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ISPs Throttling BitTorrent Traffic, Study Finds
hypnosec writes "A new report by an open source internet measurement platform, Measurement Lab, sheds light onto throttling of and restriction on BitTorrent traffic by ISPs (Internet Service Providers) across the globe. The report by Measurement Lab reveals that hundreds of ISPs across the globe are involved in the throttling of peer-to-peer traffic, and specifically BitTorrent traffic. The Glasnost application run by the platform helps in detecting whether ISPs shape traffic. Tests can be carried out to check whether the throttling or blocking is carried out 'on email, HTTP or SSH transfer, Flash video, and P2P apps including BitTorrent, eMule and Gnutella.' Going by country, United States has actually seen a drop in throttling compared to what it was back in 2010. Throttling in the U.S. is worst for Cox at 6 per cent and best for Comcast, Verizon, AT&T and others at around 3 per cent. The United Kingdom is seeing a rise in traffic shaping and BT is the worst at 65 per cent. Virgin Media throttles around 22 per cent of the traffic while the least is O2 at 2 per cent. More figures can be found here."
In my country (Slovenia) not a single person has ever received a letter of complaint from the ISP (ISPs got several from US, but they trash it instead to harass their users), no one was ever throttled and the line always, without a single exception, delivers the promised speed.
Only people living in rural areas experience internet problems due to old infrastructure, in towns the downtime are limited to a couple of hours a year and it happens only during the night.
P.S: I live in a town of 10.000 people, so size doesn't matter when it come to Internet prices. So if you pay more and get less you only have to blame the greed of your ISP provider.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
"They deliberately throttle down traffic they feel is associated to pirating."
I think you mean filesharing, not pirating. They are not the same things. Pirating is a crime, filesharing is not. Look it up. Copyright "pirating" has been a specific legal term for close to 100 years. It's amazing how many people have come to misuse it in just the last few. Of course, we have the "content industry" to thank for that propaganda.
In any case, here's the problem: first off, throttling filesharing requires deep packet inspection, which is very undesirable and may be illegal in some circumstances. Second, throttling regardless of what is being sent or received is illegal in the United States. Comcast has already been chastised by the FCC for that. I don't recall exactly, but I think they made a settlement and agreed not to throttle, in order to stay out of litigation (which Comcast would almost certainly have lost).