I've been staying with my parents at their new place on and off for the last couple months, helping them rebuild and remodel it. Yesterday we finally got internet set up, and even though it's only a couple houses down the street from the old place, we went with another ISP - our last one refused to answer any customer service emails, never came close to advertised speeds, had some of the shittiest techs and response time, etc.; for a year or so (about two years after we'd signed on) they actually tried to enforce some ridiculous 10GB monthly cap before it cost them most of their customers. If there were cable installed on this road I'd actually have argued for Comcast over these guys.
Anyways, the new service is basically the same shit with a different name; 3Mbps wireless connection that behaves like it's being siphoned off of 3G towers. The installers at least threw in a decent wireless-N router covered by the installation fees.
Everything's actually working fine; most of the time it seems like we're actually being throttled down to 3Mb/s rather than struggling to reach 1.5 or so. The problem first started when I tried to solve an (apparently unrelated) issue with my torrent box, with multiple search results failing to load.
If the site uses https natively, you'll never see an issue, but if a site you access over an unencrypted http network, and includes 'torrent' anywhere in the URL, it'll loop indefinitely before giving a connection timeout error. It's particularly easy to verify when something like isup.me gives near-instant results for anything until you ask it to check the status of something like the qbittorent home page, or when accessing the encrypted version of Torrentfreak loads fine when the non-https version doesn't load, period.
The stupidest part is that this seems to be the entire extent of the filtering, unless they're filtering actual torrent traffic as well. The sites for any private trackers I use work fine. KAT works fine. I have no idea what domains even work for TPB anymore, but the common proxies still seem to work without issue. But God forbid you include the word torrent in the URL, because that's clearly how everyone accesses their illegal materials. It doesn't reach into any (competent) search engine traffic, and no standard filesharing sites (Mediafire, Zippyshare, MEGA, although most are encrypted) are blocked. I don't know what they've actually managed to accomplish, unless they were doing the bare minimum to comply with some complaint filed against them.
(edit: technically I guess it stops people from downloading .torrent files directly from unencrypted networks, but it's 2015 and everyone's using magnet links anyways.)
Anyways, the new service is basically the same shit with a different name; 3Mbps wireless connection that behaves like it's being siphoned off of 3G towers. The installers at least threw in a decent wireless-N router covered by the installation fees.
Everything's actually working fine; most of the time it seems like we're actually being throttled down to 3Mb/s rather than struggling to reach 1.5 or so. The problem first started when I tried to solve an (apparently unrelated) issue with my torrent box, with multiple search results failing to load.
If the site uses https natively, you'll never see an issue, but if a site you access over an unencrypted http network, and includes 'torrent' anywhere in the URL, it'll loop indefinitely before giving a connection timeout error. It's particularly easy to verify when something like isup.me gives near-instant results for anything until you ask it to check the status of something like the qbittorent home page, or when accessing the encrypted version of Torrentfreak loads fine when the non-https version doesn't load, period.
The stupidest part is that this seems to be the entire extent of the filtering, unless they're filtering actual torrent traffic as well. The sites for any private trackers I use work fine. KAT works fine. I have no idea what domains even work for TPB anymore, but the common proxies still seem to work without issue. But God forbid you include the word torrent in the URL, because that's clearly how everyone accesses their illegal materials. It doesn't reach into any (competent) search engine traffic, and no standard filesharing sites (Mediafire, Zippyshare, MEGA, although most are encrypted) are blocked. I don't know what they've actually managed to accomplish, unless they were doing the bare minimum to comply with some complaint filed against them.
(edit: technically I guess it stops people from downloading .torrent files directly from unencrypted networks, but it's 2015 and everyone's using magnet links anyways.)
