what it now is, and of no use to anyone trying to do something that pen, paper telephone and television can't do better.
Click to expand...

If Rogers doesn't want it, and they want to ban it, they can, it's THEIR network, and there is nothing we/you can do about it, besides try and find a workaround.

QJ
 
DFI Daishi said:
in the first place, P2P swapping of anything at all is legal in canada. perhaps not for long, but the most recent court rulings have been that it's kosher.

in the second, it's the role of law enforcement agencies to enforce the law, not private companies.

the current practices of many ISPs constitute false advertising and themselves border on being illegal, at least in canada, so i think that some people should get off of their high horses with regard to what .torrent traffic is used for.

it's up to users to keep the internet an open medium for exchange of info regardless of it's form and free of censoring. law enforcement exists to catch and prosecute those who use the internet for truely heinous (produccing and distrubuting k-pron, for example) rather than petty theft from large companies. if we leave internet regulation and law up to the companies, the internet will be a pathetic shadow of what it now is, and of no use to anyone trying to do something that pen, paper telephone and television can't do better.
Click to expand...

The current law in Canada is that you can freely download copyright material for personal use, but you are not under any circumstances allowed to share that said material.
 
QwertyJuan said:
If Rogers doesn't want it, and they want to ban it, they can, it's THEIR network, and there is nothing we/you can do about it, besides try and find a workaround.

QJ
Click to expand...
then they should say that .torrent usage is forbidden up front, when you put your name to paper. if you're not allowed to use the full amount of advertised bandwidth then they should be advertising what you CAN actually use.

as far as i'm concerned, the workaround is to take your business elsewhere. i've done it in the past, when my previous ISPs have tried to get cute with me, and i'll do it again if my present ISP starts to do it.

the network may be rogers', but the data that you move over the network isn't. if they don't have enough bandwidth to take care of the load, then they should be buying more: it's the cost of doing business. network usage is only going to increase with time, and they are going to have to upgrade eventually.
 
The Donut said:
The current law in Canada is that you can freely download copyright material for personal use, but you are not under any circumstances allowed to share that said material.
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i was under the impression that the court rulings were still in our favour.......you can make the file available or you can download the file without comitting a crime.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/internet/downloading_music.html

the analogy is that just because a library has a photocopeir available for clients doesn't mean the the library is responsible for copyright infringement that the photocopier may be used to commit. just because i make the file available, doesn't mean that i'm liable for the actions of those who choose to snag it.
 
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