The Health Status of Net Neutrality – The Operators’ Impact on Internet Traffic is their new report which looks at how suppliers of fixed and mobile Internet services in Sweden, traditionally some of the fastest in the world, regulate the flow of traffic in their networks.

The plan was to discover if throttling activities exist among operators, and if so to assess how feasable it is to accurately measure it, and then decide whether it was worth continuing with and expanding upon the project.

Tests were conducted by .SE on the services of a dozen ISPs and measurements were taken for three different types of traffic – standard web browsing, file-sharing and video (such as YouTube).

“What is evident from the measurement results is that some mobile operators systematically downgrade user traffic such as the file-sharing protocol BitTorrent,” says Jörgen Eriksson.

Eriksson, who had responsibility for conducting the tests, says at least one ISP blocked all incoming connections to torrent clients.

The report notes that interfering with BitTorrent is a bad idea, since much open software distribution relies on it. Furthermore, messing with P2P protocols in general is problematic since other services such as Skype, Spotify and Voddler use them.

“If an operator attempts to limit these protocols and the operator’s customers know that their Internet connection does not give them full access to this type of service the operator will lose customers,” says the report.

In Sweden, service providers are free to restrict traffic providing they comply with certain conditions, but the report criticizes ISPs for their lack of transparency.

“The most interesting conclusion is that it is very difficult, if at all possible, to find information among operators about what they block or prioritize,” says Eriksson.

“We know that mobile market players see it as an advantage to NOT be compared with others. There is thus a risk that even if the technical information is presented, it will be useless for those who do not have a deep understanding of how the Internet is built.”

For now and until .SE’s next and more comprehensive report, the tested ISPs will retain their anonymity giving them time to reconsider their strategy, which given wider considerations might not be a bad idea.

Restricting end-users’ access to peer-to-peer based services could have a knock-on effect to the wider Internet. Peer-to-peer protocols help to distribute traffic online, an improvement upon older and more bandwidth intensive models.

“If peer-to-peer protocols are blocked so the trend will go toward developing protocols according to the traditional server-client model, or data will be hidden in other traffic where it is difficult to discern,” the report adds.

“It will probably not be as effective and lead to an increase in traffic – rather than the decrease as ISPs seek when they block peer-to-peer protocols,” the report concludes.

Full report here (Swedish, pdf)

Source: Net Neutrality: Mobile Broadband Suppliers Discriminate Against BitTorrent

Thanks to data collected by Measurement Lab (M-Lab) the public is now able to take a look at the frequency of these BitTorrent throttling practices. Among other tools, M-Lab runs the Glasnost application developed by the Max Planck Institute.

The interactive data set published yesterday spans a two-year period and this initial release covers the period between April 2008 and May 2010. It includes BitTorrent throttling percentages of ISPs in dozens of countries, divided into three-month periods. Below we discuss a few trends and notable findings.

United States

The BitTorrent throttling practices of Comcast, exposed by Robb Topolski and TorrentFreak in 2007, were in part what led to the Measurement Lab research. After an FCC investigation Comcast was ordered to stop slowing down BitTorrent on a large-scale, and the data shows that the company has kept its word.

Early 2008 Comcast limited nearly half (49%) of all BitTorrent traffic but this was reduced to 3 percent by the first quarter of last year. Cox, another heavy throttler, went from 51 percent to 3 percent in the same time period. The data further shows that in 2010, Clearwire was the only U.S. Internet provider that limited more than 10 percent of all BitTorrent traffic, 17 percent to be precise.

Worst: Clearwire (17%)

Best: Comcast and others (3%)

Canada

In Canada, all large ISPs have admitted to slowing down BitTorrent traffic, and some do so to a great extent. Since the start of the measurements Rogers has continuously throttled more than three-quarter of all BitTorrent traffic, and there are no signs that this will stop.

During the first quarter of 2010 the two other large Canadian ISPs, Bell and Shaw, were throttling 16 and 14 percent respectively. Videotron on the other hand has never slowed down more than 7 percent, and only 3 percent during the last measurement year.

Worst: Rogers (78%)

Best: Videotron (3%)

Great Britain

In Great Britain, TalkTalk used to limit a third of all BitTorrent traffic, but this was reduced significantly by the end of 2009. They now only slow down BitTorrent during peak hours which resulted in a 12 percent throttling rate early 2010. Tiscali and BT Group are exposed as the most heavy throttlers while Virgin Media, O2 and BSkyB have had relatively low percentages throughout the measurement period.

Worst: Tiscali and BT Group (27%)

Best: BSkyB (5%)

Other

A quick look at some other countries shows that in Australia none of the large ISPs were throttling BitTorrent traffic heavily in 2010, and the same can be said for Sweden and France. In The Netherlands UPC used to throttle heavily, but this was no longer the case early 2010.

In Germany, Kabel Deutschland seems to be the poorest choice for BitTorrent users (36%), and in Poland UPC has to be avoided as they limit 87 percent of all BitTorrent traffic.

Those who are interested in seeing how their own ISP performs can take a look at the full dataset at deeppacket.info. The researchers promise to release more recent data in the future, and it will be interesting to see how the various throttling habits of ISPs develop.

