Many Internet service providers (ISPs) cause trouble for BitTorrent clients. There are, fortunately, ways to combat traffic shaping and use BitTorrent.
A list of Internet service providers (ISPs) that are known to cause trouble for BitTorrent clients or P2P in general and the reason why are listed
here.
One of the biggest problems are providers that that perform traffic shaping on P2P protocols, see
avoid traffic shaping
on how to counter that. You’ll need that if your ISP is listed with an encryption level greater than 0 or a question mark on the Bad ISP list.
Hopefully your ISP will not have an encryption level other than 0. Use that list to see if your ISP does anything to throttle Bittorrent speeds.
Cablevision’s Optimum Online, for example, prevents seeding on Bittorrent. Seeding is the uploading of torrent data to other people. Seeding is essential, because people with higher seeding speeds are more likely to have faster download (leech) speeds since more peers (other computers) are likely to connect and mutually transfer torrent data. Therefore, people using Optimum Online will have slower download speeds in Bittorrent.
Luckily, there is something you can do. Azureus recommends to try enabling Tools -> Options -> Transfer ->
Use lazy bitfield or try encryption otherwise
.
October 14th, 2008 at 7:39 pm
Interesting. I always wondered if Cablevision cared about my bittorrent activities. Some ISPs just ignore it, while some others get all over you about it.
December 4th, 2008 at 11:44 pm
They do more than just stop seeding, although that’s quite a lot. It’s pretty much impossible to get torrents now, without randomly changing your port every half hour or so, and that’s a pain if you use a firewall especially. You’d have to open every port, which is very insecure, then set up your torrent program to randomize the port. And they’d still probably catch it.
July 18th, 2009 at 12:41 pm
It is much easier to solve the torrent problem by asymmetric billing.
Lalit