DeeLoaf

Just writing to say I havent felt much like writing as of late. Sorry. Not like anyone reads this anyway haha.

I disconnected Cogeco internet service. They suck. See my thread on DSLreports.

Forget it. I dont like the way the music sounds. I'm returning it. I can put the stereo off until I can afford to do it right.

I got the Federal resever system abolished, and delegated the production of money and the interest charged on it if any to the marketplace. Oh right no I forgot, that was my "I'm not a slave any more" dream.

So I'm a total lamewad .. i never had a surround system before, but today I decided that I wanted one -- plus I want a powered sub on my little home stereo setup for the PC and for my music. Well, so I decided to get a Logitech z-5500 Sub and satellites set. I got it all set up, and then realized I'm going to need a new soundcard to watch movies in surround. But I can run it in a streo mode where it can have 3 stereo devices hooked up. Well I just need one, but whatever. So I get that going, then I realize, OMFG this setup has LOUSY mid-range response. I mean freakin lousy, attenuated, wheres the fuckin guitar, or the midriff, oh yeah I can hear it if I listed fecking real closely like! Ok, so I'm a little disapointed since I laid down over $320+tax for this. Well, I was _VERY_ happy with it watching a movie like "Monster House", but what can I do about music ... So I tried using the stereo X 2 mode where it uses both front and rear speakers to do L+R, so 2xL and 2XR ... and I decided to hook up my older, larger than the bundled satellites, two way speakers from my old panasonic set. Those speakers are ok, I just could never get enough bass out of them. But now I just want them to handle midrange ... and they do OK :) So things are decent now. The only one problem is once I have a nice surround sound card to run the 6 channel setup, I'm going to want to actually use the bundled rear-satellite speakers. At that time I'll probably have to rig up a switch to change the rear channel speakers between the old-good-mid-range-response speakers that I have up front and the rear satellites that I will mount above the sofa for watching movies. But I think that will get the most out of this thing, as best as I can do without having spent the real big bucks on a fully separate system. Also with this slight bit of cheese that I'm doing here I dont have any control over the frequency ranges being send to my mid-range speakers, and I'm sure I could get them to handle some more slightly lower frequencies than what the built-in satellite speaker crossever will send out. Ah well. Silly impulse buy I guess but at least now I have some bass and distortion-free loudness here. Really worth the money? I dont really feel like it, plus having to engineer the living room to accomodate the giant sub was non-trivial. Bah, its in and it works and it DOES (now with the mids) sound better than the old panasonic unit I was using before.

Oh PS the Cogeco BT issue persists. I dont know what more can come of trying to get them to admit to it. I am thinking of just upgrading to business service, then chewing them out when it doesnt work for my business needs and tell them they can fix it or I am cancelling.

Over on DSLr/BBr, in response to averagecdn who writes:

I realize that this topic has been discussed to the point of sickness. However I am actually looking for a way to test the theory. I have been on MNSI(local DSL Provider) and have worked with Bell and neither have been as slow as cogeco for uploads. Now I realize that there are some differences in service and technology but it was pretty blatant that there was a difference in speeds. There must be a conclusive way to tell if traffic shaping is being done on the cogeco network.

Do you think there is any chance that cogeco will admit to traffic shaping and if they do not is there anything the CRTC can do. Like does cogeco not have to disclose that information to there users?

I've posted:

When putting in my 3rd network tech support ticket I asked them to have the tech call me. He did and we had an interesting conversation.

The crux of it is that cogeco will do what cogeco needs to do in order to deliver reliable service to its customers, in terms of what most customers expect. Certain network usages of a minority of users can not be allowed to disrupt the online experience of other users. He said he could not go into detail about it. He did mention shaping, but when I asked more on that he backtracked and said it wasnt for him to discuss. He would not, however, deny that traffic shaping is happening within cogecos network. That, so far, is the best confirmation that I've been able to get. He said that whatever is going on is going to go on for a long time.

You want an easy test? You'll need a remote computer with a good internet connection that you can control and send things to. For this I rented a VPS from one of the many inexpensive VPS providers, sub $20 per month for one with the co I pay. PM me for more details if you like. The test I run is simple and pretty fool-proof as far as I'm concerned. Upload a 18MB .avi file via FTP to that computer. Then upload it with BT to that computer. Locally, BT upload tests are conducted using Azureus to seed the .avi file and Azureus's built-in tracker to keep it nice and controlled and private. Remotely, to receive the file for the BT test, I use rtorrent which is based on lib_torrent and ncurses. You can interactively control it via SSH. During testing, the only peer to connect to the Azureus tracker and join the 'swarm' is the remote VPS. At the moment the remote peer connects, the local seed should max its upload.

The consistent result of this testing has shown that on Cogeco, FTP works (70kb/s), and BT is broken (10kb/s), while on DSL, FTP and BT both work fine (both do 70kb/s). One note is that rtorrent does not support BT protocol encryption, but we shouldnt have to encrypt things for them to work anyways.

Everything about my cogeco connection works fine except for BT (and possibly other p2p stuff that is upload-heavy, but thats not my focus), and yet, like magic, if I plug my router into the DSL line and then stop/start torrents BT starts uploading properly right away.

You are not the only one experiencing this issue with Cogeco. I know of at least two other registered users on this BBR who are experiencing the same ACUTE inability to upload using certain protocols (like BT, encrypted or not) on top of TCP. So there are at _least_ 4 of us here. And meanwhile, many others (such as urbanriot), the vast majority it would seem, have no apparent problem to upload on BT.

There is only one line of devices that I am aware of that are marketed as being able to specifically target and disrupt BT traffic encrypted or not, and that is the NetEnforcer from Allot Communications. If Cogeco is NOT using this, then they've managed to roll their own solution to accomplish the same thing. On you. And on me.

Cogeco needs to come clean on this.