ArcticSilver:

DravidDavid: It seems backwards to me too.

Games use next to nothing in terms of bandwidth.  I game a 100 or so hours on 1GB.  But I can't play a 10 year old game without dropping out because of leechers ripping thousands of gigs 24/7.

Torrents are Telecoms worst enemy on this plan.  They should throttle them so they get nothing during the day.

Its not quite that simple.

Let me explain.....

Itll be like this (or some thing simular/along the same principle):

Telecom has a international connection of say 1GB/s. This is for all their customers. They pay for the speed rather than per gb like we do at home.

Big time will probibly have a contention ratio. Think of a contention ratio as yourself being limited to a percentage of the available bandwidth.

Lets say its 5% of the available bandwidth. On a 100mbps line at the peak (where all of the 100mbps is being used) the big time pool will get 5mbps. Yet off peak where only say 50mbps is being used big time users can have from a minimum of 5mbps up to the free amount (so 5-50mbps) shared between them.

Thats why it is better off peak vs on peak. This is also why there isnt such a need for shaping off peak. The problem is the speed at peak time where there is no free bandwidth they must prioritise non big time users.

So the 1000's of GB's doesnt matter as long as its off peak where there is speed to spare.


Also it has been discussed many times eariler.

They do not deliberately shape gaming traffic. They are trying to shape just the heavy use applications.

The problem is making the rules that will only do one vs the other.


For example:

Lets say i was to create a rule for torrenting. I could:

Shape the common ports - The down side is some one will just change them and avoid the shaping.
Shape the number of connections - Suddenly any peer to peer application suffers including Modern Warfare 2

Its easy to know what you want but its a lot harder to impliment it.

Also there is a couple of telecom employees that surf this forum that have been extremely helpful. I couldnt be much happier. Oh and Gmail is now loading perfectly for me.