Last time I had cable was on Time Warner in the US. It was interesting because they didn't do the token bucket style ratelimiting I've seen from every ISP I've had since: they'd play games with TCP to try and slow down big flows instead. It was weird.
So I wrote a little program that transferred files by sending the data over UDP at a constant rate disregarding loss, then reconciling lost bits later over TCP. That allowed me to get almost double the upload bandwidth I was theoretically paying for at the time!
But on Verizon FIOS, it didn't work at all, because they really limit bandwidth at the packet level instead of trying to trick TCP into slowing down.
Last time I had cable was on Time Warner in the US. It was interesting because they didn't do the token bucket style ratelimiting I've seen from every ISP I've had since: they'd play games with TCP to try and slow down big flows instead. It was weird.
So I wrote a little program that transferred files by sending the data over UDP at a constant rate disregarding loss, then reconciling lost bits later over TCP. That allowed me to get almost double the upload bandwidth I was theoretically paying for at the time!
But on Verizon FIOS, it didn't work at all, because they really limit bandwidth at the packet level instead of trying to trick TCP into slowing down.