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Here is a partial list: http://azureuswiki.com/index.php/Bad_ISPs

ISPs that cripple torrents and sometimes how.

This has been happening in Portugal for a long time. It starts out fine but after a few minutes the upload speed slows to a crawl.
Protocol obfuscation works to a certain extent as a countermesure but I stopped caring about it after I change e2k/bt to use port 80 exclusively.

Here's a list on azureuswiki hinting that this a widespread ISP policy throughout europe.

Thanks to recent efforts by the RIAA/MPAA, the threat now isn't just that ISP's will throttle P2P, it's that they will outright BLOCK it (and any sites related to it). Their counterpart in the UK has already succeeded in this effort with most of their ISP's...

No they haven't. I don't know of a single UK ISP that blocks BitTorrent (although thottling is commonplace, and not just on P2P traffic): http://azureuswiki.com/index.php/Bad_ISPs#United_Kingdom

Right here. Despite having friends working at Videotron, I believe the Quebecor empire (more info in Fr) is a bad one as a whole (e.g. newspaper consolidation), not only the ISP part.

Check out this link. According Azureus, charter already throttles bandwidth. If what this page says is true, you can have your 60 Mbps connection, but don't use it too much!

http://azureuswiki.com/index.php/Bad_ISPs#United_States_of_America

Bittorrent already has something much better than SSL (for this particular purpose) called Message Stream Encryption that hides the fact that it is even conforming to any particular protocol -- it is, for all outside purposes, a wall of random data from the moment the connection is opened. The only way to identify it is via traffic analysis by recording when packets are sent and how large they are, and even that can't necessarily distinguish bittorrent from other protocols that send lots of data to random people.

I would, however, recommend using SSL for tracker access when possible, as that is completely separate from the actual p2p exchange, and can be used to identify what you are downloading (by the infohash of the torrent). Oh, and of course you should be using SSL/TLS for mail and every website that supports it.

Legal Torrents:
http://www.jamendo.com/ -CC music
http://bt.etree.org/ -Live music archive
http://www.startreknewvoyages.com/ -Fan made movies (allowed by trademark owners)
http://www.getmiro.com/ -Free video downloader/player with Free content.
http://azureuswiki.com/index.php/Legal_torrent_sites -List of many more

Plenty of Legal uses for the technology.

You can download a smaller version here. It's a 176MB .MKV file.

I'm also on Bell for DSL and I'm currently torrenting it at 600KBps.

Thanks for the mkv. That's what I was looking for.

As for your download speed, I'm surprised and curious. I really generally only have a max of 30k/s, but that's for week day nights, otherwise, it is much slower! Take a look at this Bad ISPs wiki page for Canada, Bell is at 5+. Whatever that means, I failed to circumvent (for legal downloads of course) the throttling. There's bypass solutions but that has not worked for me...

For many people there is.

By logging the injection of forged RST packets for one.
http://www.azureuswiki.com/index.php/ISP_Network_Monitor
Or by using your eyeballs to watch your torrents drop to spittle while your OS updates continue at full speed.

I didn't pay THEM more. I paid a third party more. Having that SSH account is pretty handy.

Although if you just want it for bittorrent, tunneling tracker communications through Tor is much easier (and saves the $8). Note that the Tor community recommends not sending P2P data through Tor, but tracker communication is fine. Works great with even one of the worst throttlers, Comcast, fully restoring normal speeds.

Using Azureus/Vuze http://azureus.sourceforge.net/ and ISP Network Monitor http://azureuswiki.com/index.php/ISP_Network_Monitor I've been able to track Comcast's network interference here in Atlanta. In general the interference has been 24/7 but there is the occasional reprieve (about five hours Sunday morning being the most recent).

The four files I've been uploading are GPL / public-domain and I would encourage you to visit the links above and do the same. The more data collected the better.

As torrents gain in popularity I'm hoping that software companies adopt this superior technology for updates - not just to improve downloading efficiencies but also to make it much more difficult for the ISPs to throttle P2P traffic. Can you imagine the impact if Microsoft's updates were torrent files?

Basic - and not so basic - routers can sometimes fall over under the load of P2P all on their own. Specifically, they come with very small amounts of RAM, and building large NAT tables to keep track of all your connections to potentially hundreds of others simultaneously can be too much for them, and sometimes upnp is the culprit.

http://www.azureuswiki.com/index.php/Bad_routers
is a good place to start to find out if yours is known problematic.