For those who have a choice, which us unfortunately not always the case, the data can definitely help to make an informed decision when signing up at a new Internet Provider.

Source: BitTorrent Throttling Internet Providers Exposed

As soon as the new service went live TalkTalk subscribers were noticing some strange behavior. During the day they were able to play games just fine, but after 6 in the evening, they were all of a sudden unable to connect. Then, after midnight the connection problems suddenly disappeared and games were loading just fine.

Initially some thought it could be that OnLive couldn’t keep up with the demand, but when the same pattern repeated during the following days it became apparent that something was seriously wrong. This was confirmed by OnLive’s support desk, who observed that the users with problems were facing excessive packet loss on their connections.

So what’s going on here?

Based on the systematic problems between 6 PM and 12 AM, it appears that TalkTalk’s P2P throttling application is also cutting off OnLive. TalkTalk are very open about their traffic management practices, and they do indeed limit P2P traffic during the exact times OnLive users are facing problems.

OnLive uses UDP connections to transfer game data, and it seems that TalkTalk’s traffic shaping equipment mistakes this for P2P traffic.

TorrentFreak reached out to TalkTalk to find out more about the issue, as users in the ISP’s support forums were unable to find out more. Yesterday we got a response and TalkTalk acknowledged the problem, but a fix is yet to be found.

“This has been raised with our network team and we are currently investigating,” a TalkTalk spokesperson informed us. Meanwhile, TalkTalk subscribers are growing impatient as they feel that they are being ignored.

“I basically feel that my money spent on OnLive is being wasted. Working from 8:00 till 16.30 I have no use for this service as I would have wait until midnight to have access. Which is unrealistic, people need to have a good sleep, right?” OnLive user and TalkTalk subscriber Dawid told TorrentFreak.

And somehow we feel that OnLive is not very happy with the issue either, as they may lose customers who think that the cloud gaming platform is simply offering a bad service. A few users of other ISPs have been reporting issues as well, but only at TalkTalk are they still persisting more than a week after OnLive launched.

While we understand that problems can always occur, the above clearly illustrates the dangers of traffic shaping. There’s always going to be collateral damage. In the case of OnLive it is significant enough to be noticed and (hopefully) fixed, but what happens if a smaller company is affected? Hopefully TalkTalk will come forward with an official apology and more details on their UDP throttling, so this debacle can be prevented in the future.

Update (October 3, 2011): TalkTalk gave the following comment to TorrentFreak

“Unfortunately the recently launched OnLive gaming service was incorrectly identified as a peer-to-peer application. We’ve changed this and are currently testing with customers. We apologise for the inconvenience this has caused.”

Source: TalkTalk’s P2P Throttling Kills OnLive Games

In one of the class action suits that were brought about from the long-running incident, Comcast has now agreed to settle, meaning those affected may be eligible for compensation.

About two and a half years ago, reports surfaced on what appeared to be the throttling of BitTorrent connections by Comcast. The throttling, first discovered by Rob Toplowski, was confirmed by TorrentFreak, and was first reported in August 2007. Other news agencies picked it up later, especially after tests by the EFF and Associated Press confirmed events and included reports that other network based activity was also affected.

Comcast long-denied any wrongdoing, but a leaked memo revealed that the company went as far as instructing its front-line staff to lie about the issue. Then the FCC got involved and things deteriorated. At a hearing at Harvard, Comcast packed the venue with people they bussed in, but it didn’t stop the BitTorrent throttling practice being termed a ‘hacker technique’.

Eventually, some assurances were made, and the FCC ordered Comcast to stop using Sandvine. Meanwhile lawsuits had been filed. One of these, Hart vs Comcast of Alameda, attained class action status, and there is now a proposed settlement.

Comcast has agreed to put $16M into a fund to pay BitTorrent users that were inconvenienced by the ‘network management’.

The downside is the size of the settlement. If you qualify, you can receive a maximum of $16, yet still Comcast refuses to accept it did anything wrong. The administrators of the settlement have set up a website to deal with questions about the case which can be found at www.p2pcongestionsettlement.com

It’s not hard to imagine that some customers will feel this doesn’t go far enough, and undoubtedly the discussion on this topic will continue. For the affected Comcast users there is still time to decide how to proceed – the deadline for claims is August 14th 2010. Meanwhile, network neutrality remains a pipe dream for most people.

Source: Comcast To Compensate Throttled BitTorrent Users

“The lesson of iTunes and Spotify is that what people want is ease of use and convenience and cheapness. And you only have to look at the decrease there has been in filesharing since the increase in popularity of Spotify.
“You only have to look at the number of people who came off illegal filesharing when iTunes came out to know that filesharing isn’t the answer, it’s not the future, it’s not valuable of itself – it’s a technology that currently is being used to circumvent the law.”

However, his words, as reported by the Birmingham Post, lack a certain ring of truth. For example, let’s take the claim that file-sharing decreased after Spotify gained popularity. While we agree that the service has the potential to convert many music pirates, its effect on the overall volume of file-sharing is simply not there.

