ISPs that throttle/interfere with BitTorrent

[DreadWingKnight]

The link is outdated.

I'm updating it now.

[sandy7m]

I know that most of you guys could run circles around my level of expertise but, in the great spirit of sharing and caring, I would like to pass on my recent experience regarding throttling.

Since I swapped over from AOL to Talk Talk I have noticed that uTorrent has slowed significantly.

Yes I do know that AOL is now Talk Talk. But like I said, bittorent speeds were no problem until I went to Talk Talk. The Talk Talk tarrif I have is the one with 40gig ceiling and then pay for Boost.

Anyway, I got fed up with this and did some trawling with Google.

First thing I found out was that I should check the encryption settings in uTorrent. By default these should be enabled. Mine were disabled! Can't figure out how that happened.

I enabled them. I then shut-down uTorrent for a bit. I started it up again. Within half-an-hour I noticed that I had a lot more activity on my bittorrents than I had before. Things were looking up.

That was fine in itself but the speed was still low. I looked at the various websites and found something regarding Port Forwarding. uTorrent randomises its selection of port to forward. This is to help keep the seed-streams from prying ISP eyes. However it uses only one port. I downloaded a well known program. I then used it to manually set the port to 9 different ports. That sped things up a lot. I am guessing that setting 9 different ports, widened the amount of data that could travel through my computer, while at the same time, making it harder for my ISP to nail-down which port I was streaming through. Add the encryption as well and that seems to have tipped the scales in my favour.

For now.

If things get bogged down again I can alway -

* Use that handy randomise button in uTorrent to make them loose the scent

That is - Options>Preferences>Connection (Then click RANDOM PORT followed by APPLY)

* Use the PFConfig application to set uTorrent up with another batch of different ports to stream through

:-)

[n2ts]

Hi guys I'm new to this forum and i've been having problems with slow downloads and uploads, i have just finished a test with Glasnost which say's there is nothing wrong,but the speeds in the results are way above what i'm getting ...5 - 10kbs average. i followed the instructions in the connection setup guide made no difference, nnagent reports "syn flood attacks" from my computer

any suggestions

[TelyZan]

Ok, Because of my wife we now live so far out in the country, that to only internet that we can get is either dial-up or satellite. So we signed up for Wild Blue through dish network and the service is fine for basic web surfing, but you can't even think about online gaming. So to find games to play by myself, i've found torrents and uTorrent to get them, which was fine until I found out that Wild Blue throttles my connection when I use too much bandwidth and even turns my connection off if I go too far over my ""alotted" 30 day rotating schedual!!

Now for my question, Nowhere can I find how to properly setup uTorrent's bandwidth screens to (hopefully) stay under my alotted amount of bandwidth??

[yukonjeff]

Hi

Im new so sorry about the dumb question but,

My download icon shows up either green, gray or red. Right now its red but still seems to be downloading. What does red mean?

[grbyslzr]

Hi there, I'm relatively newbie in this bittorrent stuff, but I have noted that my upload speed has been throtled so much.I used Glasnot to verify it,and it has confirmed that. My question is,and I hope you dear Mods or somebody of your dear gentleman or ladies out there be kind to answer or give me some tip to improve it. What do I have to do in order to get a better upload and download speeds?. I will try everything to get it.

Hope you understand my broken english because it isn't my mother tongue.

Thanks in advance.

P.S.: My ISP is Telefonica del Peru.

[gizy]

hey any one can tell me is the u torrent accelerator really work or not

[moogly]

No, that doesn't work, just bloatwares.

[HarpinHevyKevy]

I think my IP might be throttling me (comcast). I recently did a Norton Anti virus scan and it reported back 60 times and said "unused port blocking has blocked communications. In bound TCP connection from 67.172.100.136 local service port 36099 " What does this mean? Are they blocking up my connection?

[paintball9]

No Harpin, that does not necessarily mean that. Your error indicates that norton is blocking the port, it detects that the port is unused (At the moment) and blocks it permemantly for security reasons. They may still be throttling but you will have to successfully unblock it and allow utorrent through the firewall (norton) before you can even find out.

[CakeVsAnts]

Our country (Malaysia)'s ISP managed to bypass the encryption method used in utorrent and throttle us back to 5kb/s again. Is there any possible (future) way/method to bypass their new method?

(The first few days of throttle flagged most of video formats (mkv/avi/flv... yes, youtube was throttled badly) into throttle category but it seems that they have lifted them and specifically throttling only torrents)

[Switeck]

Try methods mentioned in 3rd link of my signature.

Some are contradictory and you'll possibly need to do only parts of them to see some relief.

[CakeVsAnts]

Try methods mentioned in 3rd link of my signature.

