Westnet has admitted it has been employing traffic prioritisation on its network -- but hadn't mentioned it to its customers until now.
The company made the announcement on its blog, revealing that it has been prioritising some "latency sensitive" applications, such as gaming, Web browsing, e-mail and VoIP, ahead of peer-to-peer traffic for over a year.
"Westnet has been trialling some traffic prioritisation tools on our network over the past year with very positive results. As a result, we will continue to use the tools on an ongoing basis," the company blog said.
The blog added that those using P2P had experienced "no noticeable degradation" of speeds while the traffic prioritisation was in place. According to the ISP, the traffic prioritisation is only put in place once the bandwidth required for other applications "exceeds expectations" and doesn't have a fixed amount of bandwidth dedicated to P2P.
Westnet said it has trialled the technology in Western Australia, New South Wales and Queensland and plans to deploy the technology in more states in the future.
A Westnet representative could not immediately be reached for comment.
Have you experienced the effects of traffic prioritisation with your ISP? Let us know by using the talkback section below or e-mail us at edit@zdnet.com.au
I'm on Westnet in Perth(1500kb/s download). I used to get pretty damn good speeds around 140kB/s using several different P2P programs, then one day last year the speeds suddenly would only reach a peak of 50kB/s (not 5kb/s)...could it just be a coincidence ? I think not. halving my speed doesn't sound like "no noticeable degradation" to me.