For those who are bored to RTFA and dig through its links, there is a handy Bad ISPs list maintained by the Azureus team.
That being said, there are many ISPs who also do p2p traffic caching, which is not inherently a bad thing. Certain block lists consider those wrongfully malicious as well.

Bad ISPs

While his slashdot using customers leaving would probably not make that much of a difference, you who non-slashdot readers ask for advice when they want "fix their internets".
At the start of the year, my friends had a choice between virgin & B, I recommended B due to NTL being fairly crappy since virgin took over. Unfortunately as I did have any real proof or facts and wasn't that bothered, they chose virgin as it was 1 bill to pay instead of 2, but in the future:
I care more, I got stuck with Virgin media in my flat too, and they're a terrible ISP
They cant use torrents http://www.azureuswiki.com/index.php/Bad_ISPs
They're not net neutral
The fact they made it difficult to set up a direct debit (then charged them for not using a direct debit)

This means pretty much anybody that asks me for advice, will defiantly be told in no uncertain terms to not go with Virgin. In addition to this, my dad is still on NTL (part of Virgin), but if they ever try and charge him more, ill get of my arse and set him up a decent provider.

While Comcast hogged most of the publicity in the past regarding throttled P2P traffic, almost all Canadian ISPs limit P2P traffic in one way or another.

http://www.azureuswiki.com/index.php/Avoid_traffic_shaping

I thought azureus already did this?

They don't filtered things based on the copywrite. They'll simply ban connections to infringing IPs. So they could basically just lock out all torrent sites and trackers. After that they'll probably block all encrypted traffic they can't read.

I'm surprised nobody has mentioned that this is already happening.
http://www.azureuswiki.com/index.php/Bad_ISPs
A very long list of ISPs that are known for filtering torrent traffic and packet shaping. Practices which are illegal in many of the countries on the list. Qwest is already throttling all encrypted content.

This article shouldnt be about ISPs considering filtering. It should be about them considering getting a legal mandate.

Yet people elsewhere get more bandwidth for less money.

Accounting for exchange rates, the US and Europe are not all that different. And European ISPs impose similar restrictions on P2P traffic:

http://www.azureuswiki.com/index.php/Bad_ISPs

Why, what's the problem with the current arrangement other then European mistrust of the United States?

Disputes over packet shaping on the individual ISP level lead you to think that ICANN can't govern the root DNS servers effectively? Your kidding, right? And traffic shaping is hardly unique to the United States.

And you think the technical obstacles would have been overcome faster by adding more bureaucracy to the process?

Because Swiss neutrality is slowly being erased in favor of closer ties to the EU? And why the Swiss? Why not Iceland? Why not Mongolia? Why not New Zealand?

Yes, because more will solve everything!

doesn't azureus support a type of encryption to aid in getting around traffic shaping?

http://www.azureuswiki.com/index.php/Avoid_traffic_shaping

Perhaps if they quit nuking our connections we'd stop trying to stop them from nuking our connections.

Please start here...
International list of "Bad ISPs" that throttle torrent protocols, and god knows what else...

http://www.azureuswiki.com/index.php/Bad_ISPs

Cheers,
ADeptus

Also check here. Although Time Warner isn't on there and it's not totally up-to-date for many of the ISP's like Comcast apparently.

There are many ISPs that block BitTorrent:

http://www.azureuswiki.com/index.php/Bad_ISPs

It seems odd to pick on only one of them.

Hey Pirate Bay folks, here's my list of feature requests for the new version of your open source torrent protocol:

ONION ROUTING:
1) Implement Onion routing (aka: Tor / anonymize the sources) as a built in feature.
2) Onion Routing should, where possible, try to use exit points and middle points that have roughly the same amount of bandwidth as you, otherwise torrenting will not become a reality through Onion Routing. So some kind of peer bandwidth algorythm needs to be incorporated.
3) Onion routing should be on by default, and each user should also become an exit point and donate 30% of their bandwidth to this. This will greatly increase the number of exit routers & provide this as a defacto alternative, as opposed to just some obscure security feature for the 31337 (hackers & government homeland types).
4) Individual site upload ratios, should take into consideration that fact that you are an exit point and some portion of that 30% should be counted toward your uploaded bytes ratio (even if traffic is going to other sites)... in other words, help promote torrent security = get bonus points from private trackers.