Some are contradictory and you'll possibly need to do only parts of them to see some relief.

Tried yours (I've read lots of posts in this section for anything that I can use before posting) but it's not working (Same old ~5kb/s).

The torrent speed will only reach about 20kb/s during 2 - 6am though. Kind of 'happy time' for us at the moment.

Other solutions are welcomed, for now I'll try out some of my scouted VPN. Thanks for reading.

[praneshs]

I'm downloading a 680Mb file for the past 24 hours!!!! My first time with such a big file on torrent... is this normal?!?

what can i do - please help!!!

[praneshs]

torrent downloading at average speed of 1 to 2 kB/s!!!!! AAAAAAaaaaaaaaaagggghhh!!!!!

[Switeck]

praneshs,

Your ISP probably disrupts and throttles more than just uTorrent.

But to get the most from uTorrent you have to disable some of its features that use bandwidth.

1st, 2nd, and 3rd links in my signature.

[paulmw]

ToT Thailand already throttle , now started throttling even more difficult to down load or upload.

[max840]

My ISP blocks torrent download

.torrent file is downloaded but when opened in utorrent download doesn't start

[davmec93]

I'm on suddenlink.net and I'm wondering if they throttle...anybody ever heard of them?

[Sendare]

tele2 in Norway throttles

[darkbreeze]

Greetings from Colorado. First of all, and hold the boos, we already know they suck, I'm with crapcast (AKA Comcast), second of all, the recently started throttling our downloads as well as the uploads. My downloads were fine until about three days ago, I could download at over a meg sometimes and occasionally about a meg and a half. I don't download large files very often, maybe once or twice a month. I've tried all the suggestions in this thread, I've tried encryption, different ports, different hours of the day, different files, different clients, and nothing changes the download rate whatsoever. Every time I start up utorrent it will get up to about 250kb and then gradually goes down until it's between 170 and 180, nomatter what. There's got to be something out that will defeat this. My http downloads and my ftp up and downloads work fine. Almost every Google return regarding this problem refers to outdated 2007 articles. Anybody have any CURRENT information regarding the throttling. Thanks for any help.

[Switeck]

I'm on ComCast, and I see throttling at odd times...but mostly they're only reducing SpeedBoost rather than my base max speeds.

[darkbreeze]

Well, I can assure you that they are. I had the cable tv with the higher tier internet package until about a month ago when I switched to direct tv and downgraded my internet service with comcast to their lower tier package. It's still supposed to be 1.5 M down and 384 kb up and has been until a couple of days ago. I actually still hit those speeds almost exactly time after time at dslreports but the minute I start utorrent, or any other bittorrent client, I cannot achieve over 175kb download and about 35kb upload. Like I said before I usually don't download huge files, generally between 100 and 900 mb files and I try to seed to 1.5x ratio so I know I can't be flagged for bandwidth. I used to have qwest dsl and had to toss them as the service was so sporatic and the price went way up. I've thought of switching now but my neighbors who have qwest say the service is still sporatic here as were outside of town and the lines are old. I'd just like to get the speeds I'm supposed to, or even half advertised.

[Switeck]

"It's still supposed to be 1.5 M down and 384 kb up and has been until a couple of days ago. ... the minute I start utorrent, or any other bittorrent client, I cannot achieve over 175kb download and about 35kb upload."

Sounds like you're confusing bits and BYTES as well as don't realize you'd been using ComCast's SpeedBoost heavily.

1.5 megabits/second down really will only achieve about 175 KiloBYTES/second download speed at best. The upload may be a little crippled...384 kilobits/second should be able to achieve ~40 KiloBYTES/second upload speed.

As far as I know, ComCast doesn't offer a specific speed tier that gives 1.5 MegaBYTES/second and 384 KiloBYTES/second. And their "ordinary"/lower speed tier even in their fastest areas generally is slower than that at least on the upload side.

I've only got 6 mbit/sec down and 1 mbit/sec up on the "ordinary" speed tier. But SpeedBoost can briefly do crazy things to my download and upload speeds:

http://img683.imageshack.us/img683/9625/ut22ulburstvsdlspeed.png

ComCast's DOCSIS 2.0 SpeedBoost in uTorrent v2.0.4 on Nov.5, 2010:

http://img251.imageshack.us/img251/1228/ut22comcastdocsis20spee.png

[Katrasiz]

I'm new to this forum but am having what appears to be throttling by my ISP. The problem with this is I tested it with an online test which said it was not. With this in mind I now think that one of the nodes along the route between my feeds and my ISP is the culprit (likely Comcast). I have tried unsuccessfully to route my feeds through a proxy and find myself a bit outside of my experience in the matter. Any link to a tutorial on the matter would be appreciated as well as a list of ISPs I need to route around if that's possible.