Throttling - All Major Canadian ISPs Slow Down P2P Traffic

RE: All Major Canadian ISPs Slow Down P2P Traffic

FROM Shaw:

PowerBoost™ is a great feature from Shaw that allows you a 5 to 20 second burst of downloading speed by temporarily increasing your available bandwidth. Now you can download music, pictures, videos and small software updates even faster with Shaw’s PowerBoost.

PowerBoost also improves the page-loading process, so when you visit a media-intensive Web site the page opens faster, saving you even more time.

Below is a comparison of Shaw High-Speed and Shaw
Xtreme-I average download speeds* with and without PowerBoost.

File Size | Shaw High-Speed | Shaw High-Speed with PowerBoost
5 MB | 9.1 seconds | 2.6 seconds
10 MB | 27.3 seconds | 8 seconds
15 MB | 45.5 seconds | 21.2 seconds
100 MB | 2.7 minutes | 2.4 minutes
500 MB | 13.7 minutes | 13.3 minutes

File Size | Shaw Xtreme-I | Shaw Xtreme-I with PowerBoost
5 MB | 4.6 seconds | 2.6 seconds
10 MB | 13.7 seconds | 7 seconds
15 MB | 22.8 seconds | 12.8 seconds
100 MB | 1.4 minutes | 1.1 minutes
500 MB | 6.8 minutes | 6.6 minutes

PowerBoost is included with Xtreme-I service and is available to Shaw High-Speed Internet customers for $2.95 per month.

My $0.02:

It takes about 12 minutes for 700MB with Xtreme-I so there numbers are fairly accurate, but they tell you that you get better speed for up to 20 seconds [about 50MB] and then, since your speed drops dramatically they obviously throttle you. Without any throttling, the same 700MB would take about 70 seconds. Since Shaw lays out the speeds you get and they are alright, you can't really complain... and Telus speeds are depending on old phone lines for speed, so location is important in determining the speed you will get and it is unlikely you will get the same speed as with cable. Cable is more robust, the phone lines are already topping out baud rates and so they can't give you more speed.