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
Previously: New York Piracy Law Smells Fishy Says Pirates
Next: TorrentSpy Slapped with $110 Million Judgement
97 Responses (Add yours or TrackBack)
Pages: « 1 2 [3] 4 » Show All
I’m on DirectPC (aka. HughesNet), and for the last 3 days utorrent has NOT been able to connent to any trackers.
Also reguler internet is as slow as dailup for the same 3 days.
I called them and they said “I’m sorry but I do not know”, so yeah just wait “a week” and “see if it “gets better”!!
I’m I alone?
Comcast, Ft. Lauderdale, FL
Messing with uploads on all ports. Nothing on downloads, surprisingly.
[quote comment="378578"][quote comment="378565"][/quote][/quote]
I agree!
I cant host a server for them, have a windows 2003 server running…. a shame…
Want to test still too, trying total day now. didn’t get through.
let other people do the test! this isn’t only an America’s issue.
look at the stats:
Country # measured
Canada 988
France 377
Germany 342
Neth. 372
U K 378
U S 1527
—-
Greece 10
I had the chance to run the test twice, but when it finished, both times, my DSL disconnected so i haven’t seen my results yet. Is there an issue with the USB modem?
tried a lot over the last day and still can’t get on their stupid lame servers. ah well
has anyone else not been able to take the test due to it being too busy ever since this article came out?
its comcast doing it!#
It’s well known, and in the news, that the Candian provider Bell Sympatico, throttles bittorrent traffic. That’s a good one to add to the list.
Absolutely no indication of throttling using orange.fr (France Telecom) just across the border from Geneva (St. Genis-Pouilly).
I’ve been trying to test my Mobile ISP but with no luck so far, Iam from Russia I seen only 2 checks have been done from Russia…
Got the test running after about 5 refreshes - not too bad.
I’m on Virgin Media 2Mb Cable and it told me that there is no evidence of throttling of any sort, which seems strange as other Virgin Media users have reported throttling!
It even says my BitTorrent upload/download is faster than my TCP!, heh.
13 references to this post
Pages: « 1 2 [3] 4 » Show All
Add your response