It may come to no surprise that if you want to rewire a country the size of Australia it’ll take a while. This means that the majority of internet connections is still on ADSL or ADSL2+. The outback is in really bad shape and people over there are relying on satlinks or wireless. This in turn ramps up costs significantly and thats also the reason why telcos and ISP’s are putting caps on subscriptions.
Likewise my ISP. Im with IInet and so far they have provided me the service I require. I work from home during APAC business hours and as such I only need one thing: “Just WORK!!” and so far they’ve been pretty good. The major issue I have is obviously this cap they put on their subscription. My subscription allows me to download 50G during peak times and 50G during non-peak times. Given the fact that dumps out of an array and a vast number of Brocade supportsaves plus the agonizing habit of administrators not to compress a 75meg “show tech detail” out of a cisco switch together with a multitude of snapshots of these mostly large datacentres you can imagine this cap of 50G is fairly quick filling up which leaves little room of downloading stuff for my own personal gain. Movies from Foxtel or OS/Application images from numerous vendors are pretty much a no-go during the peak times since that will really fill my cap and thus IInet will shape my speed down to 64Kb/s (duhhhh yes, that’s the state of the Internet connectivity here in Aus. I’ll save you the entire NBN nightmare and the current political minefield)
Given the fact IInet also provides a non-peak cap of also 50G us fairly useless unless you’re suffering from a major insomnia. To solve this problem for one of my needs I started to utilize my Raspberry Pi and installed Transmission (a torrent daemon) onto this little nifty box. Many Linux distros not served on the ISP’s non-measured FTP server are distributed via the bit-torrent peer-to-peer mechanism
Transmission provides an option to increase to decrease speed limits during various times of the day. 
I configured it in a way that I flip the download and upload speed limits during peak and off-peak hours in such a way that the down&upload speeds are just enough to maintain TCP sessions during peak times and the real leaching and seeding is done during these off-peak times.
This then results in me having the stuff I want the next day plus I don’t get into nasty issues with shaped speeds for the rest of the monthly period. The balance is pretty good as you can see here.
The green pieces of the bar chart represent traffic from and to the FTP server of the ISP which is not measured against either of the caps.
Hope this might help someone in rural areas where the speeds and feeds are even more disgraceful then mine. And I live 20Ks from the second largest city in AUs. 🙁
Cheers
Erwin
