Thanks to data collected by Measurement Lab (M-Lab) the public is now able to take a look at the frequency of these BitTorrent throttling practices. Among other tools, M-Lab runs the Glasnost application developed by the Max Planck Institute.

At TorrentFreak we have been keeping an eye on the changes in BitTorrent meddling among ISPs around the world, and today’s data is the latest installment. The throttling percentages for various countries and ISPs are based on M-Lab tests that were performed between December 2012 and December 2013.

Looking at the list of countries where at least 100 tests were performed, South Korea (74%), Malaysia (61%) and Singapore (53%) come out on top. Poland is the first European country with 35%, quickly followed by the UK with 28%.

Greece and Romania stand out in a positive sense, as only 7% and 9% of the tested BitTorrent connections were limited. The United States, Canada and Australia perform relatively well too, with throttling rates of 14%, 17% and 18% respectively.

United States

BitTorrent throttling in the US is not as prevalent as it used to be. After Comcast was exposed for interfering with customers’ file-sharing traffic, the throttling percentage took a dive from nearly 50% to only 3% in the period between 2010 and 2012.

Over the past year, however, Comcast’s throttling levels started to rise again to 12%. Cox is currently the worst of the larger ISPs when it comes to BitTorrent throttling with 13%, more than double what it was in early 2012.

Verizon runs the least interference on the BitTorrent traffic of its customers, 6% for Verizon business and 9% for regular accounts.

Worst: Cox (13%)

Best: Verizon (6%)

UK

In the UK, BitTorrent throttling rates are relatively high. Orange is currently the worst offender as it limits 38% of the tested connections. BT comes in second place with 35%, which is down from 65% during the first months of 2012.

At TalkTalk and BSkyB BitTorrent users are better off with throttling percentages of 10% and 17% respectively. For BSkyB this is a hefty increase, as the throttling rate is up from only 4% two years ago.

Worst: BT and Orange (35 and 38%)

Best: TalkTalk (10%)

Canada

Traditionally, nearly all of the major Internet providers in Canada have been heavy throttlers. Rogers in particular has a bad reputation, as it limited more than three-quarters of all BitTorrent traffic for years on end. This year, however, there are signs of improvement.

During 2013 Rogers interfered with only 20% of all BitTorrent transfers, down from 80% two years ago. Bell has shown the most progress though, moving 77% to 8% this year. Eastlink is currently the worst performing ISP in Canada, limiting 31% of all tested connections.

BitTorrent users in Canada are best off at Cogeco and Telus with 3% and 0% respectively.

Worst: Eastlink (31%)

Best: Bell (8%)

Australia

BitTorrent is extremely popular in Australia, but over the past year BitTorrent throttling has been relatively moderate.

iiNet is the worst offender interfering with 21% of BitTorrent downloads, up from 11%. Dodo performs the best of the larger ISPs, with a throttling rate of 12%.

Worst: iiNet (21%)

Best: Dodo (12%)

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All in all we can say that BitTorrent traffic is still heavily limited, mostly in Asia. In all countries there are quite large differences between various ISPs. For BitTorrent users it is wise to ask ISPs about their traffic management policies and take a look at the M-Lab data before signing up.

If we haven’t mentioned your Internet Provider above, an overview of all the data is available here. Those who want to know whether BitTorrent traffic is being limited by their ISP can test their connection with the Glasnost tool.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Rogers Communications claims it has to throttle P2P users to prevent their network from becoming “the world’s buffet,” as they like to call it. Not only does this affect their network, their bandwidth bills have also increased due to the growing popularity of BitTorrent and other filesharing networks.

In its network management policy Rogers details how it actively slows down consumer traffic. The company claims to target only downstream P2P traffic although we’ll later show that this is incorrect. For Hi Speed Internet customers, “the maximum upload speed for P2P file sharing traffic is 80 kbps at all times” but “there are no limits on download speed for any application or protocol,” the ISP writes.

This is just the theory though. In practice many Rogers customers have reported something entirely different. Although connection and speed issues often happen with various ISPs, an avalanche of complaints from Rogers’ customers over the past two months indicated that something had gone seriously wrong.

Starting at the end of September 2010, Rogers customers began noticing severe throttling of downstream P2P and non-P2P traffic. It was clear that something had changed, but none of the customers were made aware of these changes, and neither were many of the support employees.

The effects are nontheless severe and widespread, and at the DSLreports forums several threads were started by dissatisfied customers (1, 2, 3, 4, 5). It is reported that download speeds for both P2P and regular traffic has dropped, and some customers have issues while browsing the web, gaming and streaming content from Netflix and other services.

“Many of Rogers’ Canadian customers have reported substantial degradations in downstream speeds; whereas before September they were downloading at several Mb/s they are now reduced to a few hundred KB/s or less,” Christopher Parsons, PhD Candidate at the University of Victoria and lead researcher for Deep Packet Inspection Canada told TorrentFreak.

