The War Against BitTorrent: Attack of the ISPs
Written by Ernesto on November 06, 2007There has been a lot of fuss lately about Comcast’s efforts to throttle and interfere with BitTorrent traffic, but they are by no means the only ISP involved in such efforts. Hundreds of larger and smaller ISPs all around the world try to limit BitTorrent traffic on their networks, time to give an overview, the war is on.
The degree of traffic shaping varies a lot between different ISPs. Some only limit BitTorrent traffic during some 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. The fact is, all the ISPs listed here have been caught - one way or another - messing with BitTorrent transfers.
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.
Previously: Getting Stressed Out With Anonymous BitTorrent
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83 Responses (Add yours or TrackBack)
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Torrent on a VPS then leech from it using SCP.
Transmission, a mac bittorrent client, also supports protocol header encryption.
http://transmission.m0k.org
Used to be http://www.fast4.net was happy with me downloading 200GB’s +! a month and whilst they continue to advertise no FUP
“Pipex, one of the largest ISPs in the UK, is notorious for it’s war against BitTorrent.”
I did notice torrent downloads were getting really slow on Pipex lately. I am going to switch to Be There once my contract runs out next month.
Oh and, fuck you Pipex.
I am in the uk
BE internet rules i get full speed all the time get a ping of 10ms when gaming in uk servers unlike other isps out there
so if you looking for good isp in the uk
go for Be There
i do not work for them
its just a good service and thought i would share with you guys
“Rogers even decided to block all encrypted traffic”
This is not true, although I’ve seen this bit of misinformation spread far and wide.
As a Rogers customer in Toronto, I can say that they are definitely not blocking or shaping encrypted traffic per se; My partner uses VPN for work all the time, and has not ever had any problems. I use VPN to bypass their torrent throttling, and have never had any issues.
Nor do they appear to be blocking or restricting torrent downloads. Currently, what they’re doing is severely restricting torrent upload speeds.
With a VPN, my torrents upload at full speed. Without a VPN, I can still download quite fast, but uploading is a snail’s pace of less than 10k/s, and often less than 5k/s.
+1
I am in the uk
BE internet rules i get full speed all the time get a ping of 10ms when gaming in uk servers unlike other isps out there
so if you looking for good isp in the uk
go for Be There
i do not work for them
its just a good service and thought i would share with you guys
In UK, AOL also limits the use of p2p significantly. Everyday, between 9:00am and 10:00pm, you cannot use p2p at all. The speed is only 1-2kps. I used their service for one year, finally I changed to another ISP.
Terrible experience!!!!
I think we should have a list or a database that stores all of the ISPs that take actions against p2p, so that people can avoid using them.
These ISPs will lose out in the end, because they just make the good ISPs that much more attractive.
On that note, I use Cox (in the eastern US) and like them a lot. The Azureus wiki says they throttle heavy users, but after months of heavy torrenting, I haven’t observed even that; speeds are excellent.
I’m a comcast customer, quite a happy one as that. I’m also a server administrator, the throttling of bit torrent makes ALOT of sense from their perspective. I’m being given 8mbit/1mbit service for $50/month (a pretty damn good deal, IMO). Now, in order for them to ensure that they are able to continuously offer quality service to all of their customers, they need to make sure that no one person is using insane amounts of bandwidth hogging all of their resources. They have two options in this regard:
1.) offer a slower service without rate limiting on bit torrent
2.) offer a high-speed service that rate limits bit torrent for the same price
In that situation, I would probably be going for option #2 as well. In the end, I’m still getting very nice speeds on bit torrent (~600kBps where I cap it anyways) and still having enough bandwidth left over to run whatever else I am needing to do instead of saturating their network.
Most p2p users do not realize the amount of resources that they are using when they share insane amounts and download consistently at the full speed of their connection. Granted it is their right, but it also is not their network. It’s comcast, and they have a duty to all of their clients to ensure that they offer quality service to everyone - not just file sharers. At the router level there is only so much bandwidth that can distributed between each cable connection, it’s not as simple as “I pay for this much therefor I get this much” because there are ALOT of people wanting X amount of BW, and for $50 a month, 8mbit/1mbit connections are a steal (go price that out at a datacenter (without a monthly cap), see what it costs, alot more than $50/m I assure you).