SIMPLIFY ISP SHAPING BYPASS
Background: Forcing protocol encryption isn't enough these days; some ISPs are shaping or even blocking torrent traffic by methods such as sending TCP RST packets to close a session, or their infrastructure auto-analyzes your encrypted traffic patters and if they are high bandwidth, very encrypted and on for long amounts of time to the same destination you get flagged & shapped (regardless of the fact that you could indeed be doing something legal)

1) There's a page on Wikipedia that lists all the "BAD ISPs" (http://www.azureuswiki.com/index.php/Bad_ISPs). This is a list of ISPs internationally that in one way or another shape your bitorrent traffic (Comcast anyone?). We need to be one step ahead of these ISPs and render their multi-million dollars worth of shaping infrastructure useless - sooner rather than later - sooner so that they can't make up for the ROI on all that gear they purchased. If the ROI fails, the next time engineering dept approach CEO for X dozens of millions more, they will get declined and we (torrent community) will win.

2) This site breaks down "throttling" into 5 different categories or ways in which the ISP can throttle you... each listing the bypass method.
http://www.azureuswiki.com/index.php/Avoid_traffic_shaping#Escalation_of_the_crypto_settings
Note that level 5 (the most aggressive shaping method known so far) is only bypassable by a single client today (Azeurus), utorrent to my understanding can not bypass this.

Anyway my point with these above 2 items is that these facts need to be considered:
1. The number of ISPs throttling internationally is already large and growing larger
2. Your new torrent client needs to simplify bypassing these various levels of encryption so that it can be adopted by the masses. If it is not adopted by the masses (rendering ISP throttling useless), the ISPs will have won.

I don't have time to type more, so please research what other clients out there (beyond just torrent) are doing and borrow ideas from them.
Here's a brief list of intelligent encryption/anonymous software out there to investigate:
RODI: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/06/01/1252232
MUTE: http://mute-net.sourceforge.net/
ANTS: http://antsp2p.sourceforge.net/
GNUnet: http://gnunet.org/
I2P: http://www.i2p.net/
FreeNet: http://freenetproject.org/
TOR: http://tor.eff.org/

THanks and good luck!

I don't get why people keep picking on Comcast; lots of ISPs implement traffic shaping and/or other restrictions for consumer accounts:

http://www.azureuswiki.com/index.php/Bad_ISPs

If you want unrestricted service, why not just pay for it?

And other nations seem to have all the bandwidth fairies they need. Amazing, init?

You're dreaming. In most places in the world, bandwidth-to-the-home is much more expensive than in the US. Bandwidth to the home is cheaper in some European countries; we don't know for sure what the reason is, but more responsible usage than in the US may well be one factor. I suspect that when a German ISP says "no BitTorrent", people are more likely to comply, and hence the ISP has lower costs.

In any case, ISPs in those countries still have Comcast-like restrictions in place:

http://www.azureuswiki.com/index.php/Bad_ISPs

(And, in fact, those are only the restrictions affecting BitTorrent; users in France and Germany, for example, primarily use other protocols, so those wouldn't be listed on the AzureusWiki.)

We have Comcast cable, but I didn't opt for a cable modem because I found Comcast in a list of ISPs that block BitTorrent.

Not that I was looking for warez: no, I operate a legal BitTorrent tracker and dedicated seed to offer downloads of my own music (see sig). I need free access to BitTorrent just to monitor them, as sometimes the BitTorrent seed software (btdownloadmany.py) falls over.

Just my luck that I live beyond the range for DSL. After a lot of research I came across Stephouse, which offers something called "ISDL", or DSL over ISDN, which can go somewhat farther than regular DSL.

It works, but I pay $99 a month for 144kbps. At least I'm able to monitor my torrents, but I'm not able to watch videos on Youtube.

I'm very happy with Stephouse as a provider though, they have a remarkably permissive TOS, and their support people have been great.

I would really love to hide my content from the government, simply based on the fact that I hate the government. But

a) I don't really know how

and

b) apparently my isp blocks encrypted traffic: http://www.azureuswiki.com/index.php/Bad_ISPs scroll down to Canada, and then Rogers.

What can I do?

Sounds more like this:

http://www.azureuswiki.com/index.php/Torrents_stop_at_99_percent

Bittorrent clients already do local/LAN peer discovery and some support JPC. Sure, support might need to improve, but it's there already.

