I'm thinking that Xnet Speed on Torrent may be improved if the Free data from 75GB/month can be reduced to 25GB or 30GB maximum. and torrent users who reached the limit of 30GB may stop download so the others who don't download much can have a good speed at night time.
I've personally always thought that 75Gb free was not sustainable and that 25 was a more realistic figure, however the genie is out of the bottle now and it's hard to put him back in! Mind you, people would probably complain less if this happened than they are now!
Another idea I had is that instead of giving away free traffic, just make it cheaper after hours. For instance, $1.50 per Gb during peak hours and 50c per Gb after hours. This would still achieve the goal of 'shaping' traffic over a 24hr period, but would keep people from going so nuts and downloading so much that it saturates the bandwidth.
The problem is not the amount of data, ISP's don't buy data blocks... they buy international bandiwidth in guaranteed and burstable Mbit's or Gbit/s allocations. So you see the real problem is contention, congestion and bit torrent using a large number of half open tcp/ip connections to abuse tcp/ip congestion control.
Xnet is oversubscribed with leechers and not enough mom & pop users light net users to subsidize the total bandwidth available.
As far as I am aware Xnet does not have carrier grade traffic priorization, caching and management - this means bittorrent usage can poop™ (technical term) all over latancy sensitive traffic like gaming, skype, ventrillo and suck up all available bandwidth. This also means someone using bittorrent with 500 tcp/ip connections can adversely affect the performance of a seperate user using 2 tcp/ip connections to browse youtube.
I find this an interesting point - a lot of internet users complain and moan about how it's not up to the ISP to prioritise/shape traffic, in essense "how dare the ISP decide what traffic of mine is important". However xnet is one of the few ISPs that don't appear to prioitise/shape traffic and people want it to be done, because like it or not p2p is a big user and is not time critical. Can't win really? :)
portunus: I find this an interesting point - a lot of internet users complain and moan about how it's not up to the ISP to prioritise/shape traffic, in essense "how dare the ISP decide what traffic of mine is important". However xnet is one of the few ISPs that don't appear to prioitise/shape traffic and people want it to be done, because like it or not p2p is a big user and is not time critical. Can't win really? :)
/ben
I'm a rational person, most of the time. If it means better network stability, I think it's entirely justified. Experienced P2P users will probably know how to bypass some forms of shaping anyway. I torrent, sure, but having a quick and fairly reliable connection to the globe seems a tiiiny bit more important than downloading music/videos. Remarkably, that's not the only thing the internet has to offer.
– J
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