“I’ve contacted various colleagues around Canada and they have provided confirmation of what is being written by Rogers customers in the DSLreports forums.” Parsons wrote an elaborate blog post on the issue, which seems to show that the problems trace back to the new network management system implemented by Rogers.

Today, almost three months later, the issues don’t seem to be fully resolved yet, as more complaints keep trickling in every day. Dozens of customers state in blog and forum posts that they’ve complained to Rogers bitterly, and some have even switched to another ISP as a result of the issues.

At Rogers, things are awkwardly silent while all this is unfolding. Thus far, the only public response from Rogers comes from a forum post by Keith McArthur, their senior director of social media and digital communications.

“As some of you are aware, Rogers recently made some upgrades to our network management systems that had the unintended effect of impacting non-p2p file sharing traffic under a specific combination of conditions,” McArthur writes.

“Our network engineering team is working on the best way to address this issue as quickly as possible. However, I’m not able to provide any updates at this time about when this will be fixed. Our network management policy remains unchanged. We are working hard to ensure that there are no gaps between our policy and the technology that enables that policy.”

This response dates back to the end of October, but even today many customers are still reporting that their download speeds are severely degraded. One may even conclude that the new system is meant to slow down downstream traffic as well, contrary to what’s stated in the Network Management policy.

This does indeed seem to be the case.

Rogers’ social media director kept his public appearance limited to one post, and eventually also stopped responding to individual customers who asked for help. In a response, a Rogers customer contacted the CRTC instead, and the result is interesting to say the least.

Initially Rogers’ legal counsel Ken Thompson tried to cover up the issue, by stating that they never received a single complaint about the issue, but he did confirm to the CRTC that downstream traffic is now also being throttled. So, aside from the collateral damage the new network management system caused, Rogers has secretly started to throttle P2P download traffic.

Not a big deal according to Rogers’ lawyer, a simple change in the policy will quickly resolve the issue.

“We have determined our best response to this situation will be to update our ITMP disclosure on our website to reflect this new information. We are in the process of making those changes to our website and will provide you with the modified ITMP [traffic management policy] disclosure as soon as it has received approval by Rogers’ management,” he wrote to the CRTC.

So there we have it, instead of honestly answering customers who’ve complained about being throttled for months, Rogers simply changes their policy.

Thus far no changes have been made, but this will probably happen in the coming days or weeks. Rogers customers who want to enjoy P2P at full speeds have no other option than to switch to a new ISP or sign up with a VPN service.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

All around the world, hundreds of larger and smaller ISPs are actively interfering with BitTorrent traffic, allegedly to keep their networks in good shape. Thus far, only Comcast has been punished for doing so.

In 2008 the FCC looked into Comcast’s BitTorrent blocking and concluded that the company’s network management practices were unfair because they specifically targeted BitTorrent, not any other protocols.

The FCC ordered Comcast to stop blocking BitTorrent transfers, and last year the communications commission decided to take up the task of ensuring that the Internet remains neutral. At least, that was the initial plan, the reality is less hopeful.

Although it was Comcast’s anti-BitTorrent measures that sparked the current Net Neutrality debate, the FCC’s current proposals are not going to stop ISPs from slowing down or even blocking BitTorrent traffic. In fact, if these rules are implemented, BitTorrent users will be worse off than three years ago.

In the 107 page proposal detailing the Net Neutrality regulation, the FCC says that all traffic on the Internet should be treated equally, but it allows ISPs to slow down or block traffic if it’s considered to be “reasonable network management”.

So the key issue is, what are reasonable network management practices and how may these affect BitTorrent traffic? Let’s take a look at what the FCC has to say about this.

Reasonable network management consists of reasonable practices employed by a provider of broadband Internet access service to [...] (i) reduce or mitigate the effects of congestion on its network or to address quality-of-service concerns; [...] (iii) prevent the transfer of unlawful content; or (iv) prevent the unlawful transfer of content.

In short, this means that ISPs have plenty of options to target BitTorrent traffic and keep the Net Neutral at the same time. Let’s take a closer look.

As the EFF has also pointed out, the latter two conditions (iii and iv) would make it perfectly reasonable to block BitTorrent traffic for the purpose of preventing piracy. The terminology is rather vague, but we expect that when the MPAA or RIAA produce a report stating that 95% of all BitTorrent traffic involves copyright violations, blocking BitTorrent may become perfectly reasonable.

And that’s just one of the many loopholes. There are also plenty of options for ISPs to target BitTorrent traffic without going for the piracy/copyright angle. In fact, congestion issues and quality-of-service concerns are even more viable and can be implemented to target BitTorrent traffic specifically, but indirectly.

Under the proposed plans, ISPs could simply manage their networks by slowing down connections that use “too many” TCP connections, one of the key characteristics of BitTorrent traffic. There are plenty of arbitrary rules that may look reasonable and neutral, but will specifically (not exclusively) hinder BitTorrent transfers to ease the strain on the network.

