Here at TorrentFreak we’ve addressed the issue of ISP traffic shaping many times, offering tutorials on how to minimize it’s effects and detailing its benefits.
Essentially, when your ISP traffic-shapes he attempts to control how you use your bandwidth, giving priority to certain traffic but unfortunately for some BitTorrent users, also slowing down transfers associated with this protocol. However, by turning on protocol encryption in a BitTorrent client which supports it, it makes it harder for traffic shaping devices to recognize BitTorrent traffic. Hopefully the end result is faster transfers.
Windows clients such as uTorrent and Azureus offer protocol encyption and until now, Linux users had a choice of opting for Azurues, Ktorrent and Rtorrent. With the arrival of the latest version of the Deluge client, there is another choice for Linux users wishing to thwart their ISP’s attempts to slow down their BitTorrent transfers. Here is the changelog for Deluge 0.5.1;
Changes since the 0.5.0 release include:
* Peer Exchange
* Encryption
* UPnP + NATPMP
* Improved user interface
* Redesigned preferences dialog
* Startup and shutdown bugs fixed
Deluge was originally called gTorrent as it was the first BitTorrent client for the GNOME desktop.
The Deluge client is (of course) free and can be downloaded here
