Ben Grubb over at It News has reported that Exetel is planning on banning P2P use (that is Bittorrent, Limewire, Kazaa (does that even exist still?), etc) during their off-peak period. I’m not surprised that John Linton, the founder and CEO of Exetel is considering such drastic measures, however I was concerned for my ability to download Linux ISOs at night. (Yes, all P2P is Linux ISOs — didn’t you know?)

At the beginning of this month, our off-peak time was trimmed from 12am-12pm to 2am-12pm. This was to stop a phenomenon that would basically kill the entire Exetel network at midnight. People just have to have that latest Linux ISO at 12:01am so start all of their downloads at the very start of off-peak. No worries, except people who wanted to browse web pages, use VOIP or do anything else suffered.

As John has mentioned many times over on his blog, most downloads would be finished by 12:30am or 1am and the network would be back to normal speeds. Despite years of trying to fix it, nothing worked.

This was a great cost to Exetel, who would continue to try different ways to combat this, including a P2P cache, asking for downloaders to be fair and push back their downloads and purchasing a ton of bandwidth they didn’t need except for that half hour. Seems this new tactic worked. So since most souls are in bed by 2am, they bit the bullet and moved off-peak back.

So what about the threat of banning all P2P during off-peak? Well this would only be after November, and only after they move back to a 12am-12pm off-peak period. And only if you choose that period over 1am-1pm or 2am-2pm. And it’s only banned during the first two hours. And it’s self-regulated.

A whole lot of ands really.

So I can have 60Gb of downloads over half of the month, and I either avoid P2P for two hours (which I was doing anyway voluntarily after a request another previous post from John) or move my off-peak to 2am-2pm, which since we are late risers would help us out anyway. Woah, I better get the tin foil hat out.

I still find Exetel to be extraordinary value. They usually have good service, and if it is bad they will be upfront and admit their issue. They aren’t for the faint hearted, as you have to know your stuff well and live with a support culture expecting you to find your own help in the forums, but if you can live with that you will get more from them than your regular ISP.

Free SMS from the web, they do email to fax and fax to email ($1 a month – wtf?), and more. I love them. I really do.