For the last five years Exetel chief John Linton has been struggling with the problem of offering a 12am-12pm off peak time and dealing with torrent schedulers chewing up his bandwidth.

Despite a 12 hour off-peak period in which to use their offpeak allowance, Linton claims that 90% of “a relatively very small number of users” engaged in “obduracy and senselessness” chose to start their downloads at 12am sharp and were done by 12:30pm.

The idea behind the offpeak period being to better utilise the relatively unused bandwidth between 2-7am costing the company $150,000 a month.

I’m no broadband expert and I certainly don’t have the expertise of running an internet service provider but had Linton have asked me five years ago to explain the problem, my answer would pretty much be the same as what it is today.

The worst part is that to most internet users capable of setting up download scheduling, the answer to Linton’s problems is blatantly obvious.

In a somewhat bitter ‘woe is me‘ post Linton carries on about his personal failure to ensure Exetel customers get “the maximum ‘free’ download allowances, over the longest possible period, for the lowest possible monthly cost”.

I’m going to go ahead and make the blanket assumption that 99.99% of his customers that are high in the “asshole factor” as he puts it, are using uTorrent or some other kind of p2p scheduler.

Now despite emails to Exetel customers asking them to set their schedulers not to kick in to 2am these asshole factor customers continued to start their downloads at midnight.

Why? Well there’s two obvious reasons that spring to mind:


1. The asshole factor

As a customer I don’t care about your bandwidth problems. If you give me offpeak from 12am I’m going to set my downloads to kick in at 12am. If you want me to download from 2am then just make the offpeak period start from 2am (which co-incidentally is what it’s taken Linton five years to realise).


2. Seeding ratios on private torrent sites

This I believe is the much more plausible reason that customers chose to ignore the requests to set their download schedulers to 2am. Exetel don’t charge for uploads and with the increasing failure of public trackers, The Pirate Bay being the most recent example a lot of people are consequently members of private bittorrent trackers.

With this membership comes the requirement to seed. Often requiring at least a 1:1 ratio to not get banned and with additional rewards (access to new torrents quicker, more simultaneously downloads allowed, site-wide daily download caps removed, etc) for a higher seed ratio, many users aim for a greater then 1:1 seed ratio.

Anyone who owns an ADSL2 connection will tell you that two hours is a significant amount of seeding ratio if the torrent is active. While most users might finish their incoming traffic by 12:30am I’m willing to punt that there’s still a ton of outgoing traffic occurring to meet ratio demands.


This isn’t going to change anytime soon mind you. It was the same five years ago and it’s going to be the same into the future until someone comes up with a new dominant p2p protocol.

All Linton had to do was perhaps email out a customer survery, just randomly call up a few customers or hell just use bittorrent himself to realise why his asshole factor customers behave the way they do.

Despite smartly changing their offpeak quota from 12am-12pm to 2am-12pm over the last few days and just letting the problem remain resolved, Linton instead seems hell bent on returning to a 12am-12pm offpeak schedule.

We will have developed the basis for returning to the 12 midnight to 12 midday ‘free’ download period by the start of November – assuming that the current usage patterns continue.


Now any clown will tell you that the second you go back to a 12am start all your asshole factor customers are just going to adjust their schedulers accordingly.

I can tell you now John that nobody is sitting at their computer at midnight waiting for their porn downloads to finish by 12:30am so they can have a giant midnight till dawn masturbation session.

Well ok there’s probably one guy that does this but the reality is 99.9% of your asshole factor customers are going to be asleep and really don’t care what time offpeak starts. Providing of course that their downloads are done by the time they wake up the next morning.

If 90% of customers are finishing their downloads in 30 minutes then they’ll just have to deal with the reduced seeding time.

Wanting to return to a midnight to midday offpeak period by November, Linton’s solution to this problem is where it starts to get a bit sticky.

We will simply ban P2P traffic in the 12 midnight to 2 am period if the user elects to make that an ‘off peak’ period.

The penalty for selecting that period as ‘free’ and then using it for P2P downloads will be the removal of the free period completely for that customer or termination of the service.


So instead of just leaving it as it is now, “instantly fixed” as you put it instead you’re going to risk customer backlash over a business ideal. What is the point of offering the extra two hours of offpeak if you’re simply going to dictate what your users can and can’t do with it?

The answer here is simple John, just leave it as it is and accept that your asshole factor customers are always going to be asshole factor customers. Pissing off the one guy who masturbates all night is much more attractive then pissing off 1000 customers.

I mean really, you’re doing the guy a favour.

1. Why isn’t looking after a dog just common sense?
2. Hey Telstra, nobody cares about your stupid T-Box