Hi guys, and in particular DJ,
[Scroll down to the last two paragraphs if you want to skip to the actual questions]
I'm in the process of looking for a new ISP, but I'm having problems finding a decent ADSL ISP in South Africa, but so far Crystal Web seems like the most competent one.
I've previously used two different ADSL ISPs. One was a complete disaster, the other one is overall OK, but there are various issues that annoy me.
One thing that has annoyed me with both ISPs, to one degree or another, is that their "shaping" (I use the term losely, because in South African consumer minds, this word doesn't mean what it actually means) targets random things.
The first ISP basically considered pretty much everything except the most popular games as downloads. The result was that all web browsing for example got throttled to 1/16th of the speed I paid for. Browsing the internet today at 128 kilobits per second isn't very fun.
My current ISP goes further than just limit my bandwidth, and they consider my SSH connections "downloads". This means that when I'm working remotely on some server, they will either start dropping all, or nearly all, packets in the associated TCP connection, or they wil run a man-in-the-middle attack on my TCP connection and insert packets with the FIN or RST flags set, causing my TCP connections to be forcefully closed. This is EXTREMELY annoying, and there's no way to get them to stop. Otherwise my annoyances with this ISP are minor.
What I'm ideally looking for is a network neutral ISP. Network neutral means that they treat all traffic equally, and doesn't apply different rules to different packets. I doubt such a thing exists on the South African ADSL market, though. Actually I don't even mind a bit of throttling, as long as the throttling is network neutral, and doesn't punish me because my traffic pattern is not just Facebook and Youtube all day long.
And now for the actual questions: I see that Crystal Web's Business Premium Capped claims to be network neutral, albeit with different words. Is this correctly understood? Is it also correctly understood that the absolute most expensive product, unlike the cheaper ones, does not have free midnight till 6 data?
Next question: I see that Business Standard Capped claims that "P2P and NNTP may be affected by network contention". DJ, you seem both honest and technically minded. How do you classify such traffic? Do you do like other ISPs and consider everything except Facebook and Youtube "P2P"? Will my SSH connections be affected? Will my VPN connections be affected? Will my games' TCP connections be affected?