The Pirate Bay informed TorrentFreak that traffic from the UK is still growing, at an average of around 1% per month. Mininova likewise has seen a 15% growth, of 7 million unique visitors a month, from 38.6 million in September 2008, to 45.6 million in August of 2009. Clearly Spotify hasn’t decreased much. Strike 1.

More worrying though is the claim that file-sharing technology is not valuable. For one, Spotify itself is based on file-sharing technology, with the brain behind the popular BitTorrent client uTorrent as one of its main developers. That aside, the state-funded BBC is involved in various BitTorrent-based projects, and the technology chiefs there believe that P2P TV has a future, and many independent artists are already putting it to use.

Over the past few years, we’ve brought you dozens of stories about people being enabled by the technology, from independent artists, to filmmakers (large and small) and even large corporations that can now effectively distribute data without incredible bandwidth outlay. File-sharing technology is very valuable to those people, Strike 2 for the MP from Birmingham.

That brings us to another statement Simon made, with Yahoo reporting him as saying that whilst it is illegal, there is currently no anti-piracy legislation. Those that have read our stories about Davenport Lyons, and ACS (and the thousands they have targeted) know there is indeed legislation. So too does Alan Ellis, and the Oink uploaders who were sentenced earlier this year. For Mr Simon, that’s strike 3.

It’s just lucky for him that no-one’s proposed a law where if an MP has gone on the record and made 3 basic factual errors, his parliamentary benefits should be cut off or throttled.

Mr Simon was contacted for comment, but did not reply at time of press

Source: UK 3-Strikes MP Ignorant on File-Sharing

Regardless, Comcast is not the only ISP that is throttling. As was revealed in the stats from Project Glasnost, Cox is also throttling heavily. So, while some are popping the champagne corks over this victory, others are still working hard to keep our ISP’s honest, and ensure that their customers are getting what they paid for.

The latest of these, is a project called Switzerland by the EFF. Still in very early alpha, it’s an attempt to not just detect sandvineing by an ISP, but other forms of throttling as well. Unlike Glasnost, which uses a central server and known torrent streams to detect activities from the ISP interfering, this will use a more decentralised method, where peers running Switzerland swap information about the packets they send to other Switzerland users, in encrypted data packets sent via a central server. In effect, it’s a checksum of torrent activity sent via a 3rd party. As Peter Eckersley, staff technologist for the EFF, and developer of Switzerland puts it “Alice and Bob are exchanging packets, they connect to a neutral server (Switzerland) to arbitrate between their different views of the packets”.

When asked why the EFF started this project, and why they believe a neutral network is important, he told TorrentFreak: “There were several reasons why we started the Test Your ISP project, and designed and built Switzerland. One reason was pragmatic: we were trying to run systematic tests of the interference that Comcast was deploying against P2P networks, and we decided that the only sensible way to do that was to build an automated sensor network. So we set about doing that.”

“The bigger picture, of course, is that without transparency the Internet won’t remain the amazing open and innovative thing that it has been,” Eckersley says. “And EFF’s mission is to make sure that the Internet stays open and innovative. We need to shine lights into the dark corners of the network, and make sure that ISPs aren’t setting themselves up in some control room and saying “protocol A okay, but protocol B doesn’t fit with our business plans, so let’s give it second-class treatment or stop it from working entirely.”

Some might worry that the client might open up people to being monitored by anti-p2p companies or other undesirables, using the system as another method of verification, but there is really no way around it. The simplest method to avoid that is, in Peters words, “avoid exchanging copyrighted files between Switzerland clients. The copyright risks are probably lower if you run your own Switzerland server, but it’s still going to keep logs.”

The question of what the FCC will do about these other ISPs and their traffic management is one to ponder. Our inquiries on this matter have been acknowledged, but not replied to at the time of publication.

Source: EFF Tool Hunts BitTorrent Throttling ISPs

One of the new weapons in this conflict, is called ‘Deep Packet Inspection‘ (DPI). An innocuous sounding name for a technology that basically means ‘Internet monitoring’. Deep packet inspection is a technology that some companies are salivating over, including advertisers and entertainment lobby groups like the MPAA. With it, their dreams can come true, some of them anyway.

There are various uses for deep packet inspection, such as its use by intelligence agencies (It’s a wiretap for the Internet) to intercept email and other web traffic, like in Sweden. However, there are two more sinister usages being rolled out that are not so good for the everyday Internet user.

With the ability to see the contents of data packets, it’s no surprise that it’s a prime candidate for traffic shaping and throttling. With ISP’s increasingly overselling their capacity, they are starting to spend money not on infrastructure, but on DPI equipment, to throttle BitTorrent traffic for example. Until recently, the processing power required to inspect data packets has made this prohibitive, as it required massive computers, and significantly slowed down network traffic. Now, though, companies like Procera Networks are selling systems capable of DPI on 40Gbps of traffic, per system. Think Sandvine, without the telltale RST packets.

