Test: Does Your ISP Slow Down BitTorrent Traffic?
Written by Ernesto on May 07, 2008Hundreds of larger and smaller ISPs all over the world try to limit BitTorrent traffic on their networks. Unfortunately, most companies are not very open about their network management solutions, with Comcast as the prime example. Thanks to the Glasnost project, you can now test wheter your ISP is one of the bad guys.
A while back we posted about the plugin Azureus had developed, which allowed people to check whether their ISP is interfering with their traffic. The results showed that indeed quite a few ISPs were, but the plugin didn’t provide the user with direct feedback.
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
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I got all green ;). Switzerland - Swisscom (Bluewin) VDSL 20′000. If anyone wonders.
Lot of throttling in the US.. *wonders why*
[quote comment="378685"]FIRST! ZOMG! IM FIRST!!![/quote]
Don’t laugh, being first seems to be important to a number of the specimens here.
Most likely THE high point in most of their pathetic existences.
Comcast has been reported as NOT interfering with BT traffic. Woo-hoo. Mind you, this is northern new england. Dunno if it’s the same everywhere.
Glasnost… Excellent choice of name :)
mines throttles from 2pm til 2am
so still get nice speeds overnight, but its annoying when i want something quickly in the afternoon
Why is this tool checking bittorrent speed against non-bittorrent speed? First off, speeds tests are unreliable - there are too many factors for them to be useful. If you then apply speed tests to bit torrent, you will get all sorts of differing numbers. A better and more fullproof solution would be to check for RST packets, and to check speeds against bittorrent traffic from different locations and peers during different times. Really though, either way you look at it, checking bittorrent speeds is not a reliable method to see if you are being throttled.
I believe Post 32 above (Valect) is completely right. Speed doesn’t measure diddly.
my ISP , telus , aparrently does not throttle bit torrent[in british columbia, Canada]. THat’s awsome. Glad I made a nice decision.
#22 is an idiot they DO test for rst packets jesus christ people are fucking morons and need keep their mouth shut if they dont know what they are talking about.
Note: ISPs may throttle (rate-limit) BitTorrent traffic without blocking it. The results we present here are limited to hosts whose BitTorrent transfers to our servers are interrupted by RST packets generated by some ISP along the path. We do not report throttling as blocking, and thus we do not mark such throttled hosts in red.
[quote comment="378912"]Why is this tool checking bittorrent speed against non-bittorrent speed?[/quote]
Err, shouldn’t that be rather obvious? Is it not true that the service performs a test, or tests, to try to determine whether there be a discrepency between differing file-transfer protocols thus indicative of biased traffic policy?
[quote comment="378912"]First off, speeds tests are unreliable - there are too many factors for them to be useful. If you then apply speed tests to bit torrent, you will get all sorts of differing numbers.[/quote]
If a result indicated HTTP:80 transfers hitting 100KB/s, yet BitTorrent protocol transfers hitting only 30KB/s, would this not prove a useful indicator of manipulative traffic policy?
[quote comment="378912"]A better and more fullproof solution would be to check for RST packets, and to check speeds against bittorrent traffic from different locations and peers during different times.[/quote]
No, testing for RST packets is quite a bullshit way of doing things, it doesn’t reveal much and is far from fool-proof. Very few ISPs throttling BitTorrent traffic do so by utilising spoofed-packet injection. It would though, indeed, be worthwhile to run such tests from a multiple of locations at different times though I don’t think you can really blame the site for that.
I don’t think it applies in Australia as it’s all slow here. The fast transfer speeds have a monthly limit of about 2 Mb so we wouldn’t have time to test it and the test would take us over that limit, so it’s only for newbs to get sucked in and they wouldn’t know the first thing about a PC
[quote comment="378802"]Glasnost… Excellent choice of name :)[/quote]
Again I say users should refrain or be restrained from replying to their own posts!
I wonder if they’ll come up with plugins for different torrent clients …
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