Rogers Get A Mention ...

[GhostShip]

It looks like other networks are having issues with Rogers too 

http://www.limewire.org/blog/?p=148

Imagine you’re a broadband ISP - say, Rogers in Canada.
You sell high speed access, like 6 Mbps, for US$50/month. At the start, it’s great. Everyone is just checking e-mail and browsing the Web. There are tiny spikes of traffic, which your network can deliver quickly. Customers are happy, and you’re making money.

Then, BitTorrent comes out. All your customers start sharing enormous video files. They take days to download, and fill the upload and download speeds of all your connections. Your bandwidth costs increase.

You’re not making money. What do you do?
If you raised your prices, you’d loose all your customers.
If you cut off BitTorrent traffic, all your customers would telephone your support center, and then leave you in frustration.
What’s an ISP to do?

So, you don’t cut off BitTorrent traffic. You just throttle it, make it really slow.
Users think, “wow, BitTorrent sucks” - they have no idea it’s actually your fault.
Success!

I think Limewire are about to implement a built in torrent client and are softening up the opposition a little , I think the message is simple, throttle and face client encryption, or lets the user have what they have paid for.

[7]

I think more and more ISPs are starting to look into 'traffic shaping' hardware these days.  Though I'm aware the activity has been going on for years the hardware appears to be becoming much more popular as a practical 'solution' to ISPs problems (subscriber bandwidth usage increasing / cramming pipes whilst dropping prices / prioritisation of protocols/services / etc) these days.

Encryption seems promising as a possible line of defence for P2P applications to lessen the chance of being forcefully restricted (or outright annihilated in some cases) by ISPs though I believe it's not so foolproof as some might think as indentification of at least some filesharing protocols can still potentially be done using other methods, such as the number of TCP connections a client makes, or common ports seen, etc, rather than specifically through packet inspection.  IIRC I read a Roger's representative (admin or some kind, can't remember specifically) talking of this with regards BitTorrent traffic shortly after BitTorrent PE arrived, in that they still had the ability to identify BitTorrent traffic due to its 'connection profile' based around TCP (and possibly UDP?) connections, than through identification of data within the transfer stream specifically (which PE as a countermeasure should protect against).

I don't suppose the number of TCP connections would be of such an issue with the WinMX client as they're relatively few in comparisson to BitTorrent transfers though I do believe, as things stand now, if more and more ISPs move towards per-protocol 'traffic shaping' then WinMX isn't going to have much chance of survival at all given how easy it is to identify the protocol.

Maybe as time goes things won't get 'that bad' for most people, though if need be the potential is there right now for ISPs to rid WinMX from their networks with the flick of a few switches if they choose to (as customers of ISPs like Rogers, OptimumOnline, Chello, Plusnet, Pipex, Roadrunner, and many others are no doubt already intimately aware of).

[GhostShip]

Indeed, perhaps its time to look at  strategies to defeat this menace, ... wheres brains when you want him 

This for me is a high priority concern, as you point out 7 we are riding the net on borrowed time if they turn nasty, although I dont think they are willing to be seen to act against one network, the bad publicity and  backlash against those ISP,s operating this type of policing would leave a sour taste and be defeated using the same methods as the BT operaters are finding so successful.

But it is something we are going to have to face soon, of that I have no doubt.

[SamSeeSam]

Couldn't they rather impose download limits rather than throttle? Then it is a matter for the users to decide how much they can download. If they raise the prices of unlimited connections, I presume, many would still go for it, provided they deliver what theya are saying.

And people aren't stupid to think that bittorrent is so slow (Because of it's massive popularity) Plus when you see taht the dwonload is at a fixed spped, alwas whenmever you connect, that can slert them too. Agreed first impression may seem so, but once you start to see the same problem with two or three P2P's, they they will smell something's fishy.