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In an announcement made on Westnet’s blog, the ISP announced publicly that it has been “prioritizing” P2P traffic for over a year. “Westnet has been trialing some traffic prioritisation tools on our network over the past year with very positive results. As a result, we will continue to use the tools on an ongoing basis.”Westnet’s motivation for “prioritizing” bandwidth stems from the launch of other high consumption protocols such as “online gaming, web browsing, e-mail and VOIP”, as they claim P2P may negatively impact the latency of such applications.So has Westnet begun clamping down on the bandwidth allotted to P2P? Not exactly. Westnet points out that the amount of bandwidth allotted to P2P in most circumstance has not changed. The allotted bandwidth slated to P2P is dynamically altered only when other high capacity protocols such as VoIP challenges the total bandwidth of the ISP’s network.
Exetel has declared its P2P shaping trial a success, and says it is investigating the expansion of the program with a P2P caching solution.The popular ISP began shaping P2P in November last year, with users reacting strongly to the announcement. But Exetel said it was the only ISP being completely up front about its shaping policies.
Internode has stunned customers by increasing prices on a number of broadband plans, with some high-end plans increasing by a whopping $40/month.The changes will affect both new and existing customers, with all customers given until after 1 July to either switch plan or leave Internode without penalty.The price increases range from $5 for some low end plans, to $40 for some plans with high speeds and high quotas. One plan (HOME-512-Starter) will have its quota reduced from 8GB to 5GB. As part of the changes, Internode has introduced some new plans to fill gaps in the existing offerings.Internode has also come under recent fire for long delays at its call centre, and the removal of its premium Usenet service.Defending the changes, Internode managing director Simon Hackett said they were necessary "in order to maintain commercially viable services to all customers.""Since our last major plan changes, we have seen a boom in data-intensive online services such as BitTorrent and YouTube. At the same time, the cost of delivering IP traffic has ceased to decline. We're making these changes to ensure a fairer service for all Internode customers as usage patterns become clearer in the maturing broadband market."