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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."
"Chronic torrenters use the bandwidth they purchased. The ISPs greedy oversubscribing of their bandwidth shouldn't affect my typical internet usage that we pay the same amount of money for."
Fixed that for you.
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.
If you would like to pay for dedicated bandwidth, you can definitely do so, however you are taking advantage of the cost of the pipe being spread among many people with the expectation they won't all max it out at once. Just a hint, your measily 60 bucks a month doesn't come close to covering a dedicated 50 mbps pipe, it doesn't even come close to a dedicated 1.5 mbps pipe.
Just keep sticking it to the man though.
I've always wondered what it would be like to fight back against some of these throttling mechanisms. Since they rely on breaking tcp/ip (Actually forging packets between you and a third party) I think it would be fair game to poke back at some of these systems.
Since these are "carrier grade" monitoring and throttling solutions sold by "enterprise" software developers, we can safely assume that they're crap. I'm sure the developers think they're secure, since they're "invisible" passive monitoring/insertion systems. Why is this important? I bet you could crash any and all of pretty easily. I bet it will be as easy as generating some "interesting" traffic, then inserting lots of invalid/random garbage in fields/payloads that the throttling system might inspect.
This simple "technique" has been known to crash IDS/passive monitoring systems pretty much since they've been around. For whatever reason, nobody thinks that passive monitoring systems can be the targets of attack simply because they're "invisible" and don't respond to direct requests on the network being monitored.
If not outright crashing, you could attempt to bog down said throttling systems. It might not be hard to create a torrent client that generates a lot of noisy garbage that would cause an asymmetric load on said throttling system.
They don't, they sell speeds "up to".
Name another industry in which you pay for an advertised service and then get far far less.
Would you buy a computer that claims 8GB of ram but you could only utilize 3?
Would you buy a camera that claimed it could take 1000 pictures but only could store 100 maximum?
Would you buy a car that advertised 200 HP but could only output 50 HP?
Would you buy a 3 bedroom house that only has 1.5 bedrooms?
Would you buy a food product with printed 350g on the container but the contents only weigh 180g?
Would you pay for a meal if it claimed it would come with sides that you never received?
Would you buy a gallon of gas if you only got a pint?
Would you buy a 24 pack of beer if you only got 16?
So in what FREAKIN reality is it acceptable for ISP's to charge you for an advertised speed and then offer you something far less then that on average.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
Then as long as my torrenting doesn't increase your speeds above the "up to" number you're buying from your ISP, you can STFU, you're getting what you're paying for. If my torrenting ever causes your speeds to exceed your purchased "up to" rate, then you can complain about it.
Wait, what? Why are you defending that practice?
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.