Just my thoughts on this whole “conspiracy” against p2p users.
[quote comment="205166"]“Rogers even decided to block all encrypted traffic”
This is not true, although I’ve seen this bit of misinformation spread far and wide.
As a Rogers customer in Toronto, I can say that they are definitely not blocking or shaping encrypted traffic per se; My partner uses VPN for work all the time, and has not ever had any problems. I use VPN to bypass their torrent throttling, and have never had any issues.
Nor do they appear to be blocking or restricting torrent downloads. Currently, what they’re doing is severely restricting torrent upload speeds.
With a VPN, my torrents upload at full speed. Without a VPN, I can still download quite fast, but uploading is a snail’s pace of less than 10k/s, and often less than 5k/s.[/quote]
A VPN is not encryption. It is a virtual private network and nothing is encrypted just rerouted .
[quote comment="205222"][quote comment="205166"]“Rogers even decided to block all encrypted traffic”
This is not true, although I’ve seen this bit of misinformation spread far and wide.
As a Rogers customer in Toronto, I can say that they are definitely not blocking or shaping encrypted traffic per se; My partner uses VPN for work all the time, and has not ever had any problems. I use VPN to bypass their torrent throttling, and have never had any issues.
Nor do they appear to be blocking or restricting torrent downloads. Currently, what they’re doing is severely restricting torrent upload speeds.
With a VPN, my torrents upload at full speed. Without a VPN, I can still download quite fast, but uploading is a snail’s pace of less than 10k/s, and often less than 5k/s.[/quote]
A VPN is not encryption. It is a virtual private network and nothing is encrypted just rerouted .[/quote]
A properly set up VPN is over SSL.
But I highly doubt they are blocking SSL-encrypted traffic. If they are, I need to move to canada as a security consultant.
Yeah well then they should mention in their ToS and contracts that they limit BT use, instead of lying about it like they do now.
That’s what makes comcast a bunch of assholes, they lie to their cutomers and try to cover the whole thing up.
For around $40 I get 100/10 here in sweden, that is a good deal.
Jellies,
I’m envious of your swedish connection, for the USA 8/1 is amazing. But we’re also a much bigger country.
[quote comment="205218"]I’m a comcast customer, quite a happy one as that. I’m also a server administrator, the throttling of bit torrent makes ALOT of sense from their perspective. I’m being given 8mbit/1mbit service for $50/month (a pretty damn good deal, IMO). Now, in order for them to ensure that they are able to continuously offer quality service to all of their customers, they need to make sure that no one person is using insane amounts of bandwidth hogging all of their resources. They have two options in this regard:
1.) offer a slower service without rate limiting on bit torrent
2.) offer a high-speed service that rate limits bit torrent for the same price
In that situation, I would probably be going for option #2 as well. In the end, I’m still getting very nice speeds on bit torrent (~600kBps where I cap it anyways) and still having enough bandwidth left over to run whatever else I am needing to do instead of saturating their network.
Most p2p users do not realize the amount of resources that they are using when they share insane amounts and download consistently at the full speed of their connection. Granted it is their right, but it also is not their network. It’s comcast, and they have a duty to all of their clients to ensure that they offer quality service to everyone - not just file sharers. At the router level there is only so much bandwidth that can distributed between each cable connection, it’s not as simple as “I pay for this much therefor I get this much” because there are ALOT of people wanting X amount of BW, and for $50 a month, 8mbit/1mbit connections are a steal (go price that out at a datacenter (without a monthly cap), see what it costs, alot more than $50/m I assure you).
Just my thoughts on this whole “conspiracy” against p2p users.[/quote]
Perhaps if ISPs wanted to eliminate the “conspiracy”, they could take some very simple measures:
1)Explain why you can’t even buy (from a major ISP)a connection speed that is readily available in both Europe and Asia
2)Define bandwith limits. If the TOS says I have 8/1, then that means I should have atleast half of that availible at all times.