The MPAA loves the idea of DPI as well. It, like other groups, figure, that if people can see the contents of packets, that it can tell if those packets contain copyrighted data. Of course, they’re oblivious to the idea that their material can be used in a non-infringing way, and staunchly against fair use (and don’t forget, Fair Use Day is only a week or two away). If this becomes a popular view, though, we may see multi-part rar files in torrents growing in popularity again.

The other, arguably more sinister usage of DPI, is the growing interest by advertising companies to use deep packet inspection to observe what Internet users are doing. Watching your browsing activity, you can gain all kinds of insights into the user behind the keyboard. Similar to spyware, but on your line not your system, it’s not a good thing, and impossible to remove. Worse, it may be able to tell who is behind the keyboard at the time, by identifying trends in connection behavior. In the case of a p2p lawsuit, these DPI-based advertising companies may end up being called to testify who their systems believe to be behind the keyboard at the time of the allegations.

With British Telecom in the UK having experimented with DPI based advertising , without telling the subscribers about it , and with Charter in the US looking into trialling it (or as has just been announced – discouraged from it) it is a pressing concern. Fortunately, some people are not exhibiting the apathy mentioned above, and are doing something about it. Alex Hanff (you might remember his tangle with the MPAA) has been studiously working against the likes of Phorm, and indeed, we linked to his dissertation on it last time. He is holding a protest outside British Telecom’s AGM next month, to protest this rape of user’s privacy for commercial gain.

While the protest might be mainly against advertising based systems, it’s a worry for all net users, and needs to be dealt with by something other than apathy. At least one torrent site admin has told me he will be there and I may be there, but the more that attend, the better. So, users of the world, it’s time to start acting for what you believe in, and stop just moaning about it.

Source: Deep Packet Inspection and Your Privacy Online

At the same time however, customers of BitTorrent’s video store – a direct competitor to Bell’s store – and BitTorrent users in general see their traffic being throttled. Why? Bell says there is not enough bandwidth available.

The claim that there is not enough bandwidth to go round is suspicious to say the least, and Bell’s response to this data crisis is even more puzzling. Instead of investing money in their network capacity, they simply slow down the connections of their subscribers while ignoring the source of the problem.

To top it off, Bell decided to launch a competing video download service. So while they throttle customers using the efficient BitTorrent protocol because they supposedly generate too much traffic, Bell launches a bandwidth-hogging download store of their own. Not only does this seem unfair to their own customers, it also negatively affects other video services that base their business model on BitTorrent.

The throttling efforts by Bell and other ISPs actually hurt companies such as BitTorrent Inc and Vuze. These companies both offer products that depend on BitTorrent and they become pretty much worthless when BitTorrent traffic is throttled.

Since Bell now has its own video store, the ISP is actively degrading the service their BitTorrent based competitors offer. That is, Bell users will probably not choose a video download service based on BitTorrent because they can get only a few kilobits per second when the network is “busy”.

Instead of investing in more Internet gateway capacity and peering agreements, Bell instead chooses to launch a video store. Perhaps it’s time for Bell and other ISPs to think ahead – BitTorrent is not going away and there will only be more ‘bandwidth hogging’ services in the future.

Or maybe this just an anti-competitive move by Bell?

Source: Bell Opens Video Download Store, but Continues to Throttle BitTorrent

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.

1. Comcast, USA

Source: Test: Does Your ISP Slow Down BitTorrent Traffic?

A few months ago Azureus petitioned the FCC, which led to a FCC hearing in February. One of the complaints from the commission was that there is little data available on the scope of BitTorrent throttling, a gap Azureus now tries to fill by collecting data on the prevalence of TCP-resets among ISPs worldwide.

Last month Azureus published a plugin through which users can help distinguishing the good from the bad ISPs, and today we have a preview of some early findings. A massive 1,000,000 hours of data from over 8000 users has been collected over the past few weeks. The preliminary results again confirm that Comcast continues to use TCP-resets to manage BitTorrent traffic on their network, but they are not alone.

The rest of the Vuze/Azureus report (pdf) includes the median reset rates for hundreds of other ISPs

TCP resets seem to be more common for American ISPs, and Comcast leads the bunch. The Azureus team has sent a letter to Cablevision, Cogeco, BellSouth and AOL, where they request that the companies are open about their BitTorrent throttling practices. Thus far, the ISPs have not responded to the letters.

At the bottom of the list we see the good ISPs, mostly from Europe. There are other ways to throttle BitTorrent traffic, besides using TCP-resets, a list of ISPs who are known to limit BitTorrent traffic is available on the Azureus Wiki.

It has to be noted that the data gathering techniques Vuze uses are far from optimal. The plugin detects all TCP resets on a connection and doesn’t make a distinction between BitTorrent and other traffic, and there is no control group.

The Azureus/Vuze team will continue to collect data, and stated:

“We believe that there is sufficient data to suggest that network management practices that ‘throttle’ Internet traffic are widespread. At a minimum, more investigation is required to determine whether these resets are happening in the ordinary course of business or whether they represent the kind of throttling practices which target specific applications and/or protocols, harming the consumer experience and stifling innovation.”

