P2P and "Fair usage policy"

[Will_518]

I'm with Toucan, who has a "fair usage policy", which means I get 1 byte per second when using p2p.

Now, that doesn't seem particularly fair to me, when they market the package as "unlimited", then write a terms and condition which is about a few megabytes long.

I tried changing ports to random numbers between 80 and 60000, that didn't seem to work. I tried public proxy servers, which didn't work. I'm using a USB modem, so I'm not sure wether portforwarding is possible.

How do I get past this restriction?

[Chip Monk]

1 byte per second are you sure? That's like 15 minutes per kilobyte.

You're right that's not fair, it's bloody atrocious.

[Broken]

I looked your carrier up on a review site.
40 negative reviews out of 40 total. If possible, it would probably be well worth your time to get some other company to go through.

I am not sure how they are determining what p2p traffic is... deep packet inspection? Black listing ports?

[gamer4eva]

P2P fair usage policy sucks man. Glad that im away from it. Telewest is doing good offers and my download speed hasn't been throttled yet. Why dont you give that a shot. My friend who has AOL does not have no fair usage policy because he says whenever he uses P2P he gets full speeds. So i would recommend either.

[ghurka]

I'm also with Toucan. Read so many bad things about Tiscali and not much about Toucan when I signed up. Now find out that Toucan are re-sellers of Tiscali so the same shit service.

I've tested my connection and find that they are traffic shaping. I've made numerous complaints to them. The last 2 emails they did not even reply to. So its a case of wait out the 12 months (8 to go) or pull the plug and fight them in court.

The only ISP worse than Toucan/Tiscali is Talk Talk.

[GepperRankins]

i was reading on, i think it was the tiscali site. they say "fair usage" monitors how much you transfer. if it's loads, they'll choke your bandwidth to give other users more speed. apparently you can get all you want outside peak hours though

[nerval]

Most of the ISPs (if not all) are doing it now, either openly or secretly.
Even Zen who used to be truly unlimited have a clause about throttling your connection if they want to.
It's a case of everybody in the country has got 2Mb or above, and there isn't the capacity on the public network or the ISP's network to cope at peak times (i.e. when people want to use it).
And ISPs are charged by how much bandwidth they use, not the number of lines, so they want to keep it to a minimum.

So even if the ISP didn't choke your connection, the telephone network probably would.

Don't know about cable, but their customer service is regarded as pretty poor.

I don't think AOL is unlimited either, in that if their monitors told them you were using "too much" (whatever that is), they'd either warn you to pack it in, or throw you off.

ADSL Guide is full of stories about most of the ISPs now, not just the few who first started the traffic "shaping".

[taz1968]

i was with homecall 2meg con at 6:00pm my speed went as low as 2kbps
it was unlimeted cool but they told me i could only download 7gig in a week hmmm not unlimeted what a bag of pants..
i now have a 8meg con with bt all is fine i get 780 to 800kbps all the time.
now im happy

[Chip Monk]

I have a 10 meg connection with NTL (cable interweb) and I max out the connection with usenet. They are also removing the download limit, tho' to be honest they have never mentioned it to me and I certainly go above it every month.