On Mon, Apr 28, 2008 at 8:11 PM, Chris Rowson <<a href="mailto:christopherrowson@gmail.com">christopherrowson@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<br><div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> <br><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div class="Ih2E3d">On Mon, Apr 28, 2008 at 6:28 PM, Tony Arnold <<a href="mailto:tony.arnold@manchester.ac.uk" target="_blank">tony.arnold@manchester.ac.uk</a>> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> Pete,<br> <div><br> Pete Stean wrote:<br> > I've started to observe behaviour over the last couple of weeks that<br> > definitely indicates that BT are throttling torrents at peak times, at<br> > least in my part of London - from early morning right through to early<br> > evening on weekdays, popular torrents will saturate my connection but<br> > will start slowing down at around 6pm and won't pick up speed again<br> > until the early hours. I've observed this behaviour several times over<br> > the last few weeks, all on popular torrents with thousands of seeds<br> > and leechers   :\   not good<br> <br> </div>I know that my ISP, Pipex, throttles bittorrent to 20kb/s, which makes<br> it useless! I've not tried playing around with non standard ports, which<br> might help.<br> </blockquote></div><div><br>Also, try enabling encrypted connections in your bittorent client. Some ISPs perform packet inspection and will throttle your bandwidth when they see bittorent related packets flying by. Encrypting your bittorent traffic hides it from them....<br> <br><a href="http://www.azureuswiki.com/index.php/Bad_ISPs#United_Kingdom" target="_blank">http://www.azureuswiki.com/index.php/Bad_ISPs#United_Kingdom</a><br><br>Chris<br></div></div></blockquote><div><br>Indeed ISPs don't care about port numbers (and why should they?). They inspect packets and throttle bandwidth hoggers (this is termed packet shaping). <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_shaping">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_shaping</a><br> <br>I'm glad they do this because that means that most people's primary use of the internet is not affected (email, web) by bandwidth hoggers downloading gigs on bittorrent. As the years go by and pipes get fatter, hopefully one day this will be a thing of the past.<br> </div></div>