My roommate called MonkeyBrains SF yesterday because we were getting low bandwidth speeds over the past month (1 MB&#x2F;s down, 200K&#x2F;s up). We checked our internal setup to make sure that it wasn&#x27;t on our end, and after talking to a MB representative on the phone today, my roommate gave me some surprising information.<p>Evidently, MonkeyBrains has an informal total (up + down pipe) usage cap of 1 TB&#x2F;mo, but I can&#x27;t find this disclosed explicitly anywhere in their policies. They say we had a spike about a month ago, and decided to rate limit us. They also claim to have sent us emails ahead of the limitation, but we can&#x27;t find any. My roommate says that they were mentioning patterns of our usage during the conversation that don&#x27;t seem to reflect actual use.<p>They told us to watch our use and that they would monitor things from here on out. I have also noticed that torrent traffic maxes out on their network at 1 MB&#x2F;s down and about 15K&#x2F;s up. I&#x27;ve fiddled with router &#x2F; torrent app settings, and every time: the torrent will climb to about 2 MB&#x2F;s+ and then drop down to almost exactly 1 MB&#x2F;s. If I plug my computer into my LTE phone, the same torrent immediately jumps up to 3 MB&#x2F;s or so.<p>We also just ran a test -- my roomate got speeds of 15 MB&#x2F;s down via Ookla, and I turned on a Steam download (which, AFAIK, is non-torrent data downloaded from their servers). My download maxed out at 1 MB&#x2F;s down and my roommate&#x27;s Ookla test jumped down to 1.5Mb&#x2F;s. I turned off Steam and the Ookla speed jumped up to 15 Mb&#x2F;s+ again -- immediately.<p>I have three issues here: 1. they seem to have rate-limited us for crossing a use threshhold without notice, 2. that use threshold seems to be arbitrary and unstated in their documents, and 3. they also seem to be shaping not just torrent traffic but our entire pipe without disclosure.<p>Has anybody noticed similar patterns? I had been rooting for them as an independent local ISP, but this kind of behavior is exactly why I left Comcast.
Ask HN: Traffic-shaping on MonkeyBrains?