Folks over the last few weeks we have seen many users passing the chat room complaining of not being able to connect to WinMX during certain hours, the one thing they all have in common is that they all use carphone wharehouse.
Carphone wharehouse are the group who recently took over the old UK AOL network and trade under the name Talk Talk Broadband, atm old AOL users are slowly being shifted onto their own "Opal" network of servers, however this seems to make no difference with how badly the service blocking occurs.
If this was a problem in the US it could be settled by a lawsuit as its illegal under FCC regulations to block any application (WinMX) secretly like this, and from my readiing its not just WinMX, they also block bit torrent activity and certain websites in Russia that offer cheap mp3',s again secretly, is this part of the deal some ISP,s made with the media mafia recently ?
Reading some of the info around the net shows that carphone wharehouses p2p blocking policy is the following, you have a cap of 40 gig and on top of that you face a system they employ called "dynamic shaping" this system is switched on 24/7 and is designed to give p2p users the least priority over bandwidth, in a bit of small print I located TalkTalk advise that you should sit up all night to use the "offpeak" midnight -8am timeslot if you want to use P2P, so its now clear they regard P2P users as second class citizens, I,m sure their bills dont reflect this status.
Our advice for folks suffering from this "censorship of service" is to ditch this ISP and make sure other people are warned of this activity by posting around the net what a poor service they provide, this it seems is the only "message" they may take notice of.
