Irish Broadband Throttling BitTorrent?

Chaosopher

prof_darkins wrote:

What he said was firstly, no IBB do not block any ports or throttle traffic. However, in extreme cases, they will start to throttle p2p traffic for specific "heavy users", but throttling did not happen across the board. He wouldnt tell me what constituted heavy usage, and I doubt that there is a publically released threshold. Now for the bad bit though. Once a customer is red flagged for heavy p2p use, throttling comes into play, and he said that was permanent. Bloody hell. What to do. SSH I suppose? Can anyone fill me in on traffic tunnelling? Lets band together. Us against them. Radiohead are on our side, btw.

It seems pretty harsh to throttle without any prior warnings whatsoever, and with no indication as to what exactly constitutes heavy usage. I don't recall recieving any emails, nor am I downloading huge files 24/7.
I just want my 2/2 connection back :rolleyes:
So we're basically all walking on eggshells, wondering whether or not we're in for some throttling. And as for permanent...farkin hell.

Bambaata

im deffo been restricted anyway! nothing is moving at any great speed but ftp downloading id flying! getting ull 220 on 2mb connection and 240 maxing out with other dl's but 5 torrents combined are 20!

el dude

There was some downtime today. Don't know if that is a good or bad thing.

My speeds have been al over the place recently. It's back to being ****e once again. Think I'll give it another two weeks and if it doesn't improve I'll just go back to DigiWeb.

Bambaata

anyone here work for them by any chance that wouldn't have to make themselves known but might be able to shed some light on the situation?

thebman

Has anyone tried using port 80 with encryption on Utorrent. Once I did that I never had problems where as before we were limited to 30KB/s Max.

They say they don't traffic shape on their website so they have no defense but at the same time I don't use bittorrent a lot, its the others in the house.

I've had problems with Xbox Live last night with connection constantly dropping to the point that I gave up playing. This only happened once before and speeds dropped to 50KB/s for us that day but great service ever since that until last night. Hopefully its okay, I'd hate for it to go to crap as I just got Halo 3.

raven33

i called ibb yesterday, spoken with guy, who claimed that ibb isnt throttling any downloads. he told to wait for 3 days - ibb will investigate my connection.

fingers crossed, but frankly, i dont thing it'll change.

dc plus plus transfer speed now: below 1kb/s, and dropping...

bushy...

prof_darkins wrote:

The thing is, IBB have probably brought the throttling in under "network maintenance", in order to provide a good quality of service to all the poor people who arent hogging the bandwidth with torrents 247. I don't think that they need to inform customers about moves like this. Hopefully though some next gen encryption should sort the problem. hurry up utorrent 2.0!

Encryption won't really help , some helpful lads have come up with a "solution" for that.

Chaosopher

raven33 wrote:

he told to wait for 3 days - ibb will investigate my connection.

fingers crossed, but frankly, i dont thing it'll change.

dc plus plus transfer speed now: below 1kb/s, and dropping...

My connection's also being monitered.

How reassuring..:rolleyes:

Feeder

Now I'm definitely going to call in the morning, I gave up on the torrents after not being able to get more than 1kB/s :mad: so I gave rapidshare a whirl.

All was going well til tonight when i noticed my speeds were down to 5kB/s, from 240kB/s.

As we said already if we had been given a warning about this then we could have monitored it.

Because we had no way of knowing what usage we had then it was impossible to monitor, I d/l a bit but I usually u/l to a 3:1 ratio but I could have cut back on my bandwidth usage if it was going to be an issue.

ntlbell

Red Alert wrote:

Point being that they have no business throttling it at all and that the throttling is indefensible.

no buisnesS? as it's their network/infrasrcutrue they're an entitled to do as they wish, you sir can then choose to accept it and pay or move on...

garytuohy

yeah it absolutely madness. Browsing speeds along but anything associated with downloaded trails along. I can't even get a file from download.com

Going to ring tonight

thebman

ntlbell wrote:

no buisnesS? as it's their network/infrasrcutrue they're an entitled to do as they wish, you sir can then choose to accept it and pay or move on...

If they give you a contract and you sign it with them to provide a service and they stop providing it they are in breach of contract. You don't just move on, you demand a refund.

ntlbell

brim4brim wrote:

If they give you a contract and you sign it with them to provide a service and they stop providing it they are in breach of contract. You don't just move on, you demand a refund.

What service have they stopped providing?

CuLT

brim4brim wrote:

If they give you a contract and you sign it with them to provide a service and they stop providing it they are in breach of contract. You don't just move on, you demand a refund.

