News Cox to experiment with prioritisation

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/bits/2009/01/29/cox-to-experiment-with-prioritisation/1

Cox Communications - the second largest ISP in the US - is to stop its policy of blocking P2P traffic outright in favour of a system of prioritisation.

 

Yay for the "free countries". In UK you get throttled just for using your own bandwitch and the traffic is being monitored, so don't even think about something nasty. US throttles p2p. From this point of view eastern europe seems like a Internet heaven.

 

The problem is the assumption that all P2P traffic is inherently illegal - which is not the case, since a lot of software houses, as well as Open Source distributions, use P2P to transfer software and updates. Blocking or shaping P2P traffic punishes everyone, regardless of whether they're downloading the latest Sims addon or the latest version of Linux.

Just remember the aphorism, people: never assume, cos it'll only make you look like a tosser.

 

I thought the saying was "never make assumptions because it makes an ass of you...and umptions".

but, yes. ISP throttling is a pain in the ass. I get the occasional youtube video that refuses to stream , and I used to be able to stream videos from gamevideos.1up.com but now I have to wait for it to load a decent proportion of the video before playing (GV.com takes around 1-2Mb/s to stream and my line goes up to 4Mb/s)
it sucks when you get penalized for using what you pay for.

but back to the news. it's a step in the right direction. By the sounds of it, Cox Communications had the FCC on their ass for the throttling? I doubt they would have a policy re-think if not for the threat of legal action.

 

Thats why my usenet traffic travels through port 443, if they start throttling all encrypted traffic then they will lose a customer

 

Hey, maybe this means I'll be able to complete more than one torrent in 10, in a reasonable amount of time. I was thinking about getting a dialup account with AOL, just to download torrents on (would be faster and more reliable than cox)

<--- Located in Kansas.

Last night it took about 3 minutes to load Google.com. <Sarcasm> Connect to the work VPN... are you kidding me, that has to be illegal, only criminals use VPN's, or have servers!!! </Sarcasm> Crosses fingers and hopes the world hears a resounding "POP" as they pull their heads from some place dark and smelly.

 

uploading taking a back seat... do they not know that online gaming needs both download and upload speeds that are half way decent...

 

n3mo: i dont think the uk does get its traffic monitored, i do believe bt even posted a news thread that uncluded a statement from the current minister on the subject saying that monitoring traffic isnt gunna happen for the uk, which is always good news.

as for the throttling, that sucks, i'm with sky broadband so they dont limit me at all, but i went to a mates for some lanning, and he told me off for downloading at 4pm, he said wait til gone midnight and then do it or they'll spank his connection, and thats virgin media i do believe!

peace

fatman

 

Hell no they wouldn't have re-thought their policy... It costs them money which is "bad"....

 

"Experiment" and "Cox" should not be in the same sentence *snigger*

 

That kinda sucks. I could have SWORN Cox was screwing with my P2P transfers and that just confirms my suspicions.

 

Just a few weeks ago here on b-t was a news that UK invested loads of money into transparent proxies filtering all outgoing and incoming traffic (in a so-called paedophile search - anyone believes that crap? even the sound of it is dumb)

 

on at&t dsl here.. no issues like that- and I do alot of questionable stuff with the bandwidth.. I'll never use comcast because of how they came up.. all that equipment is (was) at&t's.. they are just as shady as mci worldcom if you ask me- even sat is better than cable.. I dunno why people are paying to get throttled- the cost is ridiculous for comcast cable too

 

oh says cox lol sorry I can't read when type this fast.. cox is ted turner on the east coast midwest- I can't really say much about him even though used to live in atlanta for 7 long years (too long)

 

Yes, it's virgin who throttles like hell, however, unlike other isps they atleast tell you how much "fair useage" (redownloading all my stuff on steam would be enough to trigger the throttling approx 40 times during the evening and 20 times during afternoons) is in their opinion.

 

I've never experienced throttling with my 20Mb virgin pipe, and my VPN LAN to LAN has been up for several hundred days.

Could they "shape" encrypted p2p packets if you using un-common ports?

 

Virgin are by far the worst for this.
Its like giving someone the keys to a Ferrari and then telling them they can only drive it at 3mph.
I essentialy cant download anything between 10am and 9pm now or my connection gets spanked so hard you'd think you where going 10 rounds with mike tyson.