Ports and speed?

[flak]

I'm hoping some of you tech wizards out there can help me.

I have a direct connection to the internet, no router, no firewall.

Anyway, I'm wondering if all incoming BT traffic is limited to the exact port selected in utorrent's connection tab. The reason I ask is because upon looking at an active/live log of all my net traffic, I discovered some peers and seeders were accessing completely different ports, typically in the 1000-2000 range. Aside from any security implications, download speeds from those connections never exceeded 10kB/s whilst those going through the proper/selcted port in utorrent were working great.

As an example, I regularly download from an IP address that when incoming at the designated port, say 51000, is problem free. Sometimes, I will be downlading two different torrents from the same address (which I think is a server) and when it decides to use a different port things start to go awry.

So, why does this happen and should I be doing anything to correct this?

Any advice would be much appreciated.

[Ultima]

µTorrent uses ports in the ephemeral port range to make outgoing connections, which is why you see those ports being used. Pick a torrent from here to test your speed.

[Switeck]

This is almost off-topic, but if you're connecting outwards to someone and they accept the connection they may already be close to maxed-out in terms of their upload speeds...so you're alot less likely to get major download speeds FROM them unless you're also uploading so quickly to them that they drop or reduce most of their other uploads.