You might want to actually read that contract...

el dude

Speeds have been all over the shop for me the past few days. They seems to be back to normal for the time being, but i really don't see it staying that way.

Bambaata

speeds are no better for me. dl max in about 30 and upload is all over the shop. sometimes uo to 200! but generally 50 - 60. anyone find any info? i think im gona ring tomorrow but id be tagged as one to watch etc with the amount i dl and ul etc

Chaosopher

ntlbell wrote: »

What service have they stopped providing?

Well, as far as I'm concerned, unless there is a technical difficulty which affects the speeds which customers are paying for (with some form of notice, be it email/post/phone), then a significant reduction in connection speed (without any exceeding of bandwidth going on) would qualify as not providing a service.

I didn't read anything in my contract similar to "Irish Broadband has the right to reduce speeds by up to 90% without notice and for an unspecified reason/amount of time".

Random

Chaosopher wrote: »

Well, as far as I'm concerned, unless there is a technical difficulty which affects the speeds which customers are paying for (with some form of notice, be it email/post/phone), then a significant reduction in connection speed (without any exceeding of bandwidth going on) would qualify as not providing a service.

I didn't read anything in my contract similar to "Irish Broadband has the right to reduce speeds by up to 90% without notice and for an unspecified reason/amount of time".

It's covered in the terms .. I believe it's something about allocating resources to ensure stability of the service as a whole.

They do have a bit which says if they change the contract unfairly you can cancel though - I think.

Full T&C are on www.irishbroadband.ie

ntlbell

Chaosopher wrote: »

Well, as far as I'm concerned, unless there is a technical difficulty which affects the speeds which customers are paying for (with some form of notice, be it email/post/phone), then a significant reduction in connection speed (without any exceeding of bandwidth going on) would qualify as not providing a service.

I didn't read anything in my contract similar to "Irish Broadband has the right to reduce speeds by up to 90% without notice and for an unspecified reason/amount of time".

Maybe you didn't read anything.

Try the section on multiple network connections

Nephew

I guess they must be throttling torrents, for the past six weeks all my high seeded torrents on 3mb breeze have been crawling at speeds of 0.3kb/s up to 13kb/s, occasionally they'll go up to 120kb/s for a few minutes. Compare this with a few months ago when I was getting 345kb/s on similar torrents. All other downloads are fine. I think this is the straw that broke the camels back and I'll be switching to someone else after two and a half years of very poor to middling service.

el dude

I got an email back a few days ago from IBB saying this.

"We do not as a company shape or block traffic on customer connections. As the T&C states below you would be informed if we were going to make any adjustment to your connection, which we have not. I will escalate the issue to Eircom whose exchange we use and get them to check the phone line."

Is it possible that it could be Eircom doing the throttling as they seem to own everything. I'm reluctant to switch back to DigiWeb if it's all going to be for nothing in the end. Why don't IBB just introduce a cap if they want to control how much people are downloading.

prof_darkins

Yes, i would much prefer a cap. The reason that they havent done that I would say is because now they can still say "we've no cap" to new customers, who go "ahh deadly, i'll be able to get lotsa films then, better go with them" and they sign up, only to find when they load up BT they get worse speeds than they would with almost any other provider. *sigh* what happened to you Irish Broadband? You used to be cool...

Bambaata

el dude wrote: »

I got an email back a few days ago from IBB saying this.

"We do not as a company shape or block traffic on customer connections. As the T&C states below you would be informed if we were going to make any adjustment to your connection, which we have not. I will escalate the issue to Eircom whose exchange we use and get them to check the phone line."

Is it possible that it could be Eircom doing the throttling as they seem to own everything. I'm reluctant to switch back to DigiWeb if it's all going to be for nothing in the end. Why don't IBB just introduce a cap if they want to control how much people are downloading.

im wirelessly connected so no eircom aint doing anything to me

ntlbell

prof_darkins wrote: »

Yes, i would much prefer a cap. The reason that they havent done that I would say is because now they can still say "we've no cap" to new customers, who go "ahh deadly, i'll be able to get lotsa films then, better go with them" and they sign up, only to find when they load up BT they get worse speeds than they would with almost any other provider. *sigh* what happened to you Irish Broadband? You used to be cool...

"normal" useage on the IBB network has been close to perfect for a number of months now.

"BT" is not normal usage.

