For Bittorrent users, if you’ve noticed your Streamyx slowing down lately, especially during office hours (and you haven’t been to Lowyat to rant about it), it’s not because another international line is down, it’s because TMNet is experimenting with traffic shaping. What this means is TMNet detects Bittorrent packets being sent and limits the bandwidth available to them. I’ve heard this also makes you unable to connect to trackers.

I’ll use another post to blast TM for their idiotic reasoning: “because a lot of bandwidth is used by P2P (peer to peer), the solution is NOT to improve infrastructure or stop overselling our lines, but to stop P2P instead”. There was a hilarious post at Lowyat.net about how silly TMNet’s numbers are though if you’re interested.

Meanwhile, some enterprising Malaysians have set up a local BT tracker at http://mytorrent.hopto.org. Because TMNet only shapes international traffic, you’ll be able to connect to local torrents without a problem - in fact, because all your peers will be local, your download speeds will pretty much max out.

You need to register and keep an acceptable DL/UL ratio though, no leeching.

[Update - May 2007]
This will no longer work as well because TMNet apparently throttles even local torrents. Welcome to the world of limited unlimited bandwidth; feel free to use your “broadband” to email and surf.

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