You do realize that most ISPs do this. British Telecom (Somewhat ironically, BT) does this - I should know, I am a BT user (unfortunately). Frankly, I think all ISPs seem to suck in the UK - I have not found one that doesn't block BitTorrent traffic, and gives me a stable connection. Seriously, if someone knows of a really good UK internet provider, please inform me. So, they do get away with it in Europe.

http://www.azureuswiki.com/index.php/Bad_ISPs#Unit ed_Kingdom - See here for a list of them, and that's just in the UK, let alone the rest of Europe.

In case you didn't know, Rogers shapes all encrypted traffic (see http://www.azureuswiki.com/index.php/Bad_ISPs#Cana da), which includes anything from SSH to torrents. In fact, the only way to download this movie at a reasonable rate through Rogers is to disable Encrypt Traffic (and possibly some other settings, depending on your config). Then it'll go just fine and fast. However, if you plan on downloading anything remotely illegal looking (i.e. OS iso's, video games, ripped movies) they'll send you a nice Cease and Desist notice occasionally.

Oh, and the reason you may be able to download fine is because they're only doing this Traffic shaping in certain areas (most), and there are a few areas I know of where they don't seem to have control just yet. And no, there's no magic port-trickery you can do to get around their traffic shaping.

So does anyone know an HTTP or FTP source for this movie?

Sincerely,
An unwilling Rogers customer

You can download just fine on Rogers. I sure do. Just be sure to use the "Encrypt Traffic" option on Azureus, and set yourself up with a non-standard port. Check out the Azureus Wiki on NAT Problems on how to do this. I suggest using a port like 25522 or something like that.

The Azureus BitTorrent client online support wiki maintains a list. Quite handy for trouble shooting download speed problems and which ISPs to avoid if you intend to use BitTorrent (even for legitimate purposes)

The link: http://www.azureuswiki.com/index.php/Bad_ISPs

Time Warner is not in the U.S. list, but since it is a wiki, we could just add it. (Unless it is listed under a different name I don't know about)

If you're not getting the service you expect form your ISP, you should call them (which by the way, really costs them quite a bit of money), and complain.

Azureus rates my ISP #1 in the way it treats it's
customers :-P

http://www.azureuswiki.com/index.php/ISPs_that_are _bad_for_BT

I will be switching as soon as possible...

Exactly. Just because the majority of traffic shaping implementations are crap, doesn't mean traffic shaping is necessarily evil. It's not hard to set quality of service rules such that BitTorrent traffic is allowed to use as much bandwidth as it likes, but it has a lower priority compared to other, more latency-sensitive protocols (web, text messaging, VOIP, etc.). It's a win-win for all customers using the same pipe. Non-torrent users get priority for their traffic, torrent users get the full measure of whatever bandwidth is left over.

That being said, there are a lot of really, really bad traffic shaping setups out there, whereby torrent traffic gets shaped right out of existence no matter what other traffic is running on the same pipe. It's painfully obvious that ISPs doing so are using shaping not to ensure good service for non-torrent users, but rather to ensure lower bandwidth bills for themselves. That kind of activity doesn't require a legislative solution, though. Bad ISPs, who degrade their own service at their customers' expense, will naturally be at a disadvantage in the marketplace, and will suffer the consequences. I selected my current ISP in part because they don't appear on that list, and their primary local competitor does.

avoid those isp's!

azureuswiki, list of bad isp

Same discussion goes arrount in emule, obfuscation may be enabled there in next version:

List_of_Bandwidth_throttling_ISPs for emule

Azureus already have LAN Peer Finder and JPC (Joltid Peer Cache). Not sure how this is different from JPC on the practical level:

Joltid PeerCache (JPC) is a device employed by ISPs to reduce the huge external network bandwidth required to support today's P2P networks. It basically acts as a caching web proxy (like Squid), only for P2P file data.

Looks like by going its own way, the official client will once again create segmentation, just like with DHT.

Do you see?

[1] For one example: I brought an ADSL modem from them that was advertised as doing 128 concurrent connections. It overheated at around 60. I was told that it was only meant to do "basic email and web", and had to get Trading Standards involved to get them to replace it. All with large wait times to talk to someone, natch. Oh, and the management do not have externally accessable email.