Your standard HTTP traffic should get you close your assigned bandwidth allocation e.g. 2/3/mb along with contention, so for the most part you should get the full whack, same goes for FTP traffic.

now if the whole network is working fine for "general usage" traffic regardless of what there T&C is or their customer support says they aren't going to give two hoots about few people who want to download every illegal bit of crap that they can get their hands on which in turn in general ruins the network for everyone else.

If your not happy with it go to an ISP that will.

el dude

So why not just bring in a cap. That way everyone's happy....Aren't they? Well i would be. And why is BT not considered normal usage. Not all BT is illegal like.

ntlbell

el dude wrote: »

So why not just bring in a cap. That way everyone's happy....Aren't they? Well i would be. And why is BT not considered normal usage. Not all BT is illegal like.

They're not claiming it's legal, lets not tit for tat for this and claim "I use BT to download linux ISO's" the majority of is illegal rubbish.

In IBB's T&C's they do ramble on about ilegal downloads but at the end of day I'm sure they couldn't care less it's the nature of how BT works which causes the problem on the network and when you have a lot of people on the same segment using it other people suffer.

99% of Ireland want a non capped service, you're saying everyone would be happy with a capped one.

A huge percentage of people want very low latency 25ms or less in order to game, blah blah blah blah.

You can't deliver everything, for everyone so if you want a capped service that allows you to use BT at full rate then go to another ISP?

It's as easy as you make it.

thebman

Providers just don't like supporting it as it puts pressure on upload and download.

If they are going to limit torrents they should explicitly say so.

One of the guys in the house was downloading something the other night and got 70KB/s though so I think they are only limiting heavy users.

Red Alert

If they throttle torrents or provide a "web only" service then that is what it should be billed as.

ntlbell

Red Alert wrote: »

If they throttle torrents or provide a "web only" service then that is what it should be billed as.

Firstly what's "web only"

As the T&C's state you're not suppose to run any services e.g. HTTPD/SMTPD/IMAPD/FTPD etc etc which the normal Joe User won't generally be doing anyway.

So joe soap is browsing the web/mail/FTP etc which you can do on the IBB network, to break each ISP down into technicalities is pointless.

so what are we calling web only? http? https? smtp? pop? imap? ftp? imaps? ssh? telnet? sftp? finger? where does it start where does it end?

there's nothing they don't allow from all the above so is it web only?

el dude

ntlbell wrote: »

99% of Ireland want a non capped service, you're saying everyone would be happy with a capped one.

That's complete bull****. Half the people out there don't even know what a cap is ffs. And if 99% of the people wanted it wouldn't they all be with IBB seeing as they're the only people that offer. Well to my knowledge they're the only ones.

MrVestek

brim4brim wrote: »

Providers just don't like supporting it as it puts pressure on upload and download.

If they are going to limit torrents they should explicitly say so.

One of the guys in the house was downloading something the other night and got 70KB/s though so I think they are only limiting heavy users.

They couldn't distinguish who's who if you're sharing the connection through a network. I mean, how could they tell that it was you and not someone else using the connection eh?

ntlbell

el dude wrote: »

That's complete bull****. Half the people out there don't even know what a cap is ffs. And if 99% of the people wanted it wouldn't they all be with IBB seeing as they're the only people that offer. Well to my knowledge they're the only ones.

I'm not sure what your point is?

people don't understand what a capped service is??

The one's who don't use other ISP's other than IBB

ok?

but what's that got to do with anything?

thebman

Achilles wrote: »

They couldn't distinguish who's who if you're sharing the connection through a network. I mean, how could they tell that it was you and not someone else using the connection eh?

I was talking about heavy IBB users not limiting me but not the other guy in my house which would be impossible.

I don't really use torrents at all. Its mostly one guy in the house that uses them.

el dude

ntlbell wrote: »

I'm not sure what your point is?

people don't understand what a capped service is??

The one's who don't use other ISP's other than IBB

ok?

but what's that got to do with anything?

You said that 99% of people want unlimited download. Which is daft, seeing as the majority of people don't even use torrents, so in reality have no need to care what their cap is.

Nephew

This is bloody ridiculous, I have eight high seeded torrents open and I have a total download speed of 2.5kb/s and 14kb/s upload. Everything else is fine except for torrents.

ntlbell

el dude wrote: »

You said that 99% of people want unlimited download. Which is daft, seeing as the majority of people don't even use torrents, so in reality have no need to care what their cap is.

I'm daft.

el dude

ntlbell wrote: »

I'm daft.

:rolleyes:

ntlbell

Eye's in the air, how cutting.

Lets take a family of two adults two kids.

