Horrible Download Speeds Mk. II

[Nanor]

So let's try the right forum this time, eh?

Recap:-

So I've been torrenting for a good while now and I'm consistently getting horrible speeds. I'm talking capped on 30kb/s regardless of the number of seeds or peers.

First of all, my speed is not capped - Download or Upload. Everything is at unlimited. All my ports are opened. I've been experiencing these problems for about 2 years and have reformatted my computer once or twice so I've gone from a virgin system, to a modified system - I've tried it all.

My specialities don't lie in the interwebs so I'm here begging you for help. Am I doing something idiotic that's ruining my speeds, or is my ISP just throtlling me when I torrent. I'm getting up to 500kb/s downstream from FTP downloads, for the record.

Any ideas?

DreadWing suggested using the setup guides, which I believe I have. Are those the guides found in uTorrent or are there some other ones?

[DreadWingKnight]

Since you're running with your settings set to unlimited upload and download, you have NOT followed the setup guides.

See the documentation section of the site.

[Switeck]

BT Central ADSL ISP in the UK certainly throttles BitTorrent traffic during peak evening hours...and probably other hours as well sometimes.

[Nanor]

Dread: I neglected to mention that I have had it limited according to the Speed Guide part but at the moment it was all uncapped.

Shame about BT doing that. Is there anything I can do about it (apart from switch ISP) or do I have to grin and bear it?

[dtjohnst]

I'm with Rogers in Canada who throttles like torrents are the devil (sometimes my max downloads barely hit 80kbps with hundreds of peers), absolutely nothing you can do.

[Switeck]

When "ISPs" also throttle/disrupt unknown and encrypted traffic, there's virtually no escape -- at best you get the max speed they care to offer...and they can change that max speed on a whim. And no salesman will ever tell you about how restrictive they're being in advance...

[dtjohnst]

If they even admit to it at all. haha Rogers still denies it. I also like how in court they argued they weren't able to provide priority to "Canadian content" because there was no way to know what their users are looking it. They called their service a "dumb pipe." Then a few weeks later in court they claimed they were able to restrict traffic "only where appropriate" because they were using "deep packet inspection", which is pretty much the opposite of "dumb pipe".

I don't know about the UK, but here in Canada ISP's are the cable/satellite service providers, phone service providers, and mobility service providers, and they're all lying cheats who gouge every chance they can.

[Switeck]

I can't say Canada didn't get some of that from the USA...where such companies have had many years of practice with such behavior. ComCast tech reps even as late as August 2008 were denying Sandvine and any kind of intentional disruption of service, whether it be disruption of BitTorrent or other software/web access.

[dtjohnst]

I worked tech support for comcast for about a year as an irate escalations supervisor. I will say this, they were better than AT&T (who they ended up merging with and taking over while I was there), but not by much. They're new commercials are catchy though.

[Switeck]

I've asked ComCast techs multiple times (and not for my amusement I might add!) what the new 250 GB cap means.

Early press releases said it would ONLY be for downloads, but some techs say it's download-only while others say it's for everything.

Many techs were likewise unsure of the speed of my line, even when I told them I had the lowest official service tier.

This is important to avoid overloading the line with bad uTorrent settings...

ComCast's SpeedBoost I am far more familiar in its use than all the techs I've talked with. Sometimes makes troubleshooting here bloody hell, because new posters on ComCast do online speed tests (which get overblown by SpeedBoost) and think that's the settings they can use in uTorrent.

ComCast email servers have been a disaster for the last ~6 months -- email is often either inaccessible or shows up as empty...possibly as a result of "absorbing" ex-TW and ex-AT&T areas.

When I asked about fastest available service tiers in my area, what version of DOCSIS my cablemodem is using, or something really obscure like about how overloaded (contention ratio) is my area...the vast majority of techs don't even know what I'm talking about.

Because ComCast's "redundancy" in my area all passes through the same conduit it seems...I get "connection reset by backhoe" about once every 3-6 months for at least a few hours. They removed all the local phones to the service center here so I can no longer call locally and ask if there's a local outage. Techs on the phone only know if there's an outage in the area so long as it's ongoing AND there's a work order in place for it. 5 minutes after that is cleared, they're clueless again.

I regularly ask for higher level techs or even supervisors because I know the lower ones aren't trained for my level problems. I only call about once every month or 2...and there's usually multiple problems I need to ask about.

Because my calls have sometimes been routed to the wrong tech center, I've been told multiple times "we don't show you as having service at all with ComCast!" It has been very tempting to make that true...were there much else offered in my area besides low-end ADSL from a mostly cellular company that doesn't even list the rated upload speed or tiers in their ads (CenturyTel) and a considerably more expensive and slower cable company (Graceba) that was recently bought out by Knology (horrible company from what I've read as far as pricing and use agreements.)