Increase P2P download speed on Streamyx – Mac Style

I was away for a few years and I just got back 3 weeks ago. I was appalled by the speed of Streamyx at home, especially for downloading, so I made a report with TM through the phone. The customer service was very friendly and advised me step-by-step what to check for and what to test. I did that and called back, like I was advised. This followed more tests and calls. At the end, they opened up a case for the technician to come over to check the line. The tech guy showed up next morning. He did some tests on the line and concluded that everything was ok and in fact the bandwidth was pretty good for my 384 kbps package and some people had it worse.

Ok, I realised that there is nothing to be done but to upgrade the package. As I researched, I stumbled across postings in forums and blogs about TM throttling P2P and torrent downloads. So, that was my moment of enlightenment. It so happened at that moment, the technical support of Streamyx called me to follow up on the case. So I asked if it’s true that TM is limiting P2P and torrent downloads and he confirmed that and apparently that is in line with TM’s fair use policy which is available on the website.

So, overall I was very pleased with the customer service provided although the throttling of bandwidth is very unpleasant (but that has nothing to do with the customer service quality, it was more of an infrastructure limitation).

After much reading, I have found a way to improve the download speed and overall browsing experience. Best of all, it’s free.

Before I proceed, I must say that this is what I did and it worked for me. Do it at your own risk and if it didn’t work for you, please don’t complain to me as I don’t have a customer service department to handle that

Two Things You Need
There are two utilities you need to use and they are independent of each other. They are both available for Mac and PC.

One is called Hotspot Shield and the other is called Opendns.

I’ll skip the details of these two applications as you can read it before downloading. Patrick Soon did wrote a very interesting article about another good use of Hotspot Shield here. Im a nutshell, one will create and VPN between your computer and their internet gateway and as a result, assigns you an American IP address. The other will unbundle your DNS service from your ISP’s Internet connection for a more reliable, secure and faster connection. They do a lot more but that’s not what I’m covering for this post.

You can start by installing either one but I started with Hotspot Shield.