Daddy gets up and downloads his email, pops on his favorite online stream to get the latest news and browses a few news sites before he heads to work.

Mad little joxer in from school after hearing all the kids talking about the orange box game they're going to be playing later that night decides he wants to download this too so set's it off before having an aul bit of dinner and his homework. Not sure how big Orange box is but I'll have a wild guess of 1gb per game 5 games 5GB of Traffic for joxer, down fly his games.

Jacinta comes in pops her Ipod into the pc starts downloadiing the latest boy/pop band albums to her ipod, opens up bebo chatting with her friends and watching a a load of you tube video's. and film trailers, she's also a fan of the SIMS she downloads the 1.5GB demo!

Now Joxer's back to play Team Fortress with all his buddies.

Daddy's back on later on with his laptop finishing off a bit of work again listening to maybe a podcast of his favorite show that he missed during the day maybe grab some music for the car the following day.

This is before joxer learns about downloading illegal games and divx's etc

This family could use up a lot of bandwidth over a 30 day period knowing about caps or not.

now if they had an 8GB cap it's nearly blown in one day with joxer and his orange box all ready.

claiming the only people who need a lot of bandwidth are morons downloading every film and soap they can get their hands is utter nonsense, and assuming the majority of people are ignorant to caps etc is just insulting people's intelligence, ISP's wouldn't advertise non capped service if didn't matter to people.

MrVestek

Nephew wrote: »

This is bloody ridiculous, I have eight high seeded torrents open and I have a total download speed of 2.5kb/s and 14kb/s upload. Everything else is fine except for torrents.

Well think of it this way, alot of OTHER ISPs seems to be traffic shaping at the minute, what makes you think that this wouldn't be affecting your other peers and seeders, thus affecting the connection to you eh?

el dude

ntlbell wrote: »

Eye's in the air, how cutting.

Lets take a family of two adults two kids.

Daddy gets up and downloads his email, pops on his favorite online stream to get the latest news and browses a few news sites before he heads to work.

Mad little joxer in from school after hearing all the kids talking about the orange box game they're going to be playing later that night decides he wants to download this too so set's it off before having an aul bit of dinner and his homework. Not sure how big Orange box is but I'll have a wild guess of 1gb per game 5 games 5GB of Traffic for joxer, down fly his games.

Jacinta comes in pops her Ipod into the pc starts downloadiing the latest boy/pop band albums to her ipod, opens up bebo chatting with her friends and watching a a load of you tube video's. and film trailers, she's also a fan of the SIMS she downloads the 1.5GB demo!

Now Joxer's back to play Team Fortress with all his buddies.

Daddy's back on later on with his laptop finishing off a bit of work again listening to maybe a podcast of his favorite show that he missed during the day maybe grab some music for the car the following day.

This is before joxer learns about downloading illegal games and divx's etc

This family could use up a lot of bandwidth over a 30 day period knowing about caps or not.

now if they had an 8GB cap it's nearly blown in one day with joxer and his orange box all ready.

claiming the only people who need a lot of bandwidth are morons downloading every film and soap they can get their hands is utter nonsense, and assuming the majority of people are ignorant to caps etc is just insulting people's intelligence, ISP's wouldn't advertise non capped service if didn't matter to people.

About as cutting as your previous response.

What your describing there is hardly the average family though now is it......Well......anyway none of use have any facts or statistics to back up anything of what we're saying so there's really nowhere this argument can go.

ntlbell

el dude wrote: »

About as cutting as your previous response.

What your describing there is hardly the average family though now is it......Well......anyway none of use have any facts or statistics to back up anything of what we're saying so there's really nowhere this argument can go.

It is typical traffic yes, what do you think people are using their connections for? reading horoscopes?

Maybe in Clare......

Granted people aren't downloading the orange box every day, but over a month with the likes of you tube very large demo's music downloads/online gaming like xbox live etc all these are any number of these are using a lot of bandwidth over a 30 day period.

Nephew

Achilles wrote: »

Well think of it this way, alot of OTHER ISPs seems to be traffic shaping at the minute, what makes you think that this wouldn't be affecting your other peers and seeders, thus affecting the connection to you eh?

The torrents are being seeded by 8000+ and of the 30 or so peers that I am connected to at any one time, on average 90% are American or British from the flags beside their ip address. These are torrents I had no trouble downloading in less than 25minutes a few months ago.

Rattlehead_ie

Its funny reading this thread........... most of people will mention that "I 8000+ and of the 30 or so peers"(not pointing you out nephew - just using your stats)
, but ppl will not mention what they are downloading. The majority of ppl here, myself includeded download a bit of what I shouldnt download and if my ISP blocked me, well to be honest I dont blame them. Their network , their rules.

