Community.Acanac.com

There have been some rumors of Bell throttling P2P traffic on wholesale ISP's like Acanac. We have not yet received any complaints, but I believe it's only a matter of time before they reach our network. If this does end up happening we are looking at alternative methods to prevent throttling. The most like scenario is that we will setup multiple VPN servers running on port 443 or 22. The entire connection will be encrypted and Bell will not be able to simply block these port because they are used for https and SSH traffic.

If anyone is experiencing slow downs with P2P traffic please post your results here.


On ongoing discussion can be found at the following URL
http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r201912 ... throttling

Best Regards,
Paul
www.acanac.ca

This is RIDICULOUS! I can't believe that Bell is actually starting to go this far (then again)...

Paul, some of the people in the thread you posted appear to be Acanac customers (I've spotted at least one).

I'll do some testing myself and let you all know what I find

I don't think any of our clients are affected yet. It looks like they are doing it by realm. We will see what happens over the next few days.

thanks 4 letting us know- we will keep u posted

_________________
Daf
---Administrator---
Any Questions Feel Free to Ask
" You Miss 110% of The Shots You Don't Take"

hrm wonder if i'm affected. downloading something with 36 seeds, was going blazing fast earlier today but now its doing 2.4 k a second, before it wasn't doing more than 0.1 k a second...the wierd part was my upload is still going full speed. guess there's just a problem with the torrent i'm downloading. will post in the other thread if i do see something's up.

edit: download just increased again, also its past 2:00 am, guess its just a torrent issue, or something happening to my line, had to switch over to my other internet line to post this though since the forum loading was taking forever. might be dns issues, i don't know. gonna powercycle my modem right now...

yeah resetting my modem helped. can now access these forums quicker. even my download speeds are back up around 50k for that torrent. Also download a file off the web at 300k so i was just being paranoid.

hi

somewhat related, My girlfriend is still with Sympatico, and I'm with the much better Acanac

so I did a test this past week with both accounts and torrents.
* rebooted the modem (to get another IP)
* started utorrent with a single torrent using a torrent site that offers an SSL torrent announce only (https)
* ran speed tests
* repeated all the above with a non SSL torrent (http).

with Acanac both were about the same speeds (allowing for a bit of fluctuation) with symaptico, both about the same as well... the difference was sympatico speeds were definitely throttled with BOTH torrents!

technically, using the SSL it should have been un-throttled, which would lead me to believe that they now throttle their customers regardless of what they are doing, SSL, protocol etc.

However! running speed tests at the same time, the lines seemed to be un-throttled, as the speed test got the expected result (ie: about 5MB down, 80k up)

I'm starting to wonder if SSL will make a difference?!?

cheers,
snuggs

snuggles, unfortunately, encryption hasn't made a difference in a long time, since both Bell and Rogers throttle all activity on the protocol that torrents run on. This is usually more of a problem for upload speeds, because by throttling outgoing packets, they pretty much deter users from being able to share anything effectively among several people.

It's too bad that instead of investing in the future of a medium like the Internet, companies like Bell and Rogers are choosing to instead hinder their clients in hopes that they'll submit instead of complaining.

My torrents have been throttled for the last few weeks now. Usually during the day they stay at about 30-50Kbps, but then jump up at night.

This is from using the same equipment, in the same configuration and same DSl connection. During the end of Feb and beginning of March I experienced a huge slowdown.

at Sabeti,
but the thing is, if the site is using SSL (https) for their torrents, everything is encrypted, including headers, protocol, everything send during that connection...

so in theory, they shouldn't be able to see anything on a secure connection... if they can, then forget banking on-line, never mind torrents lol.

I've heard that Rogers actually stops all encrypted traffic (I've never been with Rogers, but have read it a few times on the web), though I don't know how they would be able to get away with it.

I wasn't just talking about encryption built into torrent clients, I know several private sites that have gone the https way.

or did I miss something?

cheers,
snuggs

Barrie area...same problem. Just noticed this today after torrenting from the CBC website (now that they offer free content on P2P). Thanks Bell. You've offloaded me onto a crappy route so I'm at the far end of the CO and my ATT is possibly the worst in this region, now you've kicked us in the groin by traffic shaping torrents.
What's the farking point of having an internet if you can't use it for anything outside of getting the weather and the mail?

snuggles, you are totally correct, and I knew what you were saying, but I guess I wasn't being clear enough (sorry about that hehe).

Because of the fact that Bell and Rogers realized that they CAN'T see what exactly is being downloaded when it comes to the use of encrypted data (be it clients or the websites that display their info, including the links to the tracking servers), they decided to throttle ALL the packets that are used in transmitting over the BT protocol.

Like I said, it's a sad day when ISPs decide to make the customer suffer instead of making their own services better and futureproof. I guess that's what we get when working with monopolies

To be failr, ISP is facing a problem, 10% of users are using the 90% of traffic.
But the approach to solve the problem is wrong. see details here, http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=1078

To also be fair (to the 10%), the 90% that use much less than allotted never notice the amount of bw or speed they're missing... otherwise, you'd hear a lot more complaining, and a lot more would actually get done when it comes to upgrades.

It's only now, when that 90% is finally starting to open their eyes and see that there's more to the Internet than email, porn, and MSN, that the ISPs, instead of actually finding a way to support this need, are blaming the 10%. It's that type of mentality, and media pursuasion, that keeps people thinking that ISPs are doing nothing wrong.

One of the main reasons I switched to Acanac from Rogers...

This is unlikely to succeed. Remember that Rogers had no problem throttling all encrypted content on their network to work around encrypted P2P traffic, at the expense of their telecommuting business clients who had to seek other ISP's for their VPN access because it had gotten too slow to be usable.

As for HTTPS and SSH specifically, legitimate traffic on those ports is light. They could easily implement a throttle which only starts tightening after a certain rate is exceeded, resulting in a penalty for bulk transfers without hurting legitimate uses.

What I fail to understand though, is what Bell could gain with such throttling. They're not trying to save on uplink bandwidth here, just internal bandwidth. Given that a lot of users are already limited by their distance from the C-O, throttling on top of that would become an issue. And if Bell decides to throttle VoIP as being P2P, we might have serious problems...

Regardless, this would be a major selling point for your upcoming VPS: run the P2P client on the VPS, and use Bell's DSL strictly for downloading final copies to our home computers.

An interesting point from another DSL Reports post:



I doubt Bell could legally throttle DSL traffic they resell, unless perhaps they throttled their own in exactly the same way, but even then it seems anti-competitive, doesn't it?

Bottom line, as each ISP begins noticing the throttle, they need to complain to the CRTC or Bell won't have any incentive to pull back.