So, eircom have made a deal with four major record labels (EMI, Sony, Universal and Warners) to first warn, then cut off users who illegally download music using P2P networks, assumedly mainly BitTorrent. Personally, I think it’s ridiculous.
It’s not just an invasion of privacy, and a completely flawed idea, but it also threatens legal torrents. What’s to stop eircom going one step further and start throttling or even killing our BitTorrent connections? I’m a Linux user, and when I have to download a 700MB-4GB ISO of the latest distribution, I turn to the distributions official torrent to reduce strain on their servers and get my ISO quicker.
Sure, there’s always a way around these things (Google is your friend), but still! That isn’t the only thing that annoys me though, in college accommodation we’re paying for a 7Mbps line. Our router, at first, would only sync at ~2500Kbps and we got a speed of a little under 2Mbps. This turned out to be a problem with the phone port in the house which we got swapped out with a new one – Synced at 7Mbps, speeds of around 5.5Mbps, which was acceptable. It took less than a week for the router to go down to a 4Mbps sync, and speeds varying from 800Kbps – 3Mbps. Basically eircom’s service is a joke, and as soon as there’s a viable alternative (Chorus ntl perhaps), I shall be jumping ship.
Good strategy eircom, scare and alienate your users so we all leave and free up your shoddy network for the few people left
UPDATE: Just checked and Chorus ntl broadband is available in Athlone, 20Mbps here I come! 
