It turns out that a company called
Sandvine is now boasting of its ability to "manage" peer to peer traffic over the internet. What this means, simply, is that if your ISP doesn't like what you're doing with your internet connection, it can slow you down.
Sandvine told delegates to this week's NetEvents Summit here in Garmisch, Germany, that peer to peer services like BitTorrent and eDonkey - and Skype - were now forcing internet service providers to increase capacity.
"From our survey, we can tell that out of all the traffic coming into the network, 60 per cent is peer to peer; and 70 per cent of the upstream traffic is also peer to peer," said the company today.
The number of file sharers has risen dramatically, says Sandvine. "Users are moving from sharing three meg songs to uploading and downloading 600 gig movies. That means that service providers have had to apply a lot of traffic assistance for this increased traffic."
Traffic assistance? "Reducing the number of sessions that are allowed. Nobody wants to control customers and say what they can and cannot do... but ISPs want some control to reduce the cost."