said by Ravage_D :

It's my understanding that if you're in an area that offers Primus's triple bundle then you're on the Primus DSLAMS and there wont be any throttling...

Another indication is your speed. If you're getting 7Mbit chances are you're on the Primus DSLAM. This is just how it's been explained to me...

said by throttle :

This was true.

However, they started throttling afterwards.

Do a search in this forum for primus throttling. You will find it.

said by TBBPM :

Please note that our traffic management is quite different from one employed by Bell. It kick in only if there is a bandwidth bottleneck and prioritize the time sensitive traffic like VoIP, gaming, etc., along with e-mail and browsing.

said by light_speed :

- Besides, aren't we using "Car Pool" lanes in free/highways to avoid congestion and increase performance, what is so different in the Inter-Network.

said by artich0ke :

Expanding roads and highways requires more land which is unavailable for all sorts of reasons.

What's the excuse for not expanding the inter-network?

said by TBBPM :

Users want more and more bandwidth, but also do not want to pay more for it.

said by TBBPM :

Users want more and more bandwidth, but also do not want to pay more for it. ISPs, in turn, need to lease network capacity, pay for inteconnect, etc. It is quite difficult to find the right balance here....

This is my personal opinion that might not reflect the official Primus position.

said by cheston :

I'd like to provide my experience since primus added DPI-based throttling and to suggest, constructively, that they need to do some tuning on their traffic classification. These data points are when "throttling is active" which is easily identified. All throttled apps funnel through the same "60 KB/s" or so of bandwidth.

1. Video from youtube.com, break.com are virtually unusable. Bandwidth graphs show approximately 60 KB/s and that is simply not sufficient to watch any videos without prolific pausing. I understand that you did not explicitly mention video as being time-sensitive, but imo it is and should be considered so.

2. Software development tools like subversion which use http and https are throttled. Checking out or updating a branch which once took seconds now takes minutes. Very, very disappointing especially since this is an operation that is not terribly frequent but it extremely frustrating when it's throttled.

3. MIT courseware videos are also throttled.

4. General web browsing frequently slows to a crawl and large parts or portions of web pages are definitely getting bottlenecked through the 60 KB/s shape.

5. Uploads are completely broken. I used to upload videos to several sights like vimeo and such; then in April/May i started to notice the uploads would consistently break down with connection-reset. Whether this is because I'm on OSX/Safari and it's not well tested by Primus, I do not know but let me tell you i've tried tuning everything with my TCP/IP stack including rfc1323 and win_scale_factor all with no success. The general problem is "larger uploads" breakdown, sometimes with "connection-reset" reported by the upload site. This is independent of protocol - beit FTP, or in-browser uploads using any number of sites; mediafire, vimeo, rapidshare, etc. Files larger than a certain size combined with upload rate seem to be the deciding factors. I can upload at max 60-65 KB/s, so throttling doesn't matter for speed, but uploading a 50 MB file always breaks down. A few days ago I tried over a dozen times to upload a 38MB file to 2 different hosting sites, could not make it happen. If I had to guess, this is because there is some new device in the picture which doesn't play nice with longer-uploads. Even outside of throttling windows uploads are now severely broken - like I said it could be because Mac OSX TCP/IP stack does something different (not wrong) from the uber-tested Windows stack. Hint: some "new" device doing some kind of stateful tracking and/or ack coalescing in the name of good but in practice bad?

6. email. I use google email/imap . It's throttled by Primus.

said by koreyb :

You can do the triple bundle in BELL DSLAM areas to my understanding.. the cost is just higher.

said by TBBPM :

Correct, price is higher, less phone features and effects of Bell throttling. Still, in most cases, it will be better deal than competition.
Having my marketing hat on

said by koreyb :

Only wish Primus did DRY DSL connections :P

said by Ravage_D :

I'm REALLY liking their service so far!

Also, is it truly unlimited? Or is there some form of soft cap I might hit if I download too much via USENET :P

said by Ravage_D :

I can't for the life of me find their usenet server info though...

said by Kambrel :

I lost Usenet too. I'd been using news.magma.ca for years so I checked news.primus.ca yesterday with the same result.

said by anon3333 :

Free, uncensored usenet was one of the best things about Primus. Hopefully it is a temporary problem. Does anyone know more about it?