http://www.dailytech.com/More+ISP+Confess+We+Throttle+P2P+Traffic/article9544.htm(also linked within the article:
http://www.azureuswiki.com/index.php/Bad_ISPs)
As more sophisticated tools for traffic shaping are unveiled, the question soon becomes which service providers aren't throttling customer traffic
Adding itself to the small-but-growing list of ISPs that admit to traffic shaping, Canada-based Bell Sympatico has confessed to using "traffic management" on heavy users "during peak hours."
"We are now using a Internet Traffic Management to restrict accounts," wrote an unnamed forum administrator on Bell Sympatico's support forums. According to the administrator, Bell Sympatico's traffic shaping affects an unmentioned number of applications and protocols, including BitTorrent, Gnutella, Limewire, Kazaa, eDonkey, eMule and WinMX.
A Bell Sympatico Manager chimed in immediately afterwards, explaining that "there continues to be phenomenal growth of consumer Internet traffic throughout the world" and that "Bell is using Internet Traffic Management to ensure we deliver bandwidth fairly to our customers during peak Internet usage."
Let's look at this another way:
You open a buffet that anyone can eat at so long as they pay the fee. People cannot walk out with food, but as long as they are eating, they stay. The 90-pound weakling gets charged exactly the same amount as the 500-pound Sumo wrestler. If the Sumo wrestler walks in, the people cooking the food have to work faster in order to keep service up for everyone, but regardless, the Sumo wrestler is doing nothing wrong and has the right to eat as much as he can.
It isn't just that they throttle that irritates me. To fall back on the above example, I could probably understand to a point a manager coming out and telling the Sumo wrestler that he is eating so fast that others are having to wait unfair amounts of time to get food and ask him to slow down a bit...
if his sudden new appearance in the restaurant was an unexpected first-time burden. But P2P sharing has been going on for a long time now. Everyone knows it is growing. Companies need to stop offering unlimited if they aren't going to allow it to those who are taking the term "unlimited" seriously. Or, on the reverse, if they are absolutely going to throttle, then the people they are being throttled should get some money back for not receiving full service as were the terms for which they were paying.
