I've been able to download a couple of large (250MB) files from international sites recently at fairly good speeds, but only with a download manager using multiple threads. However, this doesn't exactly make me want jump for joy as I'm a chess geek and everything that is not http, pop or smtp starts well but ALWAYS times out in a few minutes. As Jhbgirl observed as well, IRC dies after a while, and so, it seems, does everything else "non-standard". Whatever the technical/resource reasons or the politics behind throttling file sharing may be, why throw the proverbial baby out with the bathwater by just killing everything indiscriminately?
I've been doing some reading up on this and the better bandwidth management tools do packet shaping not port shaping - i.e. they do not discriminate based on the port used but rather detect the type of protocols and can intelligently de-prioritise filesharing stuff without causing more protocol overhead. In other words, if Sentech gave a rat's ass about their users they could shape the file sharing protocols without screwing up protocols that don't hog bandwidth such as IRC and a connection to a chess server that requires about 300 bytes of bandwidth to operate properly.
<rant>In general ISP's need a bit of a paradigm shift - the internet is no longer about browsing and email - international traffic usage trends show that filesharing and other p2p protocols far outweigh http and email - in some regions (notably Europe) as much of 80% of internet traffic is purely filesharing/p2p. So maybe they should wake up and acknowledge the reality that the internet has evolved beyond simply downloading text and pretty pictures to view in a browser. There has been an enormous proliferation of internet enabled web services, remote management utilities, applets, databases, instant messengers, video conferencing, etc, etc. People are synchronising their pocketpc's over the internet, connecting smart appliances and security systems to internet based applications, databases are syncing with each other, telecommuters are working from home over the internet via a plethora of different protocols and tools, cellphones are internet enabled, voip is growing fast, entire corporate systems are now web-based - and yet the ISP's continue to act as if anything other than plain Jane ancient protocols like http and smtp are aberrations that need to be cracked down on.</rant>
Many ISP's in the USA and Europe are now offering services with specific protocol caps - e.g. you can get an unlimited broadband connection except with a weekly/monthly cap on the amount of file sharing bandwidth you use and after you hit the cap, only filesharing protocols are throttled. This seems like a very reasonable and sensible approach and from what I can see it is not technically too difficult or prohibitively expensive to implement, especially for the kind of trained network engineers that an ISP should employ. I suspect, though, that this is so far over the heads of Sentech's technicians and management that any effort expended in trying to get anything like this implemented would be a sheer waste of time.
]
!]