The preliminary results presented here do indeed indicate that Comcast is not the only ISP that uses TCP resets to slow down BitTorrent traffic. People are encouraged to continue using the plugin so more robust data can be presented in the near future.

Source: BitTorrent Throttling ISPs Exposed by Azureus

“We at Vuze (Azureus) decided there was something important you can do to help elevate the debate,” says Jay Monahan, General Counsel at Azureus. “We created a simple software “plug-in” that works with your Vuze (Azureus) application to gather information about potential interference with your Internet traffic.”

The main purpose of the plugin is to gather factual data on which ISPs are throttling with BitTorrent, and to what extent. Already there is an ever growing list of bad ISPs available at the Azureus wiki, but the data from the plugin will make their case even stronger.

When the first ISPs started to throttle BitTorrent traffic, Azureus was one of the first BitTorrent clients to introduce a countermeasure, namely, protocol header encryption. However, this was only the beginning of an ongoing cat and mouse game between ISPs and BitTorrent client developers.

Unfortunately, BitTorrent encryption doesn’t work against the more aggressive, and ever evolving throttling applications. Even though there is a Comcast proof BitTorrent encryption in the making, it is always easier to use political means to stop ISPs from messing with our traffic in the first place. The plugin is listed at Azureus’ Sourceforge page if you want to help out.

For the paranoid BitTorrent users among us, Monahan guarantees that the data will be sent anonymously. “Be assured that sharing this data with us does not involve disclosure of any of your personally identifiable information. We will aggregate the data and may talk about it or disclose it publicly, but no data about any specific user will be disclosed as part of this effort.”

Source: Help Azureus to Fight BitTorrent Throttling ISPs

BitTorrent throttling has been going on for a few years now, but it is getting more attention lately, because the number of people who use BitTorrent keeps growing. The traffic shaping methods used vary from ISP to ISP. Some only limit BitTorrent traffic during certain times of the day, or throttle in specific regions. Others take a more aggressive approach and prevent their customers from seeding, or even downloading .torrent files.

Some people might wonder why ISPs throttle their connection. The argument most often used is that all the BitTorrent traffic on their network slows down other customers’ connections. An argument that makes sense (if it is true), but the real problem is that ISPs tend to be secretive about their throttling efforts. If it really is that big of a problem, be open about it, and let your customers know what they can and cannot do.

Art Reisman, who is chief technical officer at APConnections – a company that happens to manufacture traffic shaping devices, lists some of the possible solutions ISPs can implement in order to cope with the “BitTorrent problem”, which he wanted to share here.

1.) Ask for voluntary cooperation.

One recourse would be to ask customers to scale back on torrents, or to use them at night or another time when network usage is low. There is plenty of precedent in the Green movement to recycle and to reduce carbon footprints. So why not a campaign to scale back BitTorrent usage ?

The downside: Can you imagine a service provider sending a letter to its customer base outlining the technical limitations of allowing unlimited BitTorrent applications, and then asking for some voluntary cooperation? Me neither. Perhaps someday, but for now providers are viewed as a profit-driven adversary by most customers.

The upside: Seems to have a warm, fuzzy, feel-good ring to it.

2.) Keep connections within the providers network.

This is the method currently practiced with help from a popular product provided by Sandvine. The basic idea is that on a large provider network there are enough BitTorrent hosts that a client need not leave the provider’s network to retrieve content.

The downside: Consumers are suspicious of providers looking at their data to make determinations on what type of traffic it is. The consumer may also not get good results if the bulk of the content were located outside their providers network; for example, if a user were to download a file that was popular in Europe, the number of servers hosting it on the Comcast network might be limited.

The upside: Consumers are still freely able to find most BitTorrent content. Providers greatly reduce connections and exchange costs with other providers.

3.) Usage based quotas.

With this method a service provider will charge much higher rates when a preset amount of data usage is exceeded over a calendar month.

The upside: This method is unobtrusive in that the provider need not look at a customer’s data, only their total usage. Experience with university residential networks has shown that once quotas are announced users voluntarily reduce their peer-to-peer or BitTorrent usage.

The downside: More complex billing detail and customer service to resolve disputes. Large providers will still compete by marketing their service as unlimited. Despite the rants about BitTorrent being a resource issue, it is still only a small percentage of total customers that use it.

4.) Limit the total connections allowed at one time per user.

The upside: It’s simple and fair to implement. Providers already set rate caps on Internet speeds, so this is just a rate cap on connections, very similar and easy to swallow for the consumer.

The downside: When users reach their allotted connection limit, all traffic on their link slows down.

5.) Build out networks to handle the increased load and pass the cost onto the consumer.

The upside: It works.

The downside: It’s most likely not economically sustainable. Without some other form of mitigation, the public’s appetite for content appears insatiable.

6.) Cancel the service of users who abuse their privileges. There have been reports of providers doing this already.

The upside: It moves an unprofitable customer off your network and onto a competitor.

The downside: Customers begin to despise you.

