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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I called sympatico, and they woulnd’t tell me their stance on net-neutrality. :|
I’m switching to “cobal” some new ISP in montreal 24mbit for 24.99 WOOT!
but its a month by month contract so once they have a bunch of clients i bet it will drop down to 6mbit like BEll (sympatico) the’yre using the same lines afterall…
Here in New Zealand most ISP’s are upfront about “managing” or “prioritising” P2P traffic so that the “web and email are as fast as they can be”.
In practice, this results in P2P traffic being choked badly between 4pm and midnight local - a generally used “peak” period.
While I don’t like it, at least our ISP are up honest about it. Eg,
http://tinyurl.com/2v2dy8
That ISP actually listed
i have BT unlimited package and the speed i get is less then dial-up connection (28kbps)i wish i didn’t leave virgin media because the speed was great (around 600kbps) no BitTorrent traffic throttling what so ever.
Don’t sign up for BT Broadband if you want to use P2P or BitTorrent.
http://www.azureuswiki.com/index.php/Bad_ISPs
This throttling does have an effect on everyone. Its getting slower all the time for me.
Sympatico has definately started throttling in my area (montreal-downtown) in the last 2 weeks. Before that all was fine, but now, torrents max out at ~50K/s in the evenings, whereas i used to hit 400K/s (and still do in the mornings)
I’m on AOL in the UK, and I’ve got to say I’ve no complaints.
I downgraded my package from 8mb to 2 mb on the account of our phone line not being able to handle anything above 5mb, but my speeds reach 320 kbps on busy torrents.
XBL plays like a dream too, just can’t torrent whilst on Live.
I’ve thought about changing, but can’t see a reason why.
Where is TPB? They have done so many great things, maybe next they will form the TPB ISP company. If they do it, the world will be happy!!!
Our admin, ask them to do it!!!!!
[quote comment="205835"]Tiscali throttle Bittorrent traffic in the UK. Though if you go with them, your an idiot anyway.[/quote]
Yes, tiscali is another bad company!!!!
I’ve never really noticed shaw throttling torrents. i only suspected it because I was using public torrents with slow uploaders. when i used torrentleech the download was 1MB/s the whole way through so they don’t traffic shape me. vancouver shaw.
Deluge-Torrent has the best encryption! The only client I can use my Connection 100% with! :)
Try it!
[quote comment="205418"]hi, can someone explain to me why there arent any isps dedicated to bittorrent users? they’d have a huge and dedicated user base and be able o cater for specific needs…[/quote]
Any ISP prefers the 60 year old guy who only reads his e-mail to a heavy BT user. Bandwidth costs money, the less the end user uses, the more the ISP can pocket. In the end, we should be glad for all the “low bandwidth” guys, they are in effect subsidizing the high-bw users so the service is cheaper for us. A BT-specific ISP would have to be pretty expensive to cover all the costs (ISPs oversell their bandwidth by a certain amount, with 100% heavy users they wouldn’t be able to).
Canadian ISP Sympatico Admits to P2P Throttling
Posted: 07 Nov 2007 11:24 AM CST
Add Sympatico to the growing list of ISP’s blocking P2P traffic. In response to consumer complaints posted in the company’s official forum, Canadian ISP Bell Sympatico has admitted that it uses bandwidth throttling technologies to impose limitations on P2P and file-sharing services during peak hours. This revelation is further evidence that net neutrality is eroding.
[quote comment="206499"]Deluge-Torrent has the best encryption! The only client I can use my Connection 100% with! :)[/quote]
If not all clients support the same encryption method then they cannot connect to one another. And the ISPs in question do not decrypt traffic to see if it is a torrent but throttle any encrypted traffic. Using a stronger encryption therefore makes no sense. Keep using your client for a while and you will find out yourself.
The only real solution to this problem is using a REAL vpn service like vpntunnel (www.vpntunnel.co.uk) and encrypting ALL your bittorrent traffic, so your ISP can’t throttle it. I tried encryption on my 24/2 ADSL2+ connection here in the UK which was HEAVILY throttled and saw no improvement whatsoever. Then I tried a VPN and went from 2-3KB/sec to 2000-2200KB/sec! a massive improvement for a tenner a month
I know it costs a lot for ISPs to provide filesharers with enough bandwidth to use bittorrent, but seriously: we pay for the service, the least they can do is tell us how much we get before we sign up!!
