Toadsprout

Unfortunately, you are only just now learning how an ISP (or all ISPs) can mess with their customers and the poor customer has no recourse other than to look elsewhere for another ISP.

However, unlike Birdy's optimistic reply, not all ISPs make it known their true policy towards P2P traffic and while other ISPs develop an anti-P2P policy as they go along.

For example, I used to belong to Virgin, here in the UK, and I used LW quite happily for a number of months (about 18 or so) then all of a sudden I could not use LW anymore. There was no announcement, no email or anything else it was just one day I could use LW and the next day I couldn't. I even emailed Virgin's help line several times to ask if they had adopted "Traffic Shaping Techniques" (I found out about TST after reading about it in this forum and doing some internet research).

I never got an answer to my TST questions but any other query I had was answered, which showed me that they had used TST on my internet connection but they were not willing to publicly admit it.

I then read, in an internet article, that Virgin had secretly adopted an anti-P2P policy and were using TS Techniques to kill off P2P traffic.

I now had no choice but to leave Virgin, who were expensive but I was quite happy with, because of the secret anti-P2P policy they had taken up.

My point is, your ISP doesn’t have to tell you anything about their change in business policy once you have signed on the dotted line, they don’t have to advertise it and sometimes they don’t even tell their own help desk.

I’ve changed my ISP now but I am still angry that my original ISP thought I was dumb enough to accept their high prices while they were only delivering half the expected service.




UK Bob