Here at TorrentFreak we have discussed some of these alternatives before, and in the long run there is really only one solution that is acceptable. The Internet is only a few years old, if the plan is to keep using it in the future, ISPs need to upgrade their networks. So, invest in more Internet gateway capacity, 10Gbps interconnect ports, and peering agreements. BitTorrent users are not the problem, they only signal that the ISPs need to upgrade their capacity, because customers will only get more demanding in the future. The Internet is not only about sending email, and browsing on text based websites anymore.

Art Reisman told TorrentFreak that that there are two solutions that make sense to him: “Raise rates per usage volume instead of flat rates, if it can be kept simple! Second is to limit customer connections as a resource.” Charging for bandwidth uses makes sense indeed, as long as the prices are reasonable. The second option of limiting the number of connections only looks like a temporary fix though.

What do you think?

Source: Decluttering The Tubes, Solutions to the BitTorrent “Problem”?

Jon Hart, a Comcast subscriber from California couldn’t take it anymore and decided to take legal action. He filed a class-action lawsuit on Tuesday and demands that Comcast stops the BitTorrent traffic interference. In addition he wants Comcast to pay him, and all other Comcast customers in California, damages for not giving him the “crazy fast speeds” they advertised.

Threat Level asked Comcast for a response to this news, but the spokesman put them off with his default response: “Comcast does not, has not, and will not block any websites or online applications, including peer-to-peer services”. Semantically speaking they are totally right, they don’t block any applications or websites, they do however, actively disconnect peer-to-peer connections, making it impossible for many users to seed files on BitTorrent.

Hart is not the only one taking action against Comcast, the people behind SaveTheInternet have also formed a coalition and plan to demand $195,000 for all the customers who are affected.

Comcast is using an application from the broadband management company Sandvine to throttle BitTorrent traffic. The application is installed at the cable modem termination system and breaks every (seed) connection with new peers after a few seconds. This means that Comcast is not simply slowing down connections, they actually disconnect peer-to-peer transfers.

We wish Jon all the best, let’s hope justice will be served. In the meantime, here’s an article that explains how to bypass Comcast’s BitTorrent interference.

Source: Comcast Sued Over BitTorrent Traffic Interference

BitTorrent throttling is not a new phenomenon, ISPs have been doing it for years. When the first ISPs started to throttle BitTorrent traffic most BitTorrent clients introduced a countermeasure, namely, protocol header encryption. This was the beginning of an ongoing cat and mouse game between ISPs and BitTorrent client developers.

Some people might wonder why ISPs throttle their connection. The argument most often used is that all the BitTorrent traffic on their network slows down other customers’ connections. An argument that makes sense (if it is true), but the real problem is that ISPs tend to be secretive about their throttling efforts. My advice to them, if you decide to limit BitTorrent traffic, be open about it and don’t advertise unlimited bandwidth.

So who are these ISPs? Here’s a brief overview of some of the bad guys, take a look at the Azureus wiki for an regularly updated list of throttling ISPs (worldwide).

Canada

The Canadian ISPs Shaw and Rogers were the early adopters of BitTorrent traffic shapers. The first reports date back to 2005, and earlier this year Rogers even decided to block all encrypted traffic, just to make sure that BitTorrent protocol encryption didn’t work.

Other Canadian ISPs that are known to throttle or limit BitTorrent traffic are Bell Sympatico, Cogeco, Eastlink and Explornet. Rogers and Cogeco are the only ISPs that actively prevent people from seeding files on BitTorrent, similar to Comcast.

UK

There haven’t been a lot of reports on British ISPs that mess with BitTorrent traffic, but this doesn’t mean that they don’t. Pipex, one of the largest ISPs in the UK, is notorious for it’s war against BitTorrent. They throttle BitTorrent traffic, especially during peak times, and they also throttle all encrypted traffic. Other UK ISPs that throttle BitTorrent traffic are BT Broadband, Freedom2Surf and TalkTalk. Virgin Media does not specifically target BitTorrent traffic, they simply throttle all traffic during peak times.

US

Hundreds of sites have reported on the Comcast throttling/interference issues, but Qwest and Atlantic Broadband do just the same thing. RCN/Starpower, Adelphia Cable Communications and Cablevision’s Optimum Online have found to prevent seeding, but do not throttle BitTorrent traffic.

The Solution?

As mentioned before, The developers of uTorrent, Bitcomet and Azureus added support for protocol header encryption to their clients. Encryption seemed to work for well in most cases, more details can be found here. If encryption isn’t working you might want to try one of the alternatives described in this article.

Source: The War Against BitTorrent: Attack of the ISPs

Millions of people around the globe share files and most do so without a second thought for privacy issues. A lot don’t know that it’s possible for people to monitor their online activities and equally, many will know that they can be monitored but chance their hand that they are one in millions and will probably slip under the radar.

For an increasing number of net users, privacy and a level of anonymity is becoming a requirement, especially for those in locales where ridiculous fines and prison sentences are becoming more prevalent. Those faced with the menace of P2P meddling ISPs or those hassled by the nuisance of sites being blocked can solve all of these problems with a VPN – a Virtual Private Network service.

