Tunneling and your ISP
 

My ISP has slowed the connection speeds down to a crawl. This is what the problem is:

I use WinMX as my file sharing app of choice. I know, it is NOT Gnutella based, BUT, please listen.

A couple weeks ago I upgraded my OS from Win98SE to W2K. The first app I tried out to see the improvments was WinMX. Well, I connected to the WinMX network but any DL/UL was <1k/s. When I tried to finger someone it took forever to get a result back. Ok. My first thought was it is due to my upgrade. I spent a week and a half posting on zeropaid and a couple other forums to get some kind of answer. I was able to speed up my connections through IE and OE but WinMX remained stuck.

Just a few days ago I was browsing through my ISP's homepage and came across a "Network Status" link. I clicked on it and the next page presented me with alot of info AND a resolution to my problem. Among other things listed like planned upgrades and outages was this little tidbit:

"03/27/2003 - Gnutella Applications policy changed to 128 kilobits/sec download and 64kbs up"

Apparently they are "Filtering/Throttleing" the bandwidth some how to slow the file shareing apps down. Not only are Gnutella apps slow BUT WinMX also.

My main question is: IF I decide to use a "Tunnel" app to get through, can my ISP find out any info about this and try to block the Tunnel app as well? Or, can they cut me off completely?

Thanks for any and ALL responses!:)

Depends....
If the ISP just filters or capps connection/speed on the usual filesharing ports (for Gnutella it's 6346) then you can avoid it by simply using other ports to connect.

But there are also some ISPs using protocol filters which analyse and filter the traffic for specific key words like GNUTELLA CONNECT
which is the handshake of Gnutella.

I think Sandvine has a filtering and monitoring app for Gnutella..

and...
 

not to suggest this is directly related... but, when you did your install of Win2k, did you also slam in the Service Pack 3 ?
DO NOT... stop at SP2.

I was almost about to do that yesterday...
Why not?

SP3 gives you all of the marvellous reporting features which are a basic part of XP...

i.e., reporting to M$...

Stop at SP2... Don't know if it is actually possible to remove SP3 if one has installed it... Maybe necessary to do a format and reinstall to get rid of it... Apologies for now, but I haven't checked on the removal of SP3 yet... But, see my sig and go to For Windozer Drivers... Info may be there.
;)