First of all, it might be in America, the laws are so screwed up.
And it's only illegal if someone else gets hurt. Considering no one wants to make money off the things i download then screw them.
First LEGAL torrent in North America
- Thread starter Starwind
- Start date
First of all, it might be in America, the laws are so screwed up.
And it's only illegal if someone else gets hurt. Considering no one wants to make money off the things i download then screw them.
No. In the United States, it is a violation of copyright law regardless of if anyone is or is not making money off a product. Downloading copyrighted material that you do not have permission to download is always infringement.
If you're in favor of copyright reform so that this is no longer the case, then so be it. But as US law currently stands, it is not legal.
Cable lines have to be shared as well, it's just that there aren't any cable resellers.
Besides, I really have no sympathy for the Telcos that complain about resellers since taxpayers paid for those lines in the first place.
To be honest, I know a lot more about ISP's in the US then in Canada, but over there at least the fact that they're forced to line share is the only thing that's keeping even a vague semblance of competition in the ISP space, and then only with DSL. No line sharing means less competition (in some cases, none!) which is great for the telcos and horrible for consumers.
Right. That's why the CRTC has basically forced them to do it. But if they can unilaterally packet-shape at the hardware level, there's no point.
Personally, I would rather have a bandwidth limit than traffic shaping. That's why I've stayed with my 3mbps un-shaped line, and pay almost double for it, rather than go with the 8mbps shaped line.
Strangely, I'm opposite. I need unlimited throughput.
What good is unlimited throughput if when you need it most it's not there?
I work at home, I'm a freelance graphic designer for television, commercial and network IDs. Nowadays high-definition is now the standard resolution I work in and then I convert them down is 720x480 interlaced footage for regular televisions. That means I need to upload/download large amounts of footage every weekday (normally gigs of data). So naturally I got a call from Comcast saying that I've exceeded my bandwidth amount for the month and I had to prove that my internet actives were not used for pirating, just for uploading video files to an ftp server.
That is why I need unlimited throughput. I don't mind paying higher than regular internet subscribers but I don't see any option to get unlimited bandwidth.
Yeah, I know what you mean. Personally I only want the unlimited bandwidth for those occasions where I suddenly decide to download the latest Linux distro, or download my whole collection of games off steam again, I may not use hundreds of gigs per month, but I like to have the option available should I want to. That's why I'm paying £40 a month for 3mbps unlimited, when I could be paying £17.99 for 8mbps with a fair usage limit (20gb on peak, unlimited off peak and traffic shaping). But I'd still prefer the option of a limited, but unshaped service. I might not use it, but the choice would be nice.
How much does it cost you? I get an unshaped 8MB line for 40 quid a month. It's a lot, but it's fast and reliable. My previous connection was shaped to the point of being completely useless to me.
WTA: Ooops I see, you pay 40 quid too. Well then my advice would be, swap to KEconnect, they give me 8MB unshaped with 250GB a month limit for 40 quid.
I'd love to, but I can't. I live in Hull, where Kingston Communications have a virtual monopoly. They maintained it by keeping their wholesale prices high, which OFCOM were fine with since they were "A small company", but recently they reduced their prices, so I hope it will lead to some competition in the area.
The other thing is that they've also got rid of the package I'm on, so if I wanted to risk trying the 8mbps service again I wouldn't have the choice to return to the unshaped service, they also charge £30 to change your package, which is annoying.
I wasn't aware it worked like that, I thought all the providers can pretty much provide to any part of the country they like. Mind you having said that there were a few I called who couldn't provide to me.
And you use Kingston? I was with Eclipse previously who are owned by Kingston. They are the ones who were battering my connection, I would get about 20kb a sec before midnight, about 50kb after midnight. I rang them up to complain about it and they told me flat out they were squeezing my connection so I quit them. They didn't have an unshaped connection to offer me though.
Now I can get 800kb a second of actual DL speed provided it is a good source.
And you use Kingston? I was with Eclipse previously who are owned by Kingston. They are the ones who were battering my connection, I would get about 20kb a sec before midnight, about 50kb after midnight. I rang them up to complain about it and they told me flat out they were squeezing my connection so I quit them. They didn't have an unshaped connection to offer me though.
Now I can get 800kb a second of actual DL speed provided it is a good source.
Kingston in Hull are a bit of a quirk of history. They were one of the only people in the country to hold on to their lines when when BT became a national provider. So they set their prices for people to use their lines to provide services in this area.
