ISP: Minimize Your BitTorrent Upload Speed!
Canadian ISP Shaw advises its customers to minimize their upload speed (set it to 1 Kb/s) to prevent their connections from slowing down. Sure, this way BitTorrent traffic will not be likely to interfere with your Internet browsing, but it will also take ages to download something off BitTorrent.
At first glance Shaw seems to be a fan of filesharing. In the customer care section of the site they write: “File sharing is a great way to share information with your friends and other Internet users and Shaw High-Speed Internet is a great platform to exchange information quickly and easily.”
But if we look at their advise to configure your BitTorrent client, it appears that Shaw has other intentions. One of their suggestions is:
“Set the KB/s LAN max upload speed [0:unlimited] value to 1.”
So they basically say: don’t share! I’m pretty sure that if you do this, sharing files wont be that “quickly and easily” anymore.
Shaw is obviously not a fan of BitTorrent. Apart from giving wrong advise to its customers, they also throttle BitTorrent traffic in general, like many other ISPs. Here’s my advise for all Shaw customers that want to use BitTorrent: Turn on protocol encryption, and try to find a better ISP, they’re not worth the money.
