Start On One Subject And Migrate To Another In The Manner Of A Raving Lunatic

I am back at work again. I am using remote desktop to access my home PC. At home I am provisioned for the 1.5MBps sync service again for testing purposes. It seems that my employer is entertaining the idea of a gaming package but wants all the kinks worked out in advance. What reallys sucks is that there is something going on within the network that is killing gamers or anyone else who has need for a stream or continuous connection. It's worse now that it ever was before. Last night my ping meter looked good on Star Wars Battlefront. All the way in the green, they were. I have a 1.5 sync connection and should therefore be able to host a 32 player game. I hosted a 16 player game and was getting lag complaints after only 4 players had joined. Yesterday, at work, I was streaming some audio from home with remote desktop. It was variable bitrate WMA and the album I was playing ranges from 206 to 400 kbps. It was skipping every few seconds. Keep in mind that I should, theoretically, be able to stream close to 1500 kbps from home. If I can't even stream less than a third of that without skips and drops there is definately a problem. There isn't any packet loss and ping times look good. I have a theory that there is a device on our network that is causing the problem. Officially, we do not have one of these devices. Few people even know what they are. All ISPs have them but I challenge you to find an ISP who will admit to it. They are designed to limit traffic on P2P networks among other things. Generally they should be set only to watch certain ports but in the case of my employer it took them 4 years to find out that the thing was running a process ever 15 minutes that was causing packet drops so I seriously doubt they have configured it to only watch the appropriate ports. It's likely that it is watching every packet and shaping it accordingly. Hint Hint. It wouldn't do you any good to ask your ISP if they have one. They do. The technical reps don't know they have it. If you have an ISP whose technical reps have the same unprecedented level of access to the systems that we do at my job they are likely to have been sworn to secrecy about it. I was, pretty much, told to lie about it. If someone asks if we have one we have been instructed to say "We do not limit access to P2P sites or services." It doesn't answer the questions but it kinda seems to. It's a dodge. I don't like being asked to lie. That's why I'm blabbing here. ISPs are limiting your access to P2P sites and services by limiting the amount of bandwidth on the network reserved for that purpose. You aren't getting that new Yin Yang Twins song at 6Kbps from 4 users because that's all they can send you. It's coming in that slow because your ISP has made the badnwidth available to P2P extrememly narrow. Also, STOP USING P2P. There are alternatives. All P2P has spyware. EVEN when you pay for the spyware free version.