Comcast Throttles BitTorrent Traffic, Seeding Impossible
Written by Ernesto on August 17, 2007Over the past weeks more and more Comcast users started to notice that their BitTorrent transfers were cut off. Most users report a significant decrease in download speeds, and even worse, they are unable to seed their downloads. A nightmare for people who want to keep up a positive ratio at private trackers and for the speed of BitTorrent transfers in general.
ISPs have been throttling BitTorrent traffic for almost two years now. Most ISPs simply limit the available bandwidth for BitTorrent traffic, but Comcast takes it one step further, and prevents their customers from seeding. And Comcast is not alone in this, Canadian ISPs Cogeco and Rogers use similar methods on a smaller scale.
Unfortunately, these more aggressive throttling methods can’t be circumvented by simply enabling encryption in your BitTorrent client. It is reported that Comcast is using an application from Sandvine to throttle BitTorrent traffic. Sandvine breaks every (seed) connection with new peers after a few seconds if it’s not a Comcast user. This makes it virtually impossible to seed a file, especially in small swarms without any Comcast users. Some users report that they can still connect to a few peers, but most of the Comcast customers see a significant drop in their upload speed.
The throttling works like this: A few seconds after you connect to someone in the swarm the Sandvine application sends a peer reset message (RST flag) and the upload immediately stops. Most vulnerable are users in a relatively small swarm where you only have a couple of peers you can upload the file to. Only seeding seems to be prevented, most users are able to upload to others while the download is still going, but once the download is finished, the upload speed drops to 0. Some users also report a significant drop in their download speeds, but this seems to be less widespread. Worse on private trackers, likely that this is because of the smaller swarm size
Although BitTorrent protocol encryption seems to work against most forms of traffic shaping, it doesn’t help in this specific case. Setting up a secure connection through VPN or over SSH seems to be the only solution. More info about how to setup BitTorrent over SSH can be found here.
Last year we had a discussion whether traffic shaping is good or bad, and ISPs made it pretty clear that they do not like P2P applications like BitTorrent. One of the ISPs that joined our discussions said: “The fact is, P2P is (from my point of view) a plague - a cancer, that will consume all the bandwidth that I can provide. It’s an insatiable appetite.”, and another one stated: “P2P applications can cripple a network, they’re like leaches. Just because you pay 49.99 for a 1.5-3.0mbps connection doesn’t mean your entitled to use whatever protocols you wish on your ISP’s network without them provisioning it to make the network experience good for all users involved.”
Customers on the other hand like to fully use their connection, and don’t agree that traffic shaping is the correct solution. One reader commented: “If you pay for an internet connection, that’s what you should get from your ISP — an internet connection. Not a connection that will let you browse the web and check email, but little else. If an ISP has issues with the amount of data a customer is transferring, then the ISP needs to address that issue with that customer, and not restrict every user in one class of traffic.”
I guess this battle will go on for a while and I would advise Comcast users to try setting up a VPN connection to get around the traffic shaping, other users who find out that they are throttles might try BitTorrent encryption first, that seems to work quite well in most cases.
More details about the Sandvine application can be found here.
Previously: BitTorrent Anime Downloaders Identified, $3500 Bill in the Mail
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493 Responses
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VPN accounts may help indeed.
The only problem is that you have to ask if they are torrent-compatible.
I had a cheap vpn provider before, but torrents didn’t work. Now with strongvpn - everything works properly.
anyone here in this thread from Eastern Washington ??? Or around Spokane… contact me…interested in this thread … 509 459 5492
I have comcast and have two computers on WOW at least 4 hours or more a day Even more on weekends. A XBox 360 live going a good part of the day and my own dl of music and pother graphoc and game related downloads. i have yet to gfigure just how much we use however thankfully knock on wood No letters have arrived i do worry though that it will happen where i live is realy limited to the services in my area that are offered.
Umm by the way have you ANY idea how hard this site is on my eyes :0)
https://vpnout.com/
One way to shield yourself and fix the problem. The kevlar of the internet, keep your privacy safe and your internet service out of your home!
From : http://www.secguru.com/link/comcast_forging_packets_filter_torrents_using_rst_packets
I dont have much knowledge of Bittorrent protocol, but cant we devise a way to detect that ISP is blocking the client from SEED’ing.
For example, When the bittorrent client starts up - it sends SEED packets to (lets say) 10 randomly different IP’s. Now, if you recieve RST packets for most of those 10 packets then probably your ISP is blocking from bittorrent SEEDING.
If your ISP is sending RST packets, then what will happen if you start ignoring those ?
I believe the connection will remain open for some time based upon your OS ( or this can be set in the client itself ) and then automatically closed as no data was transferred…
I just moved to Seattle from Portland. I had Comcast is Portland and could seed endlessly with no problems. Here in Seattle I can seed to some places without problems but the connection gets broken at other places, which I am assuming is compliments of Sandvine.
Quite frankly I do understand the arguments for limiting bittorrent traffic but I think it should be clear. When I was living in Canada our ISP clearly let us know how many gigs we had per month for uploading. Sure it sucked but at least you knew your limit.
Sandvine is b.s. and I will more than likely changing ISPs, even if I do have to take slower speeds.
It seems like Comcast is throttling via Sandvine mainly in large cities, probably because of the bandwidth required to service these areas.
The funny thing is that the Comcast guy who hooked up my service said in the next 6-8 months Comcast will be moving to faster 16mbps connections.
theres a way to get around this but you retards will have find out on your own
I just tried to download using abc torrent on my comcast here in maryland it would not start at all.
I downloaded utorrent turned on encryption and it works fine but still not as fast as it used to be.
I used to be able to download at 500 but no more……
[quote comment="160842"]theres a way to get around this but you retards will have find out on your own[/quote]
That is very helpful…Thanks!
[quote comment="160842"]theres a way to get around this but you retards will have find out on your own[/quote]
fuck you mother fuker retard, bastard, stupid, fucking ass hole, i am fucking your mom and girlfriend in your garage.
Well, I tried the strategy that was posted in comment #198 and bought myself a 3 month “strongvpn.com” account for $45 and now my bittorrent downloads work perfectly. True, it’s not the cheapest solution, but it was super easy to set up. I see this as a temporary solution for me until someone else figures out another way in the future.
Well, thanks for the thread guys! I have comcast in MD, and here is what worked for me to increase torrent speeds:
I Changed DNS address away from Comcast (have no clue why this is having any effect). Currently I have them at Cisco: 128.107.241.185,
192.135.250.69.
2. I always had my torrent port(s) in the high range, over 50K, so that may also be helping.
This basically doubled my torrent downloading speeds and helped out with seeding.
I am going to play around with ipchains command string through my dd-wrt firmware on the router and see if it helps any (will probably leave it on anyway).
Oh, and thank you for the Onion Router, safe torrent plugins, and Privoxy suggestions.
Downloaded Tor package, Squid, and couple other things and configuring them now. I think I am just going to setup another box with Redhat, Ubuntu, CentOS or even, FreeBSD (pfsense maybe).
I do have a question, for VPN services, what’s better, VPNOut or StrongVPN?
You guys are leaving out Cox. Lately my torrents have been suddenly cut off. I was at 98% and it went to 0kb/s. I let it sit for hours and there was no movement in the speed and it never finished. Over the past few days any time I’ve tried to download a torrent file it has gone some but has been cut off before it finishes.
Has anyone tried JanusVM to get around comcast throttling?
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