Basically your complaining, that IF IBB are traffic shaping / blocking,their making it hard for you to illegally download software/music etc. Thats like someone complaining that I have an alarm on my house as it makes it harder for them to steal stuff

Now for people that are downloading legally through torrenting, which for a few work / leasure applications I and others do use. Unfortunatly and truthfully again, IBB have this covered. the nature of torrenting and how it works on the Majority of ISP networks would and will contravine

6.1.19 use the Services in such away as to impair or degrade the operation or performance of the Services and/or Irish Broadband's network, including but not limited to abusive or excessive use.

To be honest IBB and any other ISP that has this clause in their T & C's
have every right to disconnect you without warning, your lucky you even get your 2-40Kbs or whatever you get. The fact that its only happened in the last xx months means nothing except for fact that there werent inforcing their T & C's before hand. Not their fault that some people have read through (or didnt read through) the T & C's and came to their own clonslusion.

This is not a go at anyone complaining about IBB. Its just a general comment about ISPs and torrenting, dont complain and moan if you havent read or mis understood a T & C's.

Protocol7

I was on the phone to IBB earlier as I'm thinking of switching from Digiweb. Was trying to find out how traffic shaping would affect me as switching ISP is a bit of a pain, especially when you leave something you know for something you don't. And with a six-month minimum contract to boot.

The salesperson told me that YES they do prioritise certain traffic and that bittorrent traffic was the lowest priority. The tech support guy disagreed and categorically stated that they do not shape. To be honest I'd be inclined to take the salesperson's story as they'd hardly make up something like that to a potential customer.

The impression I got was that traffic-shaping is dependent on your location and contention. In an area like central Dublin where a heavy downloader could degrade the service for many other users, shaping may be more extreme. In the sticks you may not have any worries at all as you're not causing anyone else to suffer.

It's hard to say if torrent shaping is a deal breaker for me. I would certainly use it a lot more on a "limitless" connection (yes, I'm aware of FUP. hence the inverted commas). But while I get good speeds with Digiweb, the traffic cap is ultimately a big limitation. Though 5k/sec torrents would be awful.

Has anyone switched ISP recently? I was looking at the Digiweb T&Cs and it said that in order to cancel the contract you need to give 30 days notice in writing. The salesperson at IBB said I would just need to complete a transfer form (as at the end of the day it's the same resold Eircom line, just a different bill) and the switch would only take a couple of hours or so. Perhaps it's easier if you are only switching ISP rather than ending usage altogether?

Nephew

How is everyone elses torrent speed? I'm still getting dreadful speeds, I intend to call them in the morning and see what they say and if it doesn't improve within a week I'm canceling the contract. There's no way I am going to pay e50 a month for a 3mb line if they are throttling torrents.

Rattlehead, there are hundreds of thousands of legal torrents available. Just because you use torrents doesn't mean you are breaking the law.

Bambaata

no improvement for me really.

Anti

ntlbell wrote: »

It is typical traffic yes, what do you think people are using their connections for? reading horoscopes?

Maybe in Clare......

Granted people aren't downloading the orange box every day, but over a month with the likes of you tube very large demo's music downloads/online gaming like xbox live etc all these are any number of these are using a lot of bandwidth over a 30 day period.

`

I completly agree with everything you have said here. There are three people in my house. And we are all heavy internet users, from online gaming to music/movie downloads etc etc.

Although we are on a capped service (30gb) we break it in a few days. As while in work we get out clients sorted to pull down and upload all day. Same when we are in bed.

Dowbloading the latest patches for yoru games, software, os etc etc. Emails, youtube, etc etc it all ads up to a fair ammount.

So far this month i have personally downloaded 46.2gb and uploaded 20ish gb.

el dude

ntlbell wrote: »

It is typical traffic yes, what do you think people are using their connections for? reading horoscopes?

Maybe in Clare......

Oh dear. You're a right pompous **** aren't ya!!

Cabaal

I don't want to see any more personal insults in this thread lads,
This is a warning to all.

Red Alert

Last things I downloaded via bittorrent: Gentoo Linux installation ISO's, Openoffice - they sound legal to me? Actually weren't Valve Software planning to use Bittorrent to deliver updates to their Steam gaming platform?

The point here is that if there is throttling going on then it should be plainly advertised as such. Why all the cloak and dagger by the ISP's? People aren't fools.