3)Define how many gigs per month are acceptable. If you can’t provide a number, how can you enforce it. (If the police were to pull you over and ticket you for speeding but don’t bother to tell you what the speed limit is, nor are there any signs, there would be an uproar. Of course the response would be driving is a priviledge not a right, so if you don’t like it, don’t drive.) Even at a fraction of that speed, you’re more than capable of downloading enough to be booted by Comcast, and likely others.
The problem is at the end of the day accountability. We as inviduals are responsible for our actions, yet every day coporations get a pass.
Even the FCC believes ISPs should police themselves.
If that policy works so well, we might as well disband the police, because if corporations can police themselves, so can the rest of us.
In UK, with BE also, good speed, CRAP service, bunch of idiots.
Used to be with plusnet, they are major arseholes for throttling
We are going to have to start pushing for laws against blocking protocols. I have no problem with the ISP’s limiting the speed of my connection if I am impacting the network, for a short period until I stop using Bittorrent.
However, I do not want them to just block it totally, like they are trying to do right now.
I’m in the UK on Virgin Media, and whilst they do throttle all traffic in the evening, they only seem to do it if your download speed is above a certain level for a prolonged period. I think it’s somewhere between 50-100 kbps. I’ve set my scheduler in my bittorrent client to not d/l above 50k between 6pm and 1am, and I can surf and upload normally. If I don’t have the schedule on then my d/l speed drops from 20mb to about 1mb for the period and my upload isn’t worth speaking of.
Basically, I throttle myself before Virgin throttle me a lot more harshly.
here in panama we have the same problem with DSL provider Cable & Wireless, just wondering if anyone is getting the same problem with CWP in other countries?
I think Time-Warner might end up getting added to this list… I got done DLing about 4-6 gigs of data via uTorrent last night, preceeded about a week ago by another 5 gig DL, and now I can’t get certain things to load, particularly flash objects. Even this site loads way slower than normal, which is ridicilous, since the site hasn’t appeared to have changed itself. Also, the flash problem was rather sudden; one minute I’m lolling at the fact that Oprah intends to capitalize on the popularity of YouTube, the next I’m looking at blank thumbnails and a black box, wondering why I can’t get a music video to load.
BT Broadband’s throttling has become fucking ridiculous. I’m down to 10kbps (24/7), even though I supposedly have a 8mbps connection on their ‘unlimited’ price plan. I’ve totally given up on bittorrent now, which I guess is what they want.
Please take Virign Media (UK) out of the list! You are otherwise starting to fight a war on more than one front. Virgin Media has a throttling policy but it is unrelated to Bit Torrent traffic. The policy can be found on their web site and you can prevent yourself from getting throttled by -50% through throttling yourself by only -25%. It sure stinks when they call it “unlimited broadband” but you really are starting a war on a front of “bad marketing”.
My advice is to switch to a small ISP, which does not throttle BitTorrent traffic and thereby support their business against the big ISPs.
[quote comment="205180"]In UK, AOL also limits the use of p2p significantly. Everyday, between 9:00am and 10:00pm, you cannot use p2p at all. [/quote]
Ah, but the AOL chatrooms and the way they handle email between AOL users negates the need to use p2p.
In the right room, you can get all the latest stuff sent directly to your email in seconds and download it from there over http.
[quote comment="205079"]Torrent on a VPS then leech from it using SCP.[/quote]
Only as long as your ISP doesn’t throttle all encrypted traffic due to header encryption.
My old ISP made SSH unusable in their fight against encrypted torrent.
The best bet is to simply walk away from any ISP crap enough to be doing this. Find yourself one that sells by the GB instead, and pay for what you use. Those selling in that way don’t care what you use your GBs for.
In the US, if you have an option for insightbb, go for it. 10Mbit down, 1Mbit up. They dont monitor or shape bandwidth in any way. As long as you have your TCPsend and TCPrecieve set right for your machine, you can max it out very, very easily.
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