The Australian ISP Exetel decided to cut the available bandwidth for P2P traffic in half from noon to midnight. This move will save Exetel about 45.000 US dollars per month, while it only takes $75.000 dollar to implement the bandwidth throttling mechanisms.
Exetel noticed that the percentage of P2P traffic is relatively high relative to the rest of the traffic on their network. To counter the increasing cost that are involved with the rise in P2P traffic they decided that it would be “better for everyone” if they cut the available bandwidth in half.
Somehow they think that customers that pay a lot of money for their high speed connection won’t mind anyway. In the announcement on their forums (removed, copy over here) they say:
These restrictions shouldn’t affect any user at all – other than to slow the download speed of files using P2P protocols – which shouldn’t matter in any way.
This is rather absurd. Why shouldn’t “slowing down” matter? That is the reason why people pay a lot of money for their high speed connection!
In a reaction to this announcement 65% of the Exetel customers that participated in this poll indicated that they might switch to another provider.
According to Exetel this step was absolutely necessary to keep the prices as low as they are. But in fact in means that the prices won’t be that cheap anymore because you can only use half of the bandwidth you paid for.
But there is still hope, earlier his year the three largest ISP’s in Australia said that they would never throttle P2P traffic. Check out this list if you’re unsure if your ISP is throttling BitTorrent or other P2P traffic.
