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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.

shaw bittorrent isp throttlingAt 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.

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  • Matthew

    I’ve got Shaw and i have to say, they are horrible. My internet was out for about 15 hours last week. The only good thing about them is that even after you use way more then your monthly bandwidth(i used about 20 gigs more then my 60 gig monthly limit) all they did was send me a e-mail to let me know that i was using too much bandwidth. But they do suck. a lot

  • Simon

    I agree Shaw sucks, but as the above poster said, the other Canadian cable isp’s suck alot worse. (eg Rogers or Telus, which shape bandwidth and block sites for their users).

    I’m sure I’ve been over my monthly cap for probably a year now, but they’ve called me once.

    Better the devil you know.

  • Yatti

    Im sure Rogers has either started charging users, or calling\emailing for running their cap…Encryption helps a bit.. But now I need a new isp for sure(any1 have any recommendations?) .. These Caps Suck!.. Rogers site even admits they have had caps in place since 05 i think… Just sad…

  • bltz

    Remember seeing some news article that Cisco has introduced new devices that can sniff BT and p2p traffic even with encryption. They are happily selling those to Canadian ISPs, and Rogers seems to already be using some of those.

    Encryption might not work for long.

    The real cause of this is that Cable ISPs in Canada are all jumping over themselves to sell VOIP service. And they need the upload BW for that traffic.

  • somedude

    I have Sympatico, the speed isn’t super fast but unlimited bandwidth is very good feature.

    I used 500GB last month, 300GB the month before…

  • tortehweb

    Shu mod FTW! ;-)

  • Dave

    hey somedude, im just wondering how much you pay for Sympatico internet? 50 or 60? I have rogers and pay $22 plus $3 for modem rental and have 60gb bandwidth limit and have limit of 128kbps. Im thinking of switching to sympatico.

  • Greg

    I’ve got Shaw Extreme I (max. 10 Mbit), and I use it to download more than a gig of TV daily. I routinely get download speeds of greater than 1050kB/sec — yes, a megabyte per second — using BT. How much bloody faster would it be without shaping?! In my experience, Shaw in my area kicks the a$$ of Telus, with which I was only getting 750kb/sec — that’s less than 100kB/sec, remember — from a connection that was touted as being 2.5Mb/sec. The price difference? Shaw is just $2 more, for more than 10 times the speed!

  • Mike

    I’m on Rogers Extreme. They’ve been shaping the hell out my BT abilities.
    Azureus with encryption, tried any port. While downloading, all kinds of basic TCP functions stop working. HTTP web surfing is unaffected, but doing things like using my own private encrypted tunnel to download my own email off of my hosting server in the US works very flaky now. Can’t make the TCP connection most of the time now.
    Seems their shaping is a bit of a wild dirty hack.
    All this snooping and hacking will cause people to go underground and explore things like i2p. But you wouldn’t believe what’s on there – totally crosses the line, and I don’t want to see the crap ever again that I’ve seen on it.
    Goody…. now Junior, thanks to our dumb-ass ISP’s, will go underground and explore 100% anonymous networks, darknets and such. People do *very* strange things once they experience 100% anonimity. The world will never be the same I tell you.

  • HyperHacker

    I had Cogeco, they were a *very* good ISP but the caps got in my way. For the same price as their 15GB plan I got Sympatico’s plan with the same speed and no cap. (Sympatico’s tech support is ass, though, whereas Cogeco’s is the best I’ve ever seen.)

  • Kiko

    “Set the KB/s LAN max upload speed [0:unlimited] value to 1.”

    This only affects if your are running Azureus that has leechers and seeders within your LAN, not WAN.

    I have my setting for LAN at 1 and I’m uploading at 100kB/s.

  • SSS

    I ALWAYS hav my upload speed at 0!
    i set my firewall to block it so i get max dl speed

  • Steve

    I have Shaw – so for no problems, uploading or downloading torrents, or bandwidth issues.

  • bob

    yea thats real smart….

    how the heck are people suppose to downloading if nobody is uploading in the 1st place…

    idiots

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  • dlab

    I don’t think you can blame Shaw for trying to manage their network. All they really do is make conflicting statements.

    At least they’re not enforcing imaginary bandwidth caps or forging RST packets.

  • belagiorgo

    COGECO sucks shit ass they block me 5 day i download more then 60 gb 95 gb i download then they block 5 days fuck shit cogeco jew i pay high speed internet but i didnt finish the downloads

  • Shaw User

    I actually find shaw to be really good. They helped me configure my torrent so I could maximize my download/upload and were kind enough to open ports for me when I told them my BitTorrent downloads were slower than they should be. I’ve been over my cap lots of times and they give you a friendly reminder now and then but they don’t care that much if you’re over.

  • A Different Shaw User

    FYI, Shaw doesn’t throttle BitTorrent traffic but they DO throttle encrypted traffic. Depending on your area, newsgroups and torrents FLY at max speed, but try it with encryption on. Granted several hundred users maxing out their 10Mb/s connections 24/7 with BT trafiic is going to slow things down a bit for everyone. Isn’t asking customers to help out better than them throttling BT traffic to 1kb/s manually?

  • An SaskTel User

    If you live in Saskatchewan Canada, and have Shaw, Switch to SaskTel. They have no problems with P2P, and they don’t throttle encrypted traffic.

