[tweakmonkey]

If you're a frequent bit-torrent user and subscriber of Comcast high-speed Internet, you may have recently noticed issues with upload speeds that make seeding nearly impossible.

ISPs have been throttling BitTorrent traffic for almost two years now. Most ISPs simply limit the available bandwidth for BitTorrent traffic, but Comcast takes it one step further, and prevents their customers from seeding. And Comcast is not alone in this, Canadian ISPs Cogeco and Rogers use similar methods on a smaller scale.

Unfortunately, these more aggressive throttling methods can’t be circumvented by simply enabling encryption in your BitTorrent client. It is reported that Comcast is using an application from Sandvine to throttle BitTorrent traffic. Sandvine breaks every (seed) connection with new peers after a few seconds if it’s not a Comcast user. This makes it virtually impossible to seed a file, especially in small swarms without any Comcast users. Some users report that they can still connect to a few peers, but most of the Comcast customers see a significant drop in their upload speed.

Read more here.

My Internet seems fine so far, but I don't use torrents frequently. How about you?

[Chris]

Originally Posted by tweakmonkey

If you're a frequent bit-torrent user and subscriber of Comcast high-speed Internet, you may have recently noticed issues with upload speeds that make seeding nearly impossible.



Read more here.

My Internet seems fine so far, but I don't use torrents frequently. How about you?

There has to be a way around this. Can they legally block all uploads to non-Comcast customers? That's BS.

And what's with all the torrent stuff lately? First Torrentspy blocks US searches now this? Maybe everyones prepping for the RETURN OF SUPRNOVA! lol

[86mcss]

torrentspy.com banned all USA users from their site and it has been taking forever to download/upload crap on other torrent sites.

[chapel]

Originally Posted by Chris

There has to be a way around this. Can they legally block all uploads to non-Comcast customers? That's BS.

And what's with all the torrent stuff lately? First Torrentspy blocks US searches now this? Maybe everyones prepping for the RETURN OF SUPRNOVA! lol

What they are doing is sending to both the non-comcast downloader and to your client a tcp-ip packet saying to end the connection. So as far as your client is concerned the peer requesting the file has said nevermind, and the other person that requested the file is told that you wont send it. There really are no ways to protect against it, as you can't tell that the packets are forged. You can tell your router/computer to ignore stop bit packets, but that doesn't fix the fact that there is one still being sent to the downloader.

The only real solution I see to this is to create a custom UDP protocol based network with custom packets. Then really their systems wouldn't know what you were doing, just sending data. You could use encrypted data packets as well, but I am not sure if that fixes the problem.

Torrentspy blocked searches from america because they got rammed in the butt by the government saying they had to hand over their data on what people search, like ip address and things they searched for. It is best for the community.

[Chainblade]

i have comcast and haven't noticed any problems yet. Hopefully I won't as I will not be happy. I guess I'll just have to go back to using IRC to get my stuff....that just sucks though...