Vuze Study Exposes P2P Throttling By Canadian ISP Cogeco

urbanriot writes "Despite a growing number of complaints on the popular North American consumer broadband site BroadbandReports, employees working for the Canadian cable internet provider Cogeco have publicly denied interfering with torrents on their network. However, a recent plugin put out by the Vuze team exposed Cogeco of being the second worst ISP globally, of those tested. So far, Cogeco has failed to respond to these findings, but recent coverage from the mainstream media and Michael Geist may prompt them to finally admit to their controversial practices." The report by the Vuze team has some interesting information about other ISPs from around the world as well. Prior to this, Bell Canada was taking most of the flak in Canada for traffic management.

Bad ISPs

[daydr3am3r]

For those who are bored to RTFA and dig through its links, there is a handy Bad ISPs [azureuswiki.com] list maintained by the Azureus team.
That being said, there are many ISPs who also do p2p traffic caching, which is not inherently a bad thing. Certain block lists consider those wrongfully malicious as well.

I'm not seeing this

[Anonymous Coward]

I use Cogeco cable internet and I haven't noticed this. A well seeded torrent will max out all the bandwidth I pay for (16 mbit). I use their pro service now but the same was true when I was using regular highseed only capped at 10mbit They just enforce a soft bitcap which is annoying but I'm only able to hit the caps they are now enforcing because they've made the network so fast.

Re:Not the first time, not the last...

[Faylone]

Parent is troll, don't click

Cogeco response

[wrook]

The CBC has a decent article where they contacted Cogeco. They claim not to use false resets. They also say that they haven't received the letter from Vuze yet.

http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2008/04/22/tech-vuze.html

I'm not sure if I believe them or not. When I lived in Ottawa last year I had friends using Cogeco. Some people had no problems at all with bittorrent while others couldn't use it. It's hard for me to tell if they are blocking some of their customers, or if my friends just couldn't figure out how to set it up.

Re:this is why we need competition

[Jurily]

Yes, it has. Hence the need for anti-trust laws.

Re:this is why we need competition

[erroneus]

Infrastructure are the vehicles by which services are traveled or transmitted. This would include the roads, railways, air space, the power lines, the pipes and sewers, phone lines, cell towers, radio frequencies or anything along those lines.

"Healthcare" is not even remotely within that description. Land ownership is even further removed.

The prevention of ownership of infrastructure *IS* a pro choice move. It allows multiple service providers to compete across the same media offering "pro-choice" to the consumer. Regional monopolies are still monopolies and cases of abuse are frequent. I'm not talking about socialized services. Only publicly owned infrastructure. The Public Utilities Commissions which were created to prevent the need for public ownership of infrastructure has failed in its mission where it has permitted cherry picking and inconsistent levels of service. There are places in Texas and all across the U.S. that still have no water and no power, forget about broadband internet access and cell phone coverage.