February 23, 2010

Georges Laraque did WHAT now?

At first I thought this was an April Fool's day joke, but the date in the post and on my menu bar said February 22nd, and there's a press release, so I guess it's real.

February 8, 2010

How to avoid Bell Canada's torrent throttling

In late 2007, Bell Canada started throttling bittorrent transfers on their network down to 60KB/s or 30KB/s depending on the time of day. As you might expect, many people got frustrated with it and switched to using some of the many Wholesale DSL Internet Service Providers such as Acanac, Electronicbox, TekSavvy, Velcom, etc. Around March 2008, Bell Canada started throttling users of these wholesale ISPs without telling them. Sometime around May 2008, members on the TekSavvy forum on DSLReports found that MLPPP (meant to bond lines) has a side effect that it bypasses the throttle. In July 2008, a company called Per Vices publicly mentioned a way to bypass the throttle. Whenever the µTorrent 1.9 beta was released, it was found that Bell Canada does not throttle the UDP protocol. µTorrent 1.9 beta and later supports torrent transfers over UDP instead of TCP.

February 2, 2010

Bell Canada introduces a new tier and new names. Brings many lies along with it.

Two days ago, Bell Canada introduced a new internet tier in Ontario and Quebec. Aside from that, they renamed their Performance tier and Max tiers. They are now called "Fibe" and there's also a new tier called "Fibe 25".

Now, the name "Fibe" sounds an awful lot like "fiber", doesn't it? In fact, you'd probably think it is fiber. Nope. Bell just uses FTTN (Fiber To The Node) which connects what's called a "remote" to the central office via fiber optic cabling. From the remote, the data gets to/from your modem via ADSL/ADSL2+/VDSL2+.