
BitTorrent Throttling Internet Providers Exposed - nextparadigms
http://torrentfreak.com/bittorrent-throttling-internet-providers-exposed-111020/
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praptak
My pitchfork and torch is always ready but have they ruled out the possibility
that the measurements are a result of something other than ISP targetting P2P?
Something like ISPs just blocking bandwidth hogs? Have they tested various
protocols with similar characteristics to see that only BT is throttled?

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palish
So... This won't answer your question directly... Just as a datapoint: I use
Charter, and rarely torrent. But when I do, my connection gets "throttled" in
an interesting way. It happens like clockwork:

I reach maximum download speed (1.5MB/sec in my case), and after a few minutes
of sustained speed, all internet traffic suddenly halts. It's as if the modem
were unplugged. Between 1-5 min later, internet suddenly starts back up. Rinse
and repeat.

As far as I can tell, this has never happened with any other program. Not
once! Only uTorrent seems to trigger it. Sometimes I can torrent for about an
hour before experiencing the throttling; but it always eventually happens.

I'm actually glad they throttle me, since I don't feel bad about hogging
bandwidth anymore! But that's just a personal quirk... =)

There is one other interesting aspect to the throttling: during the download,
my upload speed is capped to 0.5kb/sec. (that is not a typo.) And when the
torrent finishes downloading, the upload speed immediately drops to zero.

In other words, Charter seems to be entirely blocking all Bittorrent seeding.
My little conspiracy theory is that the 0.5kb/sec are "keepalive" packets,
which trick the Bittorrent protocol into allowing me to download without
seeding at all. If true, then that's very crafty of Charter... And no one
complains, because no one tends to notice/care about upload speed. (and if
they did notice, they probably say "yay, that's cool, torrenting without
saturating my upload!". But I feel greedy.

There's probably a mundane explanation; maybe our Linksys router is
misconfigured somehow? But then why does my download speed work correctly at
1.5MBs, with upload speed capped to 0.5kbs? And when a download completes, why
does the 0.5kbs drop to zero?

To me, it seems like there's a mystery there. But I'm likely just stupid. =)

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redthrowaway
Are you on wireless? Apparently bittorrent tends to kill a lot of wireless
routers, as it opens too many simultaneous connections for them to handle. I
will regularly see my download speeds shoot up, only to crash to 0. Resetting
my router fixes it, but the modem itself is fine.

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palish
Oh wow, thanks! I am on wireless.

I don't suppose your router happens to be a blue-and-gray El Cheapo Walmart
Linksys, like mine...? Haha. It's so ghetto; I can only forward 10 port ranges
total, for example.

Out of curiosity, does uploading/seeding work correctly when you torrent?

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mgcross
Check out Tomato firmware: <http://www.polarcloud.com/tomato> Much more
control than stock firmware. It may be a matter of adjusting max connections
and/or TCP timeout.

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palish
Thanks very much!

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radarsat1
Took me a while to figure out the title.. hyphens, people. They work!

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CosmicShadow
If you go anywhere in public you will hear people complaining about Rogers,
it's more common than seeing a Tim Hortons.

Rightly so, Rogers is probably the most hate inducing company in Canada!

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joejohnson
Who is Tim Hortons?

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nkassis
A hockey player who started the huge chain of coffee/donuts restaurant. Tim
Horton's restaurants are everywhere in Canada.

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joejohnson
Oh, thank you. I feel dumb now.

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Legion
Comcast has gone from being synonymous with Bittorrent throttling to making
the "best" list for lowest throttlers.

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jerf
This is why when Comcast announced its bandwidth limit policy, I actually
cheered rather than jeered. By solving the problem correctly, they eliminated
their need to solve it incorrectly. I only sort of wish you could pay for more
bandwidth, though that's an abstract concern as my worst month ever barely
cracked 1/3 usage. (But I know others can have issues.)

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dotBen
I have it on good authority that converting your residential account to a
business account (~25% more expensive) will 'remove' Comcast's bandwidth
limits (or have them turn a blind eye, etc).

If you don't want to pay the extra, often downgrading the line to the business
equivalent of the speed tier below what you are currently using on your
residential package will net out a similar monthly fee.

They have better contention ratios on Business accounts and so you may even
see faster speeds at that lower tier.

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khafra
Interesting. Will that improve latency, as well? I have a 50mpbs connection,
but I'd be happy with a 10mbps if it didn't take 45 seconds to load reddit.

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dotBen
It might in general, but Reddit's bottleneck might be their own servers.

We downgraded a 50Mbps Comcast line to a 25Mbps line and I honestly couldn't
see much difference in terms of actual page load time, file download speeds
etc but we saved some $

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mhartl
Admin or submitter: Please add a necessary hyphen to the title.

    
    
        - BitTorrent Throttling Internet Providers Exposed
        + BitTorrent-Throttling Internet Providers Exposed

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Maven911
In my neck of the woods in quebec, canada where we do not have rogers internet
service, it is Bell that is usually the target of hate because of p2p
throttling

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noarchy
We have Vidéotron as an alternative, and they don't throttle. They are,
however, on the pricey side.