In fact, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) which develops and promotes Internet standards is working on a proposal that might kill BitTorrent traffic if implemented. The proposed protocol will mark all packets which are expected to cause congestion as “negative packets,” which is likely to apply to and slow down most peer-to-peer traffic.

One way or another, the FCC’s Net Neutrality plan is no guarantee that BitTorrent will be able to download at full speeds. On the contrary, the plans might actually encourage ISPs to use Deep Packet Inspection technologies to check if the traffic of its subscribers is lawful, if it’s the last resort to slow down BitTorrent. We don’t want that to happen do we?

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Among other tools, M-Lab will run the Glasnost application developed by the Max Planck Institute. Last year, tests performed with the Glasnost tool revealed that Comcast and Cox were actively interfering with the BitTorrent transfers of their subscribers.

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 the flow of data through 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.

In their quest for Net Neutrality, Google is backing the M-Lab project with 36 servers in 12 locations. Google will also provide network connectivity for the tools hosted on M-Lab. The servers Google has promised will be rolled out over the next few months, while the PlanetLab Consortium manages the tools hosted on the site.

The project aims to reveal the throttling practices of ISPs worldwide and put an end to all the secrecy. “Transparency has always been essential to the Internet’s success, and everyone can agree that Internet users deserve to be well-informed about what they’re getting when they sign up for broadband,” says M-Lab, explaining the ideals behind its website.

Among the other Net Neutrality tools hosted on M-Lab is a diagnostic tool which allows user to test their connection speed and receive sophisticated diagnosis of any slowdowns. More tools will be added soon, Google powered.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

There haven’t been many reports of British ISPs throttling BitTorrent traffic, but this doesn’t mean that they don’t. Pipex, one of the largest ISPs in the UK, is notorious for its anti-BitTorrent measures. They actively throttle BitTorrent traffic, especially during peak times, and also throttle all encrypted traffic. Other UK ISPs that throttle BitTorrent traffic are BT Broadband, Eclipse, Plusnet, Freedom2Surf and TalkTalk. Virgin Media has not (openly) targeted BitTorrent traffic, but they will now follow suit.

Virgin Media’s CEO Neil Berkett told The Register that the company will start limiting BitTorrent traffic for all its customers. To some this might not really come as a surprise, as earlier this year Berkett said “This net neutrality thing is a load of bollocks.” Virgin’s BitTorrent throttling plans seem to back up this earlier statement. Which throttling methods Virgin will use has not been announced, but Berkett said that they will be implemented mid 2009.

ISPs have been messing with BitTorrent traffic for years, even when the traffic generated was just a tiny fraction of what it is today. When the first ISPs began throttling BitTorrent traffic, Azureus (now Vuze), BitComet and uTorrent introduced a countermeasure, namely, protocol header encryption. This worked well initially, but soon after encryption was introduced, ISPs started to use hardware that could detect encrypted traffic.

The degree of traffic shaping varies a lot between different ISPs. Some only limit BitTorrent traffic during certain 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 most used argument to justify their actions, is that all the BitTorrent traffic on their network slows down other customers’ connections.

Whether this is indeed the case can be debated. Nevertheless, instead of investing in their own network to solve these potential congestion issues, ISPs prefer to slow down customers who just happen to use the ‘wrong’ protocol, claiming problems with capacity. Which is interesting, since Virgin started offering an unlimited 50Mbit/s package this week, up from their old limit of 20Mbit/s. Maybe BitTorrent throttling helps make room for this new service.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Kevin Martin, FCC chairman told AP that Comcast’s BitTorrent throttling is “arbitrary”, and that the company had violated the principles of the Federal Communications Commission. Martin said that Comcast slows down BitTorrent users independent of the amount of traffic they use, and that the company failed to communicate their network management practices to their consumers.

Indeed, a recent study by the Max Planck Institute showed that the company had misinformed the FCC and their users. Comcast has always argued that BitTorrent upstream traffic was only blocked during periods of heavy network traffic, this turns out to be a lie, as the study showed that they blocked BitTorrent upstream traffic 24/7.

The FCC has announced that it will take appropriate action against Comcast, and the ISP will be ordered to stop interfering with BitTorrent traffic. Comcast has said before that it will invest in its network capacity and stop slowing down the traffic of their users, but these were all false promises.

Marvin Ammori, general counsel of Free Press who filed the complaint with the FCC is delighted with this outcome, and said in a response: “Nine months ago, Comcast was exposed for blocking free choice on the Internet. At every turn, Comcast has denied blocking, lied to the public and tried to avoid being held accountable. We have presented an open and shut case that Comcast broke the law.”

“The FCC now appears ready to take action on behalf of consumers. This is an historic test for whether the law will protect the open Internet. If the commission decisively rules against Comcast, it will be a remarkable victory for organized people over organized money,” Ammori added.

It is to be expected that – if the pipes are really congested – Comcast and other ISPs will have to step away from the all-you-can-eat plans they have been offering for years, now that people are actually using bandwidth they signed up for.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.