Up until recently they were owned by the city council, so managed to get by on that fact, now they've been sold off they're more interested in expanding outside of the city than they are improving services within the city.
Yeah Eclipse is a pretty good example of what we in Hull are stuck with. Except Eclipse is slightly cheaper, and seems to get upgrades before we do, since they actually have to compete with other suppliers outside of Hull.
When they first upgraded to the 8mbps service they said the problems were just short term while everything was smoothed out. But it was next to useless. When I tried it the speeds were all over the place. At times I had speeds ranging from 6KB/s to 110KB/s, whereas on the 3mbps service I get a constant 370KB/s.
Ah right I see. Were you getting these poor speeds when using FTP or just when using filesharing? I never encountered anyone who shaped their FTP, but Eclipse did tell me they shaped HTTP and all filesharing.
The other problem I uncovered when trying to get to the bottom of my appalling speeds is that even if your provider doesn't actively traffic shape apparently a bunch of them, eclipse included, use 3rd parties to provide their service to you, and of course they have no control over what those people do with their servers.
I have found one alternative to getting around shaping filesharing traffic and that is using a remote server to DL all your torrents. You pay a company a small fee and you can use Bitttorrent services that are actually installed on their server, they do all the filesharing for you, and then you DL the file via FTP at the end of it changing the name to whatever you want.
What it means is that because you have been able to change the name of the file and it is not being DLed using any filesharing protocol your ISP actually would have to manually inspect everything you DL in order to identify it.
I was getting those speeds on everything, even just surfing the net. Youtube videos and trailers wouldn't play for about 15 minutes. I called and complained and basically got told "You're paying less, what do you expect?", I also heard, from someone who works there, that the traffic shaping was on everything, including HTTP and email, at all times, and it didn't matter what service you were paying for, because they were all on the same profile.
I complained until I got put back on the 3mbps service, which they stopped offering as soon as the 8mbps service was rolled out.
I hear the service is somewhat better now, for HTTP etc. but I'm not risking trying it again, I'd rather pay more, and get a consistant service.
Well that's REALLY stupid 
It's not a bloody 8MB connection if you can't achieve 8MB of bandwidth at any point. Where the hell do they get off with that? 
Its this whole thing about it being up to 8MBs as well I guess, they work on some sort of contention ratio and apparently it can be as high as 50/1. Which means that minimum bandwidth you could achieve would be say about 160kbps and the maximum would be the full 8MB depending on how many people are on the service at any given moment. Which isn't the same thing as traffic shaping, but if they are doing that as well, then that's a very bad situation. That's what was happening to me. Whereas with the slightly lower speed connections they guarantee you the full thing.
Now I get at least 5MB at any given point, and more often than not the full 8MB.
It's not a bloody 8MB connection if you can't achieve 8MB of bandwidth at any point. Where the hell do they get off with that? Its this whole thing about it being up to 8MBs as well I guess, they work on some sort of contention ratio and apparently it can be as high as 50/1. Which means that minimum bandwidth you could achieve would be say about 160kbps and the maximum would be the full 8MB depending on how many people are on the service at any given moment. Which isn't the same thing as traffic shaping, but if they are doing that as well, then that's a very bad situation. That's what was happening to me. Whereas with the slightly lower speed connections they guarantee you the full thing.
Now I get at least 5MB at any given point, and more often than not the full 8MB.
Well that's REALLY stupid
Its this whole thing about it being up to 8MBs as well I guess, they work on some sort of contention ratio and apparently it can be as high as 50/1. Which means that minimum bandwidth you could achieve would be say about 160kbps and the maximum would be the full 8MB depending on how many people are on the service at any given moment. Which isn't the same thing as traffic shaping, but if they are doing that as well, then that's a very bad situation. That's what was happening to me. Whereas with the slightly lower speed connections they guarantee you the full thing.
Now I get at least 5MB at any given point, and more often than not the full 8MB.
That's the thing though. They said that the 8mbps isn't a contended service like the 3mbps service. It's artificially limited, by the traffic management service.
I tried making the point to them that it's been sold as an up to 8mbps service, and my line was syncing at 7.9mbps, that should mean it was capable of getting 7.9mbps at some point.
They said it was, and told me to try their speed test. Turns out that the traffic management wasn't implemented on their servers, so there it said 780k, but running a speed test not on their server and got 40k.
