Exetel plans to ban P2P during off-peak period

Internet Service Provider Exetel is considering a ban on peer-to-peer network traffic during the first two hours of its 'off-peak' period, should users continue to set their P2P downloads to go off at the very second the provider's off-peak period starts.

Exetel chief John Linton said he will place a ban on P2P network traffic during the first two hours of the provider's midnight to noon off-peak period if a user "elects to make that an off-peak period".

Users would also be given the choice to nominate the two-hour period as "peak", retaining access to peer-to-peer but paying higher rates for it.

"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." Linton said on his personal blog.

The company will start its off-peak period at 2am instead of midnight "because we could never find a way of dealing with a relatively very small number of user's obduracy and senselessness," Linton said.

"For well over five years we have been trying to find ways of giving Exetel customers the maximum 'free' download allowances, over the longest possible period, for the lowest possible monthly cost without sending ourselves broke," he said.

"For well over five years we have spent more and more money buying more bandwidth than we needed to try and meet an ever higher end user.

Linton said Exetel's user base insist on starting to download over P2P networks at "one second past midnight EVERY night".  He also claimed that for over 90 percent of those users, "their downloads were completed by 12.30 am EVERY morning."

This meant that the company had to purchase more bandwidth to cope with the influx of users at 12:01am.

He estimated the off-peak period to cost the company $150,000 in bandwidth a month.

Linton said Exetel would bring back the midnight to midday off-peak period in November.

He also planned to bring in the ban on P2P if users abuse the Exetel network during the off-peak period.