Alexa
I use uTorrent and I am a consultant to manage QoS for an ISP.
I’ll tell you right now, BT traffic is a thorn in my side. When I set it up on my machine, I made sure that I still had a low ping and decent bandwidth left for general browsing and games. It seems that just about everyone else puts 1000 connections and unlimited bandwidth. Somehow encrypted torrent traffic has overcome our provisioning and a 256/512 customer is downloading at 6Mb with a few thousand open connections. AT&T cuts off 2 of the 4 T1 lines due to abuse, so now 1 person has shut down the cable system as well as gotten AT&T’s attention with the sights set squarely on us from both directions.
So now we have 250+ angry customers that can’t get on, one customer that left uTorrent running while he went off to work/play/sleep/etc, and the wrath of AT&T, meanwhile everyone complains that ISP’s are throttling BT.
I fixed the issue with the customer overriding their bandwidth limits at the cable modem, however even with a 256/512 connection, they still had over 1500 open connections, which got AT&T’s attention again and locked up our router.
I fixed that problem as well and limited each customer to 200 open connections.
As of today, since I started cleaning up their network, BT has only brought it down twice. On that same note, we’ve called and asked the customers to turn down or turn off P2P, with mixed results. Some work with us, others have the same attitude found here, that they’ve paid for this service and demand it, full speed, 24/7, with low latency, even while they alone saturate our $2700/month, 6Mb T1 bundle. Those guys get cut off.
For the record, 90% of our customers have the 256/512 package, with 512/3Mb being the highest offered. 90% never go over a gig for the entire month, with about 4 people pushing a few hundred gigs.
It would work better if the makers of the torrent clients would work with ISP’s to prevent problems rather than try to constantly circumvent QoS management. You can’t run BT wide open 24/7 and justly complain about crappy service, bad VoIP and high latency.
The other side of this is legitimate uses of BT (linux, WOW, etc) are being throttled as well due to file sharing and abuse. While throttling 4 people that cause system wide problems, we also inadvertantly throttle the other 50 people that play WOW. Fixed that to, then uTorrent updates… and again we go.
[quote comment="206936"]… Some work with us, others have the same attitude found here, that they’ve paid for this service and demand it, full speed, 24/7, with low latency, even while they alone saturate our $2700/month, 6Mb T1 bundle. Those guys get cut off. …[/quote]
Unbelievable! A business gets to the top, then they do not know where to go next and therefore chooses to go down …
Torrents are designed to push the limits of networking. If an ISP does not understand this, but only thinks of cables and devices being their cash cow you will find yourself with a cow that just crapped on your meadow. Shit happens!
Cash cow nothing. Lets say $35 per customer and 250 customers. Thats 8750. Each modem costs about $75 per customer, 24/7 tech support for $7 per, $300 a month for an outsourced network engineer to babysit, 6Mb internet at $2700, line maintenence, full time line crew and an engineer.
Cisco router for $$$$$$, CMTS $$$$$$, NetEnforcer, proxy server, managed switches, etc…
Cash cow indeed, the equipment hasn’t even paid for itself yet.
Got anything else to add on how we’re screwing everyone when 4 people can hog the entire backbone?
If I could shape BT, I would lower the priority so it would not impact everyone and would use whatever bandwidth was leftover after HTTP, games and VoIP. With encryption, I can’t shape it, so my only recourse is to cut the modem back to 128/128, get the customer to cut back or just cut them off.
JustMe: perhaps you should try investing in cFosSpeed? it may help with your traffic-shaping problems.
Awww poor ISPs, advertising “unlimited” bandwith, fast downloading of audio and video, right up to the point where people take them up on that, then they’re screaming bloody murder.
In the end it’s the consumer’s own fault, stop giving these assclowns your money and the whole problem will resolve itself.
How about changing operator if your operator sucks that badly. In major cities there are easily over 10 operators to choose from.
In country side you might have 1-3 operators. It’s bad luck if you got only one option.
Now The CRIA threatened the company renting the servers to Demonoid so Demonoid are now off line.It´s war !!!
utorrent, a pc bittorrent client, also supports protocol header encryption.
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