Author Topic: Does Your ISP Slow Down BitTorrent Traffic?  (Read 15381 times)

Offline olddays1

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Does Your ISP Slow Down BitTorrent Traffic?
« on: May 07, 2008, 03:33:44 am »
Test: Does Your ISP Slow Down BitTorrent Traffic?
Written by Ernesto on May 07, 2008

Hundreds of larger and smaller ISPs all over the world try to limit BitTorrent traffic on their networks. Unfortunately, most companies are not very open about their network management solutions, with Comcast as the prime example. Thanks to the Glasnost project, you can now test wheter your ISP is one of the bad guys.
A while back we posted about the plugin Azureus had developed, which allowed people to check whether their ISP is interfering with their traffic. The results showed that indeed quite a few ISPs were, but the plugin didn’t provide the user with direct feedback.

The new tool developed by the “max planck institute for software systems” can be used without having to run your BitTorrent client, and compares BitTorrent traffic to regular traffic. On top of that, it will give you more information than the Azureus plugin does.

“The goal of our Glasnost project is to make access networks, such as residential cable, DSL, and cellular broadband networks, more transparent to their customers,” the Glasnost team writes. We couldn’t agree more of course, as we have said many times before.

The way it works is pretty straightforward. The Java applet developed by the Glasnost project uploads and downloads data via BitTorrent for a few seconds, and compares that to your regular download speed. It detects if your ISP is limiting all BitTorrent traffic, or just traffic on well known BitTorrent ports. All in all this tool should be able to tell you whether your ISP is messing with BitTorrent traffic or not.

Please keep in mind that the degree of traffic shaping varies a lot between different ISPs. Some ISPs only limit BitTorrent traffic during certain times of the day or do not throttle until the customer has exceeded a certain data threshold, others only slow down traffic in specific regions. More advanced tools have to be developed to detect these methods.

Thus far, over 5,300 users have performed the test, and the preliminary results show that at least 10 ISPs in the United States are slowing down BitTorrent. We asked the researcher for some more details (names) but we haven’t heard back from them. However, on their website, they promise to provide more detailed results later, once the code is peer-reviewed.

We encourage you to do the test, if the test results show that your ISP is limiting BitTorrent traffic, please let us know. We will add a lits of offenders at the bottom of this article.
The test servers seem to have limited capacity. If it shows up as “busy”, please bookmark this article and try again later.

SEE http://torrentfreak.com/test-does-your-isp-slow-down-bittorrent-traffic-080507/ FOR LINKS TO TEST SITE.

MinLo

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Re: Does Your ISP Slow Down BitTorrent Traffic?
« Reply #1 on: May 10, 2008, 04:05:46 am »
When I had comcast I didn't get slowed down........I had comcast about 5 months ago......

Now I use my phone as a modem(cell phone) and I don't notice since it already slower than what I'm use to.....

gus8511q

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Re: Does Your ISP Slow Down BitTorrent Traffic?
« Reply #2 on: May 11, 2008, 06:34:23 am »
here in greece the biggest ISP (Ote) is using TS !!! with a 24mb line im downloading in 1-2 mbits!

moggy

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Re: Does Your ISP Slow Down BitTorrent Traffic?
« Reply #3 on: May 12, 2008, 09:18:14 pm »
my ISP Bell sympatico throttles I do up to 500 k max but from 4 pm to around 2:30 am its slowed down to 30 k

texasboy

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Re: Does Your ISP Slow Down BitTorrent Traffic?
« Reply #4 on: May 13, 2008, 06:31:29 am »
my ISP Bell sympatico throttles I do up to 500 k max but from 4 pm to around 2:30 am its slowed down to 30 k


Most telephone broadband sevices slow down dramatically during peak period  usage. Better off with cable. Getting 1-1.3MB downloads with Virginmedia Broadband UK even on 10 mb. Would have to change set top box to upgrade to 20MB +
cheers

Offline fuzzytomcat

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Re: Does Your ISP Slow Down BitTorrent Traffic?
« Reply #5 on: May 13, 2008, 03:20:59 pm »
This is my Comcast connection on a good day ......................



But I do get throttled on upload compression sometimes to approx. 70 Kb/s and download speed to 1600 Kb/s it's very inconstant and if your playing Sony's PS3 "Call to Duty 4" online ................. all bets are off !  ;D

surfer

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Re: Does Your ISP Slow Down BitTorrent Traffic?
« Reply #6 on: September 24, 2008, 06:14:56 am »
my current ISP Rogers (canada) is notorious for traffic shaping, throttling and capping.  However in 3-5 days i'll be on a new provider.