I switched ISPs at the beginning of April.
After about six years with Plala, I had to leave — shortly after switching to fiber, I started experiencing sudden slowdowns when browsing.
Right around that time, Plala announced P2P throttling.
Technically speaking, detecting only P2P packets from network traffic is extremely difficult.
Any application deployed to block P2P risks incorrectly throttling other traffic too — and newly deployed technology almost always causes false positive issues initially.
Looking at Plala’s user forum at the time:
http://mpw2.plala.or.jp/freenote/arc/d/datavw/348_uojbad_ALL.html
http://mpw2.plala.or.jp/freenote/arc/d/datavw/348_tslwti_ALL.html
Plala claimed this was unrelated to their P2P throttling, but there’s no other explanation for the symptoms.
According to forum reports, beyond Winny, issues were also appearing with Skype, MSN Messenger file transfer, and some online games — instability, connection failures, packet loss.
Plala had provided reliable service at a reasonable price for a long time, which is why I stuck with them. But given recent network instability, running a home server on their network was no longer viable. A real shame.
I’ve switched to OCN. First ISP besides Plala I’ve used, but no complaints about the service quality so far.