iP3K

A few months ago, the news broke out on Ars Technica that a Bell Sympatico employs traffic shaping to control the flow of traffic on the Internet. They claim that it is only in use during peak hours, and call it “Traffic Management”. I have always tried to stay clear of the tiresome Net Neutrality debate hoping Canada would be spared from this cancer. As with all good things they often come to an end way to early!

I’ve noticed the first effects around mid-December and it seemed to affect mostly BitTorrent traffic. Basicly, as soon as it turns 6PM, the upload and download speeds of BitTorrent is capped at 30kb/s up and 30kb/s down, making the downloading of large files unpractical. However, the purpose of such measure does not really prevent the bandwidth to being used, because it’s still available, at the same time as they apply bandwidth caps in their peak hours, I’m still able to download shows from revision3 at around 500+kb/s.

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