Eran used our newssubmit to tell us that one of the larger broadband ISPs in Israel (012), appears to have found the solution for RIAA's problem by - without informing their subscribers - limting the bandwidth of P2P filesharing programs such as KaZaa and eDonkey.
This is apperantly done by using the port number of the outging packets. According to some inside corespondance of the technical department, the company restricted the peer to peer bandwidth to 15% max ! When asked the company responded with the following:
A handfull of users were hogging the band by using filesharing programs" and that limmiting the bandwidth will benefit the majority of users. The article that appeared in an online newspaper, Ynet, created a wave of reactions by subscrobers, which caused the company to retract their first response, and they now claim not to engage in band limmiting. However, many users still claim slow downloads on the p2p programs. |
The article on Ynet also claims that AOL-Time-warner will charge users by bandwidth in the future. So, if the RIAA has it their way, all ISPs will limit the band of p2p programs, causing them to slow to a hault.
There are also reports of an US ISP blocking filesharing networks (read here.)
If this continues, this could certainly be a threat to filesharing networks, but the chance of making the filesharing networks more advanced to bypass this blocking is bigger...
Source: Ynet.co.il
