Here's a thinker....

[y7deluxe]

..

[[P][RO][CE][SS][OR]]

No hardware changes were made. No software changes were made. My torrents went from being able to download 2mbytes easy and upload 510kbytes easy to nothing. I have Verizion FIOS 20mbit/5mbit (although mine ups at 5.2mbit). What's happening is when I open torrents up (in Azurues or utorrent) my connection will go really fast in the beginning and begin to drop like flies. It will be download at +1mbyte and uploading at +500kbytes and then all of a sudden, both upload and download will drop to say 200kbytes for about 10 seconds. Then it'll pick back up but only to maybe 70% of what it was before. Then it'll drop down to probably 100kbytes up and down, then pick back up again to even less again. It will continue doing this until it gets down to less than 10bytes up and less than 10kbytes down and then stay there without picking back up or dropping again. I tried two different routers. I tried my old OS... Windows 2000(which it worked fine on for 3 years) and I also tried it on my current OS Windows XP Pro Corp N eth0 rls(which was freshly formatted probably a month ago). In the beginning with XP, it worked fine. Then the problem started out of no where. I figured it was XP at first, so I went back to win2k, didn't help. Figured then it was the router, so I switched that out. Didn't help... It does it with all of my trackers (TB, TL, HDbits, Music-vids, etc...). It ONLY does it with torrents. I tried replicating the problem with an FTP transfer and couldn't get it to act on anything. The last weird thing about it is that if I cap the download to say 225kbytes/per second and cap the upload at 510kbytes/per second, it does fine. It'll reach both of those caps no problem.

I am connectable. max up: 510kbytes/sec, max dl: 225kbytes/sec, max upload slots per torrent: 8, max connections per torrent: 250, max connections globally: 850.

Please let me know what you guys think. I'm thinking that my ISP somehow blocked the torrent protocol from downloading over X kbytes/s... I'm also posting this in the software forums to see if they can think of anything...

EDIT: Here is a picture of it happening... http://208.36.232.209/wtf.jpg

You can't expect peers off of Azerues/uTorrent to stay connected and sharing the entire time. A person that is seeding at their full bandwidth, might stop their bandwidth for the stuff that they want to download, plus you may have been downloading it off of peers that were also downloading, they had wonderful uploading until you downloaded all that you could from them. It's not a problem with your connection/computer/os/tracker/router, nor a problem with them, it's just the luck of the peers/seeds that are on, and what they have finished already.

[lynx]

Sounds like Verizon have introduced packet shaping.

Where possible, make sure you enable encryption.
Don't use the most common ports either. If possible (depending on whether your router supports uPnP) use random ports each time. In any case, change the ports you are using just to see if it makes a difference.