P2P throttling by ISP's

[NiKRuLeZ]

So by turning on encryption on bittorrent, you can get past the ISP's p2p blocking system. But wont the ISP know that everyone has turning thier encryption on and that bandwidth is going up and up, wont they know at all?

[citizenblue]

Yes they will.
I believe the reasoning behind it all is that is much easier for "us" to come up with workarounds, than it is for the isp to go through all the trouble of blocking certain types of traffic.

[Dedalus^]

would encryption on bt get past school p2p blocking systems?

[ghurka]

Peronally I don't think the encryption works.

I know that my ISP (Toucan) is traffic shaping. Whilst I was downloading a small mp3 at 300KB/s from a webpage, uTorrent was only downloading at about 8KB/s.

I've tried uTorrent, Azureus and BitComet and it makes no difference.

The ISP's know how to block p2p even with the encryption.

[ilikechikin]

The ISP's can't block p2p with encryption. Encryption encrypts all outgoing data so they can't tell what it is. They may cap uploads and downloads but they are not blocking p2p. Also, encryption only works when other peers accept encrypted peers. It's not turned on by default so many people don't have it on. If only a few people have it on, you may not download more than 8kB/s.

[Zod5000]

I found with my Shaw account, the encryption really helped.. i went from a 10k/s upload to 60k/s which is what the account is capped at for its upload speed. It did take a while after encryption was introduced for other people to use it as well. but now its smooth sailing :)

[justinius23]

i am on tiscali 2mb down, 256kb up and have noticed awful speeds from around 6pm onwards to maybe 11.30pm. after this my speeds are fine.

i am aware this is their peak time and they operate fair usage policies but considering my speeds are dropping to like 10kB/s from around 200kB/s i think this is slightly taking the piss.

i am using utorrent with an open port and with encryption enabled on very well seeded torrents from a fast private site.

is this throttling? or something else? any help would be greatly appreciated.

[Dawkins19312]

I have FiOS from verizon and they are very generous (5MBb down/2Mb up). No throttling despite leeching from newsgroups at max speed everyday.

[j0hn]

i am on tiscali 2mb down, 256kb up and have noticed awful speeds from around 6pm onwards to maybe 11.30pm. after this my speeds are fine.

i am aware this is their peak time and they operate fair usage policies but considering my speeds are dropping to like 10kB/s from around 200kB/s i think this is slightly taking the piss.

i am using utorrent with an open port and with encryption enabled on very well seeded torrents from a fast private site.

is this throttling? or something else? any help would be greatly appreciated.
that isnt throttling bittorrent traffic specifically, which is what the encryption is for. all traffic will most likely be limited to those speeds during peak hours. check ur http speed during these times to see. i think its an all round peak cap myself though.

[justinius23]

tested my d/l speeds out last night from rapidshare and i was averaging at about 170kB/s, which i was pretty happy with at 7pm. at this stage i had exited utorrent.

restarted it again, knowing it's not an all round thing and the torrent speeds were still terrible. how is it possible to throttle torrents specifically?

at the minute (9.12am) i am downloading a torrent from one seed and have an average d/l speed of 83.6kB/s - so it is definitely only at peak times. i am completely stumped.

[nerval]

how is it possible to throttle torrents specifically?

.


It's called "Deep packet inspection". They look inside every packet of data and can tell what kind it is. Then if it's P2P, they bin it/slow it down/ strangle it.
Encryption is supposed to stop them being able to do this by pretending the packet is something else. It's not clear how successful encryption is at doing this, but it must be worth a try.

But at peak times, none of the ISPs has enough capacity, and neither does the telephone network, so it's going to be slowed down anyway.:stars:

[justinius23]

yeah, i expect slower speeds at peak times i just thought dropping from 200+ to 10 was slightly taking the piss.

i guess i'll just d/l from p2p at night and spike their bandwidth at peak times with usenet or something!

[nerval]

More on encryption:
I've got encryption enabled on utorrent and have just had a look at my ISP's analysis of what my bandwidth is used for. They've got about half of it down as P2P and the other half as "Other".
This suggests that encryption does get stuff past their P2P detector, though they can of course just throttle the "other" to get round it.

[j0hn]

try changing the default port used
the encryption hides it from the isp that u are using torrents
so they cant be traffic shaping ur torrents during peak times, unless u have it set up wrong

i know for a fact that encryption works with tiscali

[NiKRuLeZ]

Ah well, i hate it when ISP's throttle.

[justinius23]

try changing the default port used
the encryption hides it from the isp that u are using torrents
so they cant be traffic shaping ur torrents during peak times, unless u have it set up wrong

i know for a fact that encryption works with tiscali

i am not using the default port. the port i am using is open and accepting incoming connections. i have a green light and my bandwidth readings are fine. my normal downloads are as quick as i can expect.
actually, i know for a fact i have it set up properly.

it's kinda strange that the speeds (on the same torrents) shoot up to 200kB/s after peak times, compared to like 10kB/s from 6 to around 11 in the evening. i could live with reduced speeds (due to increased usage) but 1/20th seems a bit much.

i take it you're with tiscali and have never experienced slow speeds?