Trying to understand the situation

It has been very hard to get an ISP (Internet Service Provider) in my country to fix the problem that I’ve been facing for about half a year. High latency problems, traffic shaping (wouldn’t blame them as the trunk to other links may be too small for the country itself) and a lot of complications between the user and the service provider.

Everybody has been talking about Quality of Service (QoS) that this particular ISP is serving. Is it poor? Is it good? Or is it just average? I’ve asked myself that questions many times just to see how good it is. As of 6 months ago, I’ve willingly comply with the high latency matters. But it was not solved until recently for a short while. And then, it just came back on! I was wondering, “What happened to the fix?” With that, I waited for a few weeks more and I couldn’t bare it anymore. I rang them up at their Customer Service hotline and asked to speak to a supervisor so that I can get stuffs to the higher levels.

In fact they did. Thank you for once. And one of their higher level teams did ring me up. As what I’ve told them, I’m a UNIX user (Linux in particular) and I’m also a Windows XP user. I asked them about a lot of questions, telling them all the information that I could supply them. I won’t deny that they have to do traffic shaping but high latency has been a major problem to me. As they have told me, traffic shaping may not come off or it might just come off in about 5 years time.

A little sidetracking. Tech in my country has never been a very good industry. It is sometimes influenced by money, mostly politics and also economics of the country. Part of the reason why they took up traffic shaping is that broadband penetration is only about 20+% of the population in my country.

Back to what I was talking about earlier. I’ve forgotten about getting traffic shaping and taken it out of my mind. But sometimes when it comes a time I want to get a certain file fast out of P2P (legit files), I really want them fast and I really want to utilize the bandwidth that I’m leased to (1.5Mbps, it’s slow, I know). Time to forget about that.

Moving on, lately, I’ve been trying out some stuff to overcome traffic shaping for this particular ISP. Tried proxy, worked for a while, tried encryption, didn’t work at all, and I’m thinking of SSH tunneling! WHAT AM I THINKING OF!? Is that really necessary? But I’ve just rang them up again, threatening them that I would tunnel their server for bandwidth. And I’m still wondering if it works. I do hope that they respond.

What do you think? Should I really go through what I’m sitting through now? Or should I just send them a lawsuit claiming for compensation? And should I send them a lawsuit for controlling an honest user? Who do torrent for legit files such as Linux distributions? And also legal podcasting items? Here’s more information. I’ve not been able to any of my subscribed podcast ever since that problem. Should there be any readers our there who are working with other ISPs, place get in touch with me, I’m trying to understand the situation. Just leave a comment and I’ll get back to you. If it’s possible, e-mail me, and I’ll get back to you privately.