ISP automatic forums » AEI Internet → AEI in Montreal now throttling P2P upload ?

Hello

Until yesterday i was perfectly satisfied with AEI (contrary to a lot of people it seems ) as they let me download however much i wanted (though lately i was pretty calm on the download side ) and the connection was up and fast enough most of the time (if you rule out the occasional connection drops).

Now it seems Montreal is on the Comcast way ? This morning i noticed my connection was really bad when trying to browse with both firefox and IE (with uTorrent running in the background) resulting in slow loading when not simply connection timeouts. And the uTorrent connection could actually go quite high in download but upload was shitty (1-2k).

I restarted uTorrent and noticed the upload is initially quite high but goes down in a matter of seconds. If uTorrent is closed, browsing with firefox resumes at a high speed. All those signs point to traffic shaping unless I'm mistaken.

I still haven't called AEI to confront them as i want to check again this evening and see if other people are having the same problems but since AEI rents the lines and bandwidth from Bell, I'm not putting my hopes up seeing the recent reports of traffic shaping from Bell. If the problem is still on, i will try to call AEI to know if the problem originates from them of Bell. If the latter, I'll ask them if they plan/can do something about it and depending on the answer might cancel my account.

If things go this way, is there another ISP in Montreal that truly has unlimited BW / does not have to account to Bell / does not shape traffic ? Any other advices on managing the problem ? Is there any legal point i should know in complaining about that ?

Thanks IA

I got a good laugh out of this one. It's common knowledge the day you sign with AEI is the day your connection is throttled down to dial-up type speeds for everything. Single connections (one user) overseas in Taiwan and Japan have much more bandwidth than the entire bandwidth of all of AEI.

Fascinating. Really. And such a constructive comment at that. Wow ! I am sooooo impressed.

For those not only interested in bashing AEI, FYI my speed before the recent throttle was actually more than decent and it has been like that for the last few years. And even now, with no torrent software running the speedtest on this site gives me 2155 download /534 upload.

So the connection with no torrenting is more than enough for me. I called AEI and the service was quick and polite. They (obviously) said the problem was not on their side and after a bit of conversation (and making them understand that i was sure the problem was not coming from mine), they hinted the problem might indeed come from Bell.

I did a few speed/ping tests and it confirmed that when a torrent software is running pings to google.ca (or another) goes from 30ms (without torrent) to 1200ms and there is a lot of packet loss. Speed is also reduced to a crawl while the torrent software is running.

If the problem is indeed coming from Bell, it is obvious that AEI is not gonna have any control. And i don't see a lot of people moving in protestation against bell at the moment so it's unlikely to change in the next few days.

AEI is supposed to call me back at the beginning of the week to provide some additional information. If they don't or cannot resolve the problem, then i will have to switch for another ISP. Even though the service was actually quite good at AEI (Well to be frank i seldom needed support), i cannot accept such limitations.

If it comes to that, i plan on switching to Teksavvy (and finally switch my Bell phone line to another to thank them for screwing my connection) which seems a right choice at the moment. After reading a few threads about them it seems they are pretty much comfortable with sub 300go/month downloading and non-technologically-impaired users.