Irish Broadband + Filesharing

in sudurbia

We've had Irish Broadband's breeze service for several years now and have been through the ringer with them on more occasions than i care to remember, but that I can't forget :-((

Until the spring of this year things had stabilised and the connection was working well. Then in March I began to notice strange behaviour on my torrent client. For periods of ten hours the transfers would move extremely slowly -5Kps. Then, inexplicably the speed would shoot up to what seemed like a more accurate relection of the swarm speed.

In April however the faster spurts seemed to come to an end. Since then I have not seen download speeds > 12K and upload seems to have disappeared almost entirely. I underline that there ahs been no change in the configuration at my end, either in terms of router or clients.

Upon contacting IBB I was initially tlod that it might be that a software update might be required for the aerial. We heard nothing further. When I called them back, they informed me that they 'did not do troubleshooting' on p2p problems and that this was specified in their terms of service. I can find no explicit reference to this in the T&C (or am I blind?)
http://www.irishbroadband.ie/terms.php

Anyway, I make documentaries and am involved in several p2p platforms for the distribution of independent content, so this situation is crippling and as a result I am investigating alternative services in my area.

My question is: have other users been experiencing degraded performance of their p2p clients on IBB in recent months?

They insist that they are not blocking services, but my guess is that they're using traffic shaping whilst keeping the service nominally open.

Lastly I have to admit that my previous experiences of IBB have prejudiced me against them, so I thought I might be able to find coorroboration or evidence to reject my thesis here.

cheers,

in sudurbia

alhimself

hey mate,ive had the problem with irishbroadband,uptil 5/6 months ago the service was grand p2p's had great ups and downs but these days im fairly screwed,speed tests on the connection say im getting around the 2mb up and down im meant to be getting and tried switching out the router but thats perfect.its a pain in the swiss to no end.a pity considering the service was great before this.not sure if its due to traffic shaping/oversubscription on a mast in ballyfermot or what the hell to be honest.gaming has become a nightmare too.i play used to be able to play alot of css or dod but the lag is just to much now,i could get a ping of 30/40ms at the quickest then it could shoot to 300/400 every 5 or 10 mins,even at 30/40ms the game aint going to play smooth.i feel your pain brother!

Its the exact same scenario for me. Before March of this year, my torrents were flying along, maxing out the line at rougly 330KB/s. Now I'm lucky to get above 12. I seem to be getting lots of packet loss as well, meaning the likes og online play and poker are out the window.
Because of the major packet loss, I cant use Skype. This is not a huge deal, but it was nice to have.

Its not only the torrents. My browsing has been slow and my regular day-to-day HTTP downloading rarely goes above 100KB/s.

I've tried talking to them about it but nothing ever gets done.

flintash

that really could be it. I have the same story.since could be downloading movie a night, now i "happy" with 2 kb/s torrent. i gave up.but worse, i think even larger files to download not possible for me with such a small speed as 7 kb/s. i am using Ripwave, in Cork.out of coverage- as customer care informed me.( i moved to new house few month ago outside city, like customer care said- out of coverage,- downloading a free porn movie a night for fact, just recently cut out of torrent.) So, will see for how long

Random

All my Linux distros are crawling along on uTorrent

in sudurbia

I'd like to approach this from another angle.

Are there many people out there who are using Bit Torrent or other p2p apps over IBB and are not having any problems, regularly reaching > 100kps on both upload or download?

Direct downloaders, do not apply!

in sudurbia

delllat

o2 broadband can download at these speeds but only after 10pm,torrents crawl on peak hours but i downloaded over 9gb recently in a few hours after 10pm at speeds of 2300k

thebman

We are in Maynooth and one of the guys I'm living with downloads torrents a lot and said it to me, the resident techie.

After looking at it, we were getting 240KB/s from Microsoft.com on downloads, I could play online games but torrents never went above 12KB/s.

I told him to ring IBB and ask about traffic shaping. He said that they claimed they were not traffic shaping. They asked him to not use the router and plug it directly into the computer and this worked, at least for a while but was not a workable solution given 4 people contribute to the cost of the broadband in the house. Also seeing as the Pc that downloads torrents is plugged into the router, its hard to believe that it would be the router as I had replaced the router in this time when it had gone crap and no speed increase on torrents occurred (the old router had to be restarted about 3 times a day).

I was still convinced they were traffic shaping so I switched the ports for utorrent to 80 and encrypted torrents. Now we are back getting 240KB/s on well seeded torrents.

Cabaal

Lets no see anybody here mentioning any dodgy torrent sources or they shall be bans handed out

On the other side of things, check your client settings, are you using non-blocked ports its common for the standard ports to be blocked by ISP's, also might want to try encryption

Bambaata

how does one check if they are using non-blocked ports?

garytuohy

just noticed last nite my torrents werent going past 12

had it installed last week and could d/l at full speeds but torrents dropped last nite and I purposely got a torrent with high seeders and low leechers..just to test it.
done a speed test and got

Cabaal

Bambaata wrote:

how does one check if they are using non-blocked ports?

Generally speaking above 30000 and below 65535, standard one's like 7777, 6346-6348 are throttled by alot of ISP's

Remember to update your forwarding rules on your router when you change your port!

in sudurbia

I've tried alternating ports, including those in the range you suggest, but to no avail. I've also been using encryption etc and this doesn't change things at all.

My suspicion is that they're using packet inspection or else traffic analysis so as to handicap these services. There are devices out there designed specifically for this purpose, after all.

I'm still curious to hear if there are IBB users out there who have not had any problems with BT particularly, or who have had difficulties and identified either the cause or a means to overcome them.

in sudurbia

in sudurbia

Just a couple of quotes to supplement what is already in this thread, first regarding traffic management at IBB and the 'fair usage policy'. The first is from the head of Customer Service at IBB and is from an interview in the Business Post last year. The second is from an unknown user at Justin Mason's blog. Lastly, and answering my own question, there are obviously people happily torrenting away on IBB as is clear from this thread.

Nevertheless, Irish Broadband still has some issues that it’s dealing with. One of these is how to manage a broadband network with the increase in the number of heavy downloaders.

Such people use their broadband connection constantly, to download very large files such as films or masses of music.

Although it’s usually only one or two people per area, it can have a knock-on effect on other users in the catchment area, reflected in slower broadband speeds.

‘‘There’s one area where one individual has caused us to limit the number of subscribers to 45 because of his bandwidth usage, whereas the norm is 75 to 100.”

This is being rectified, said Byrne, through the use of special bandwidth management technology at the firm’s Sandyford base. The result is that it has not had to throw heavy users off its network.

‘‘I don’t know of any customer that we’ve written to because we have people managing it,” she said. ‘‘We just manage their traffic down.

“Generally, it’s not a problem for us.”

http://archives.tcm.ie/businesspost/2006/04/30/story13761.asp

I signed up for Breeze 2Mb with no caps. There’s a fair use policy but according to the sales guy that only kicks in about 60GB and then they’ll prioritise web services for the other users on your link if you’re causing a problem.

http://taint.org/2006/02/09/195117a.html#comment-695

thebman

small Sandyford-based company

owned by NTR

How can they say they traffic shape heavy downloaders but say they don't traffic shape or limit ports elsewhere.

Its a bit annoying but the 4 of us in the house don't make up 60GB a month. I don't think that should be the limit anyway as they say that it isn't the case.