Anyone looking for a Relakks alternative (who doesn’t wish to read my rantings!) should scroll to the section below marked: “Relakks Alternatives”

The Rise and Fall of Relakks

When Relakks burst on to the scene in late 2006 it was heralded as the “world’s first commercial darknet”, promising to hide your online identity in exchange for a small fee. As a big privacy fan (some might say ‘obsessive’), I immediately signed up for this service and have been a customer ever since. Sadly, I’ve had enough.

Although great for web browsing and running one or two torrents at a time, ask it to handle more than a handful of torrents and the whole connection simply stops responding. I’ve seen many other Relakks users with this same problem and to come home from many hours out, eager to sample what you downloaded today only to find a dead connection, it’s an annoyance. When you were supposed to be seeding a friend’s Hip-Hop album all night and it died after 6mb uploaded and no-one got anything, it’s a major hassle and time to complain to Relakks. Again.

Relaxed Customer Service

Any member of Relakks will tell you – their customer support is VERY ‘relaxed’. Send them a complaint or a query – it takes at least 3 days to get a response. My multiple questions about the ‘dropped connection’ issue always resulted in ‘you have a firewall issue’ response and this is a standard response to people complaining about this. The Relakks ‘News/Status‘ page is never updated, it’s useless.

There have been many, many days where service has been sporadic at best but recently the entire Relakks network was down from Friday to Monday so I ran out of patience and complained in my capacity as TorrentFreak writer – surely this would be enough? I wrote a highly detailed email looking for some definitive answers and the great response from support@relakks.com after multiple attempts at different times was: ‘Undeliverable’

Relakks you have lost me – not on price but customer service. I have you emailed you many, many times over the months, you have never solved my problems. Your service is cheap but when I pay for a premium service I expect support – I get better support from free BitTorrent sites. Time to protest by spending elsewhere – if only I hadn’t paid you 12 months in advance.

Relakks Alternatives

VPNOut kindly got in touch to let us sample their service but due to issues with the host PC (it wasn’t VPNOut’s fault) that trial never really got off the ground but already, responses and customer service levels were way above what i’d experienced with Relakks.

Moving on, I came across VPNTunnel and I thought I’d give it a try. Sadly I had the same installation issues as I did with VPNOut but it was at this point where you really appreciate a company who not only wants your business, but is prepared to bend over backwards to get it. With nearly 20 years in sales, I know good service when I see it and VPNTunnel’s blew me away.

After complaining I couldn’t install VPNTunnel’s software (my PC’s fault, not theirs) a customer support guy got in touch within minutes and over the course of the next 24 hours and number of emails later resulted in me receiving a custom version of their software, tailored to my exact requirements! I was back in business and loving the contrast in customer service levels. Now for a trial run.

After loading 3 torrents and allowing each to connect to a minimum of 10 peers, more torrents were loaded, totaling 15. The connection remained stable with a total speed of around 5mbit, which compares to Relakks. Stability remained for all transfers even after simultaneous downloads were initiated on both IRC and Usenet. More speed would be nice but given the choice, I’ll take reliability instead. A generous 50gig monthly limit is more than enough for me.

Relakks (Sweden) do not reveal what information they hold on their customers but say they won’t give it up unless ordered to in a criminal case carrying a penalty of 2 years in jail. VPNTunnel (based in Scotland) obviously keep your payment data but only carry log in information (your real IP address) for 30 days and there are signs this may decrease further to 21 days. Any potential legal action would need to move at an unprecedented speed to have even a small chance of identifying someone.

File-sharers are notoriously difficult to please – they get everything for free and still expect customer service from torrent sites and the like. So when a file-sharer actually puts his hand in his pocket to pay for a service, he expects to be treated well. I think deep down I’m more angry with myself than Relakks. I’ve promoted Relakks for 12 months to thousands of people and then in the end, couldn’t take my own advice.

You weren’t all bad Relakks, you just took me for granted and although I’ll end up paying more with VPNTunnel, it’s worth it, if only to get stability and that ‘wanted’ feeling.

Here ends my first ever Tor-Rant. Deep breaths….in……out….

Source: Getting Stressed Out With Anonymous BitTorrent

Comcast is using an application from the broadband management company Sandvine to throttle BitTorrent traffic. It breaks every (seed) connection with new peers after a few seconds if it’s not a Comcast user inside your community boundary. According to some Comcast technicians, who were brave enough to tell the truth, these Sandvine boxes are installed at the cable modem termination system. As a result, it is virtually impossible to seed a file, especially in small swarms without any neighboring Comcast users.

The good news is that there are several ways to fight back and get BitTorrent up and running again. Robb Topolski, a networking and protocol expert summed up some of the workarounds that reportedly solve the throttling issues.

What is working

1. Quite a few Comcast users report that forcing protocol header encryption completely eliminates the problems. This is the easiest solution since most BitTorrent clients support encryption. Please note that simply enabling encryption is not enough, it has to be forced. More details on how to do this can be found over here.

2. Another successfully workaround is to run BitTorrent over encrypted tunnels such as SSH or VPN. BitTorrent over SSH works, but it will cripple the servers of the SSH providers if you plan to use it permanently. A VPN service such as Relakks or VPNTunnel is a better option, and it is worth a few bucks.

