Throttling Counter Measures

I've been using multilink PPP to circumvent Bell's throttling since around May 2008. The purpose of multilink PPP is for combining PPP connections together into a logical bundle which aggregates the bandwidth of all the connections. This bundle inserts a 6 byte header into the packet data which is enough to fool the deep packet inspection that Bell uses to throttle connections. The best part is that multilink PPP works on a single link. It is well known that it would be easy for Bell to counter act multilink PPP on a single connection.

For the past few nights bittorrent looked like it was being throttled again. Oh, no! They finally figured it out, I thought. I checked the Teksavvy.com forum and others had noticed the problem, but there was no need to worry. The reason was a much less sinister. Teksavvy was having problems on a server and had turned off multilink PPP on that server. Sure enough, I was connected to that server. Taking a chance that I would find a different server, I reconnected. It worked and bittorrent speeds returned to normal.

This highlights a couple of issues. I'm now completely dependent on getting good speed from bittorrent. If Bell decides to counter act the multilink PPP, I would have to consider getting a second line. It shows how transparent Teksavvy is. Very few ISP would even consider discussing their network problems in a public forum.