Bah! Eclipse traffic management / throttling is just a joke

[Nat101]

RedHotAnt, hell that takes me back, can't belive that was 6 years ago now.... i feal so old, i'm only 21. I used to dial up with my ISDN, they would let you have dual channel too off one yearly fee! Then they went bust.

6 years!? Yeah, I was with RedHotAnt too and also took advantage of the ISDN channel bonding. And when they withdrew the channel bonding support, my brother bought another ISDN card and we then used a single channel each or employed software bonding... Eee, those where the days... Honest!

I've switched from Pipex to Eclipse. My line was estimated to support at least 5Mb/s and initially 5100-5600 kbps sync was exactly what I got... Until I switched out my crappy filters for a pair of Speedtouch ones, when my sync suddenly jumped to 7612 kbps!

Transfer speeds are generally better than expected, given all the complaints atm. Speedtest are indicating at least 2000 kbps, even during the peak periods, although I am yet to see more than 4000 kbps, even in the wee hours.

Eclipse appear to have implemented a speed cap via traffic shaping during the day and evening which limits P2P to a global pool of 30 kbytes/s. I'm use header encryption for BitTorrent stuff and am able to saturate available bandwidth, but I'm a good boy; I schedule my transfers to run full-bore overnight, throttled during the day and paused during peak hours. My housemate also uses aMule (i.e. no encryption options), but the speed caps do not seem to be in effect at night, so thats fine!

I'm on the Evo 2 package, so I can't complain. It won't be long before almost all ISPs are employing more stringent load balancing, esp. if 'Max' uptake remains strong and BT don't do something about their rather limited infrastructure. For the price, I think Eclipse's approach is pretty sensible and a hell of a lot fairer than the likes of Pipex - hardly a joke!

[davidstone28]

The Speed Test results of Eclipse's so called "8mbit" service also suggest that download speeds are closer to 3mbit......

[Nat101]

Looks I spoke to soon: Eclipse are now seemingly capping all unidentifiable and unencrypted P2P traffic down to a punitive level, into a pool of around 300Kbps, 24 hours a day...

3000 Kbps would be fine by me, but if all 'non-standard' traffic remains crippled to under 300 Kbps, I'll be taking a MAC... And apparently, Eclipse have suggested that their sledge hammer approach to traffic shaping is here to stay - bye-bye to another once laudable ISP.

[davidstone28]

Yeah, just had a browse of the ADSLguide forums, and there are quite a few people reporting this issue. Interestingly, people that seemed to be okay about a week ago are now getting quite restrictive traffic shaping imposed.

Have a look at the picture below - HL2/Steam update on a Sunday evening nothing else downloading or uploading.....23Kbps????

[nichomach]

TBH, I've had the same speeds from Steam on the end of a 4Mbit Telewest Blueyonder connection, and then had it swap content servers and immediately ramp up to about 125. I think that's less to do with Eclipse and more to do with the shocking state of some of the content servers.

[UltraMagnus]

or, the shocking state of how crap steam is...........