  • Matt

    I have Shaw internet as well. It’s the only provider in the lower mainland that doesn’t have some ridiculously low cap. And even if you go over they don’t really care too much. Also I have hit 1MB/s for sustained periods with Shaw, which is much faster than I have with Sympatico or Videotron.

  • Bryan

    [quote comment="253154"]I have Shaw internet as well. It’s the only provider in the lower mainland that doesn’t have some ridiculously low cap. And even if you go over they don’t really care too much. Also I have hit 1MB/s for sustained periods with Shaw, which is much faster than I have with Sympatico or Videotron.[/quote]

    Hey Matt,

    Well if that’s the case (I’m in Victoria)…care to share your setup?

    What client?
    What settings?
    Which Shaw Broadband package?
    Encryption on/off?
    Windows/Linux/Mac?
    the more info the better

    Thanks in advance

  • curtis

    I use sasktel. Not the fastest but okay I suppose.

  • Richard

    I am also in Victoria, and my Azureus speeds suck…they used to be fine. I’ve tried encryption, seemed to increase for a bit…I used to cap my Download at 320KB/s and upload to 24KB/s….I used to be able to get 320KB/s sometimes, but usually 200 or more. Now I can’t sustain over 80KB/s down now…usually 30-40.

    This started happening recently, since late Nov…

    I think saying that Shaw doesn’t cap or shape is incorrect. They do. It probably matters where you live. Perhaps they haven’t rolled it out yet. I know here that doing a ssh transfer of files to work (shaw to shaw) on port 22 (ssh port) works fine, at my max upload speed of 1Mbps…but transferring to a forwarded port in the range of 10000-60000 maxes out at 1/5 of that…(20kbps). So, thanks shaw, for that. Trying to be secure while logging into work and transferring files has now reduced my speed to 20Kbps…slower than a modem. Good job. Telecommuting is painful. Excellent.

    At this point I believe that Shaw is just shaping all traffic that doesn’t come from a well known port (ie: port 80 for http, 443 for https, port 22 for ssh, whatever port nntp uses). Anything that comes or goes to a port that is not well known is getting shaped to 20-40 Kbps..

    Encrypting my bittorrent traffic seems to speed up some torrents with high numbers of seeders and peers, (but only to about 80KB/s, from 20) but if you only have 12 seeders and 11 peers, requiring encryption reduces the number of possible connections you can make, (in my case to 4 from 14) and my speed went from 10-20KB/s to 1KB/s….

    Any ideas? I’ve tried all Azureus recommended encryption levels from 2 to 5…(see the wiki). CRTC complaint? As far as I can tell, this policy pretty much ensures that any protocol they don’t like gets reduced throughput. Say goodbye to itunes movie downloads, skype, vonage, etc. Anything that competes with shaw, or something they don’t like get sh*t-canned. Bravo.

  • Honda3475

    I in the GTA I find my Rogers High Speed is good. 900 kbs download speed and it almost never goes down with me. If anything it goes down like 3 times a year. Some ppl might complain but for me thats not bad. I am a user of torrents and where I get screwed is when Rogers sent me an email saying I had downloaded Illegal content. Basically I had to reply staying I will comply to their regulations. So with this said would encryption prevent Rogers from busting me again. From my understanding Bell doesn’t do all this. Bell just blocks it from their end first so you can’t download. I have to proof in writing… this is just from a bunch of IT guys talking. Anyone has any input 1) Encryption and 2) Bell blocking downloads? Thanks in advance

  • Anonymous

    I use shaw and I normally get over 300kB/sec downloads.
    It’s also on a wireless N router. Not sure if that’s fast or if the router matters but I can download movies in about 2 hours. I download mostly HD stuff which takes much longer but the speeds are the same.
    I’ve never hit any cap, sometimes I have to change my ports but once I do I’m usually good for a week at least, usually longer.

  • $askTELUser

    Sasktel 5mbps is ok i get 550kb/s down
    and about 65 up. only problem is there crappy 2wire modems

  • Anonymous

    @ #27
    Thaat’s why I switched to shaw. They said their router/modem is only capable of 200 connections.

  • Gr33n3gg

    I just recently got Shaw High Speed internet(5MB/S) and the BT seems shifty. I don’t think I have the right ports mapped, but I’m DLing at 30-40KB/S sometimes even up to 200KB/S. Encryption doesn’t seem to have an effect, I also disable PeerGaurdian2 to see if something help, but nothing. On another note, I recently got a new modem from them (Motorola), that stupid thing only allows 1 connection/device. 1 connection + 6 computers = 1 mad comptuer geek. And yes, I’m using a router. So now, a guy is coming here tomorrow morning, so I can get back my old modem…atleast that one worked. BT has always sucked for me on Shaw. Telus isn’t available in my section of town, although a friend up above me on a different street has Telus…interesting. Greetings from BC

  • Anonymous

    I have Shaw extreme-i service in Edmonton and have no problem with torrents. I use uTorrent as a client and have seen sustained downloads in the 1200-1500kB/s. Yes, that’s 1.2-1.5 Megabytes per second. This of course is provided I have enough good seeds. Normally I’ll pull an easy 800kB/s though.

  • Dwee7

    As of a couple of months ago, all my Shaw torrent traffic gets killed within a minute – the torrent dies with a ‘file not found’ error. “The system cannot find the path specified.”

    I haven’t loaded a client on another system to test – my base system had no other changes prior to this.

    Implication is Shaw is running ‘forensics’ that kill streams dead. They can go F themselves.

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