Torrents not downloading

I'm using bittorrent program and have been downloading 4 last 6 months. Haven't changed any settings but last two weeks my torrents aren't downloading (connecting) anymore. My speeds have reduced hugely but this looks to be because of the ISP throttling (only read about this this last week), but out of 8 torrents only one connects and downloads at 25kb/s although I'm on a 4MB ADSL as well as 4MB data package. Any ideas? New to torrent downloading but haven't had problems before. Tx

You need to check :-

1) make sure it's legal.

2) see how many seeds and/or peers there are. Seeds means how many people already downloaded it and are letting you download it from their computer. Peers are other people who, like you, are in the process of downloading it. If there are no seeds, you can't download it. Peers are less important; you can download it without them.

Thanks, under the seed column it shows e.g. 22(218) for the one downloading and 0(43) for one not downloading. does this mean 22 out of 218 are online?

as to whether it's legal do you mean what I'm trying to download? It's movie and book torrents from btjunkie and demonoid. I've down/uploaded 85GB for April and am thinking my ISP isn't too chuffed.

You may simply be unable to connect to the seeds. Doesn't mean they're not online, though they may be gone/quit from the torrent. A seed could be firewalled or at connection max -- either way would prevent you from connecting to it.

Considering another poster in the same national region posted about extreme connectivity issues here:

http://forum.utorrent.com/viewtopic.php?id=74118

There may be some BitTorrent throttling/disrupting by ISP/s in that area.

Thanks 4 the replies, have managed to download at a bit higher speed 25-45kb/s. will see at month end if the speeds change because of the ISP i'm with.

I had the same issues until I opened the correct ports on my firewall. My donwloads went up from around 20-30Kbps to between 100-350Kbps depending on the amount of seeds. I'm in SA as well.

thanks, I'm very new at this. I'm using windows firewall and kaspersky. how do you open these ports and which SP do you use?