Those of you who also subscribe to the WFTL-LUG list will have already seen part of this but I wanted to make sure it made it into my blog as well. I wanted to touch on this whole Bittorrent story because of an experience I’ve had. It’s also part of a personal rant I’ve had lately about businesses and government treating us like criminals without just cause. Yeah, there’s some background ranting that needs to be done to clear up how my ire was raised this far (and perhaps my next blog post should be the beginning of this), but I’m going to stick to the Bittorrent story for now.
As you all know by now, my Website(s), IRC server, and the various WFTL-lists, have all moved out of my office to a hosting service in Montreal. Since I no longer needed the rather expensive ADSL service at home, I went for the Rogers Extreme HIgh Speed service (6 megabits per second). So far so good, except . . .
. . . that Rogers had blocked Bittorrent! I could not use any BT client to download packages or Linux distribution ISOs since Rogers was limiting BT to one stream. This was widely reported and Rogers received a number of complaints, and about three weeks ago, I confirmed the fact that I could not, in fact, do any BT transfers.
Rogers automatically assumes, apparently, that there are no legitimate applications for Bittorrent, due, no doubt, to massive misinformation campaigns by the RIAA/MPAA/pick_your_fav that portrays all such file sharing and bandwidth sharing services as evil and obviously out to destroy the entertainment industry. But I digress . . .
Today, as I write this email, I tested another BT transfer and miraculously, I could do BT transfters again, but only briefly. The transfer speed was good for a few minutes, then throttled back down to virtually zero (1 byte/second). If I start another torrent, the speed starts to build (as expected) then, a few minutes later, also goes to zero. Apparently, nothing has changed.
The whole point of this story, I suppose, is the same as any cautionary tale. Buyer beware and make sure you get the services you think you are getting. That aside, I was wondering whether this was happening to anyone else with Rogers or any other service provider.