Before you jump ship, try changing your p2p program. I was using ABC and getting speeds that varied wildly. I tried utorrent out of interest and turned on encryption and the change has been phenominal. Regularly max out my connection speed when I'm downloading whereas ABC would struggle for days sometimes for a small file.

On the contary

Bad Rep is bad rep for a reason the best way to guage if an ISP is good is to read the feedback in a public messageboard such as this. If PlusNet were "any good" then there would be plenty of people countering arguments by the "plusnet haters" instead of just two or three who hang on to an ideal that they are still just as good as good as they used to be and blaming the haters for PlusNet destrouying thier service and tunring this into the place it has become.

If plusnet did GOOD things people would post about it and praise them you only have to read back about a year or so and you will see this is a case. Theres an old saying that if you do someone a good service then they will tell maybe 1 or 2 people. you **** someone off they will tell 7 of more people. PlusNet are not immune to this they need to do a lot of good to restore any sort of reputation they once had.

The fact is they screwed their customers over, screwed their service over and have done nothing back the result........ people will winge and continue to winge until they give them something not to winge about.

I dont hate PlusNet but I cant say they have given me anything to defend them over in the last year either, we jave just accepted that PlusNet are no longer the ISP we all grew to love and have relegated themselfs to the depths of isps stayaways like tiscali. Spitting their dummies out of the pram when people point out their mistakes and abandoneding AG just because they cant censor stuff like they can on thier own forums was also a poor move.

I know everyone is hoping this place will calm down so they can come back but its not going to happen until they stop tarnashing their reputation (if thats even possible now) and give us something decent to praise them over. People will and are going to be cynacal at first but if PlusNet constantly did something for the good of its customers then the place will change. I can only recall one thread within the last few months of this nature.

Edited by UKSMS (Fri 06-Oct-06 09:48:09)

Hopefully you will find from next week that having encryption on or off will make no difference.

Why are they planning on brute force decrypting all encrypted traffic?

That would be illegal unless of course you mean there going to start looking for encrypted traffic on certain ports we all know how effective that is epsecially when people use port 443 or some other SSH port.

That leaves looking for encrypted traffic from multiple sources and looking for large amounts of encrypted data.

Some people use p2p and only use a few GB a month I think Ive downloaded about 50meg off p2p in the last 2 months and prob triple that in transferring stuff over VPN and over VNC. I dont consider this excessive traffic at any time of the day and I dont expect to wait for it at 2 or 3k a second either.

Meaning encrypted p2p will be slower, or unencrypted p2p will be faster?

I`m not saying that it isnt a good idea to read the various ISP`s message boards when selecting your ISP. But in my opinion, if you are going to ask for advice on choosing a new ISP, then you are better off asking in the which ISP section. I say this because in all forums there may be people who are biased towards their ISP, or there may be people unfairly opposed to them.

Both.

Encrypted should be prioritsed the same as unencrypted which will slow it down. This will release more resources for unencrypted.

Unless PlusNet have managed to find a way of breaking all the worlds encryption protocols in less than 1ms then they have no no way of determining what type of traffic the encrypted traffic is

Short of breaking the encryption and then reading the packet something I dont think the elacoyas are capable off on the fly. Encrypted traffic is therefore a type of traffic in its own right and has to be priorotised as such. As theres no surefire of distinquishing VPN and p2p traffic so theres no surefire way of placing them into either queue.

You can do a time comparason and look maybe at what port they are using and the number of people your connected to... for example 50 encrypted connections to different ips transferring 5GB a day on a common p2p port is likly to be p2p traffic and they can shape users encrypted data on an individual basis if taking the pea however if plusnet are ask what your transferring you are well within in your rights to say "thats my business hence the reason its encrypted to stop nosy buggars like you looking at it" and as long as your not over your peak/offpeak usage theres not much they can do about it.

Edited by UKSMS (Fri 06-Oct-06 12:41:10)

I don't think they will be breaking the encryption, what they will have done is managed to identify sufficient characteristics to identify the traffic as encrypted P2P. Alternatively I suppose they could have found ways of identifying all the valid encrypted traffic and make the assumption that all that is left is encrypted P2P.

The length of time from it first emerged that people were using encrypted P2P to beat the system to them putting something in place to deal with it indicates how difficult this has been.

Somehow I don't think we'll ever find out how they are doing it.

Well currently I'm downloading via encrypted p2p and I've got a couple of VPN connections to work too. I wouldnt be too impressed if I was peanalised accross every type of connection.

My 4pm-midnight usage is VERY VERY low, I do a bit of browsing and email in that time, never any p2p and very little VPN after 4pm too.

I'll hammer it out of hours, but during their peak hours, I'm happy to leave my usage to a bare minimum.