We need more of these articles looking and trying to quantify the effect of shaping on the SA ISP market. It's one of those open secrets. Everybody knows their ISP does it, but to what degree is a guess.
I'm on OpenWeb 4Mbps Gold Uncapped, which I changed to from MWEB uncapped. MWEB was so unusable at times due to P2P that I simply had to jump ship to another ISP (e.g., could barely watch streaming videos, Gmail would timeout incessantly). Then with OpenWeb it turned out that we had somewhat similar issues, even though the account had a lower contention ratio. Well, turns out, if we had downloads running on P2P during "office hours", it would affect the line speed quality not just during those times but for most of the times, hence reducing the internet experience entirely. Since then and after a lot of experimentation (since tech support is generally useless—they're not gonna come out and say, "ja, it's because we shape your line to kingdom come, you evil P2P'er!"), we schedule uTorrent to only download from 18h00 to 08h00 the next day midweeks and full speed over weekends. And whaddya know, it has since sorted out all our issues.
Ergo, we need more transparency when it comes to who shapes how much in SA? MyBroadband should get the community involved in digging up the dirty little secret of shaping.