3. Comcast prevents seeding, if you’re on a private tracker, and want to share as much as possible, an easy solution is to lower your download rate. When downloading, make sure that you have met your uploading goal by the time that the download completes. The easiest way to accomplish this is to set a download rate slower than the uploading rate. This of course is not an optimal solution because your download will never be faster than you upload speed.

4. One of the best options, if possible, is to switch to another ISP.

What is not working

1. Some people suggested that setting your firewall to drop RST packets could be effective, however, this is not the case. The RST-messages Comcast sends go in both directions, ignoring the RST on only one side creates a useless half-open connection.

2. According to most reports, enabling the Lazy Bitfield option in your BitTorrent client doesn’t solve the problem either

3. Reporting the issue to Technical Support. No explanation needed here.

4. Grab a hammer, visit the Comcast office, smash a keyboard and knock over a monitor. This might sound like a great alternative but apparently it only results in jail time.

I would advise affected Comcast subscribers to play around with these alternatives, some solutions that work for one person, might not work for another. Do you have another solution that is not reported here? Let us know in the comments!

Source: How To Bypass Comcast’s BitTorrent Throttling

I wouldn’t recommend BitTorrent over SSH as a permanent solution since it will cripple the servers of the SSH providers. If you’re looking for a long term solution check out a VPN service such as BTGuard.

1. Get an SSH account.

You need an SSH account in order to get this working. You can try one of these free shell providers from this list.

2. Download, Install and Configure Putty

Download Putty, store it somewhere on your computer and run it. In the session screen enter the host name, the port number (22), and tick the connection type box (SSH).

Next, go to SSH –> Tunnels, enter a source port and tick the dynamic box. I’m using port 23456, but you are free to choose any post you like as long as it’s available.

When you’re done, it might be a good idea to save the session so you don’t have to enter the info next time you run Putty. If you’re ready, hit the “open” button in the session screen. A command-line interface will pop-up so enter your username and password that you received from your shell-provider, and you’re done.

3. Configure your BitTorrent client.

The last step is to configure your BitTorrent client. I will show you how it’s done in uTorrent and Azureus but other BitTorrent clients use a similar setup.

uTorrent: go to Options > Preferences > Connection. Enter your port number (I use 23456), socks 4 or 5 as type, and localhost in the proxy field.

Azureus: go to Tools > Options > Connection > Proxy Options. Tick the “Enable proxying of tracker communications” and “I have a SOCKS proxy” box. Next, enter your port number in the port field (I use 23456) and localhost in the host field.

When you’re done, restart your BitTorrent client and you’re ready to go. BitTorrent over SSH tends to be a bit slower than your normal connection, but it’s a great solution when BitTorrent connections are blocked or throttled.

For those on a Mac OSX, please check out this great tutorial (which in part inspired this article) for more details. It includes instructions on how to do this on a Mac, using Azureus.

Source: BitTorrent: Bypass any Firewall or Throttling ISP with SSH

Moxie, a Comcast customer who replied to a post on Silicon Alley, points out that when you log your network activity with an application like Wireshark, you’ll notice that Comcast servers start sending reset messages as soon as a download is finished, exactly as we described it.

With Wireshark in the background run your BitTorrent application. Wait until completed and watch Wireshark, notice when it finishes seeding Comcast servers send out a reset command every second to your computer noted by the highlighted red line in Wireshark. It is 8:30 pm Monday pst and Comcast is still resting my BitTorrent connections. Maybe the PR guy didn’t get the email from the VP of Networking.

It might be that not every Comcast customer is equally affected, but a significant percentage is. Not only the 10+ users we talked to before we first reported this issue, but also hundreds of additional commenters here on TorrentFreak, and elsewhere. Some users even captured the throttling in progress on video (download), and anyone has to agree that this does look very suspicious.

More evidence comes from Robb Topolski, a networking and protocol expert with more than 25 years of experience, who first wrote about this issue on DSLReports. He told TorrentFreak: “We have had two Comcast techs confirm Sandvine in use, but neither confirmed or denied its connection with the RST interference. For me, seeding is possible. I can reach my upload speed limit, but there sure is a lot of interference. Since your article came out, I too have received many reports of seeding being impossible. I’m not sure if it’s regional, or what!”

For the networking savvy people among us, here’s an example of real RST interference on an unencrypted BitTorrent connection. In this case, it happens right after the bitfields are exchanged

Nevertheless Comcast spokesman Charlie Douglas said in a response to Light Reading: “We’re not blocking access to any application, and we don’t throttle any traffic”. He might be right here semantically speaking, they are not throttling anything, they just kill all outgoing connections when a clients starts to seed a file. But the fact is that Comcast is making it impossible for (at least some) customers to share files with non-Comcast users over BitTorrent.

Luckily there is a fix for this problem, and we know that at least two BitTorrent client developers are including this fix in their next update.

Source: Comcast Wrongfully Denies Interfering with BitTorrent

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.

Source: Comcast Throttles BitTorrent Traffic, Seeding Impossible