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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Okay, I tested my ISP which is HughesNet (domain name direcpc.com) and found out some interesting things. Instead of throttling individual ports related to torrents, as soon as they detect you’re accessing a torrent they THROTTLE YOUR SUBNET and everything behind it. Once I did the test, I was only able to download at 10KB until 12AM, EST. So Hughes will let your torrents through without shaping them, but will then flag your ENTIRE connection! They should be added to the list.
Also, the azureus bad ISPs wiki entry for direcpc.com is totally wrong: http://www.azureuswiki.com/index.php/Bad_ISPs#United_States_of_America
HughesNet has NO real flatrate, LIMITS bandwidth during certain times of the day. LIMITS bandwidth for accounts with a high traffic volume, and should have a proposed encryption level of 3+ (as soon as they see a classic BT port being used, they will throttle everything on your subnet, not just torrents.)
well my isp isnt throttling, but neither of my torrents are downloading at all….
Comcast, Cox block BitTorrent 24/7
Posted by Richard Koman @ May 15, 2008 @ 8:52 PM
http://government.zdnet.com/?p=3822
Comcraptastic gets great download speeds… and then its TCP RST packets on all connections trying to be open to seed. 100% seeding connections were dropped because of a forged TCP RST packet according to the test.
nothing new though, I leave uTorrent on all night and it doesn’t seed a damn thing. Not one KB.
Telekom Srbija everything works fine :) Im happy
I’m on Comcast but have been unable to run the test. I wish they could find more servers.
Usenet wins every time
We are sorry, the test failed due to a problem.
get that every single time
Good results from Rogers here in Canada.
http://blog.andresvalera.com
Unsurprisengly my comcast is blocking my bittorrent traffic down in FL. A few months ago my upload speed dropped from 90KB/s to 45KB/s. Well its better that a total block, at least I can still seed files I download.
Comcast HAS admitted in hearings (and reported in various newspapers) that they DO limit the speeds for Bittorents!
The company admits that Bittorent users congest the cable bandwidth thereby slowing everyone else’s speed!
If that’s the case, why is Comcast advertising that their service is “speedy”?
All Comcast’s “Speedboost” feature does is compress the first megs of the data then sends it speedily off.
But what if the person is online for “hours”????
What a joke!
Don’t want to pitch for any company but… Verizon’s Fios service is MUCH better and faster than Comcast’s service!
Verizon’s Fios service also does NOT limit the speed! Woo-Hoo!
So glad not a Comcast subscriber anymore!!
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