How crap is your ISP ? #1...
Tuesday, February 23, 2010 at 10:36PM The top sign of a crap ISP is that they 'traffic shape'. They snoop into what you are doing and make judgements based on their accounts 'last airline magazine article read' and then implement them.
So a very good ISP - for instance BE/O2 - can be turned into a very bad ISP - by simply snooping on your customers and 'traffic shaping'. They will bleat 'Oh yeah, these nasty P2P people are consuming all the bandwidth, so we'll make everyone suffer'. And sometimes they'll hit something important like port 1352.
One way to find out if your ISP is a cock is by running 'TrafficShaper'. It'll show you if they are.. Even if they claim they're not.
In my case O2 had to admit they were traffic shaping as they destroyed bandwith for everyone for months. So not only snoopy cocks, but incompetent snoopy cocks. Nice.
Reader Comments (1)
My ISP (PlusNet) has long been honest about it's traffic shaping, all bar the most expensive options are shaped but even the cheapest options have periods overnight where P2P etc is not throttled.
However if you want to have un-shaped traffic then you pay extra and they switch your account onto the un-throttled gateway farm.
In principal therefore they can support a large number of customers and still cater for the geek market. Of course the solution is not without the odd issue but on the whole most users are happy
Simon