Final Word On True Manipulating Bittorrent Traffic

[CosmicSurfer]

I stumbled onto this site that tests if your ISP is manipulating BitTorrent traffic...

This was the result for TRUE :

As you can see, in the attached Test report jpg, TRUE doesn't block or manipulate Torrent Downloads.

You can try it for yourself Here.

Now I have to find something/one else to blame

CS

[Guest Reimar]

I stumbled onto this site that tests if your ISP is manipulating BitTorrent traffic...

This was the result for TRUE :

As you can see, in the attached Test report jpg, TRUE doesn't block or manipulate Torrent Downloads.

You can try it for yourself Here.

Now I have to find something/one else to blame

CS

Why you want to blame someone? I mean except yourself for to use an system to download mainly pirated software pp?!

Get real CS, 98-99% of all torrents are pirated! Instead of blame someone you should say "thank you" for the things you get for free while others pay for it!

And from an technical point of view, torrents are submitted via an P2P Network and therefore mainly private. Private connection are limited to the speed they pay for and the download you can get is the max upload they can do! And most of the time there more than one connection to one of the private "server" and therefore the download is even more limited! If you download a popular movie, software or whatsoever, there at the same time a lot of leechers and the speed for the party who's downloading is quite limited.

That's are the main factors for the limited download speed using torrents! That some ISP's also limiting torrent downloads is just and other point but they mainly starting to do so only if the amount of torrent downloads exceed and internal limit of the ISP in question.

Cheers.

[CosmicSurfer]

Reimar...

The point of this post was only to settle the question about whether or not TRUE manipulates Torrent download speeds...

Some people believe that they do.

So the question is settled and we can all sleep better at night.

I don't want to blame anyone. (That was just a little bit of humuristic irony.)

CS

[Phil Conners]

I don't know about True but Maxnet don't throttle any specific port, instead they throttle any port with more than a certain amount of traffic for a certain amount of time. Of course they never admit this but it is easy to see when you use something like utorrent, the connection is fine for a while, then it gets blocked. You can then choose a new port and then it's fine again for some time. Some people have asked for an "automatic port randomizer" for utorrent but for unknown reasons the suggestion has so far been rejected.

[MKAsok]

Nice find CS. As I believe I've stated before, there's no evidence from either my old True 2MB connection, or my new one (I moved recently) to suggest True does any shaping/throttling on Bittorrent traffic. Both connections are/were quickly maxed out on good torrents i.e. one's with high amounts of seeds and/or seeds with very high bandwidth. If you can't max out your connection on such torrents, it's almost certainly either a problem with your client configuration or the internet in your area is just rubbish (local bandwidth saturated/too far from the exchange if ADSL etc.) and you're not getting the speeds you should be (on anything).

[jeffer]

I think whatever speeds you get are more to do with the number of seeds and the newness of the torrent and of course the area you live in e.g. central Bangkok during office hours is not conducive to high speeds. The other thing is the lack of other Thai seeds for many English language torrents. If you were in the USA then you would have plenty of local seeds but it's not the case here. When you do have a couple of Thai seeds then I find the speed can go from zero to 270k/Bs within 90 seconds of beginning the torrent as no one seems to limit the bandwidth available to local peers.

Interesting the list on that website showing bit torrent blocking country by country. Thailand is land of the free, the USA most definitely is not.

[sillyfools]

I just took the liberty of running the same tests on my True 8Mbps Local (& International) link.

The results are astounding. It think it is utterly clear that they are limiting certain ports and protocols, but even worse is the maximum speed that was achieved was in the 300kbps range where it should be in the 8000kbps range.

Glasnost: Test if your ISP is manipulating BitTorrent traffic

Results for your host (ppp-xx-xx-xx-xx.revip.asianet.co.th - xx-xx-xx-xx):

Is BitTorrent traffic on a well-known BitTorrent port (6881) throttled?

The BitTorrent upload (seeding) worked. Our tool was successful in uploading data using the BitTorrent protocol.

Your ISP possibly rate limits your BitTorrent uploads. In our tests a TCP uploads achieved at least 260 Kbps while a BitTorrent upload achieved at most 100 Kbps. You can find details here.

The BitTorrent download worked. Our tool was successful in downloading data using the BitTorrent protocol.

Your ISP possibly rate limits your BitTorrent downloads. In our tests a TCP download achieved at least 214 Kbps while a BitTorrent download achieved at most 24 Kbps. You can find details here.

Is BitTorrent traffic on a non-standard BitTorrent port (10009) throttled?

The BitTorrent upload (seeding) worked. Our tool was successful in uploading data using the BitTorrent protocol.

Your ISP possibly rate limits your BitTorrent uploads. In our tests a TCP uploads achieved at least 266 Kbps while a BitTorrent upload achieved maximal 105 Kbps. You can find details here.

The BitTorrent download worked. Our tool was successful in downloading data using the BitTorrent protocol.

Your ISP possibly rate limits your BitTorrent downloads. In our tests a TCP download achieved at least 336 Kbps while a BitTorrent download achieved at most 32 Kbps. You can find details here.

Is TCP traffic on a well-known BitTorrent port (6881) throttled?

There's no indication that your ISP rate limits all downloads at port 6881. In our test, a TCP download on a BitTorrent port achieved at least 384 Kbps while a TCP download on a non-BitTorrent port achieved at least 336 Kbps. You can find details here.

There's no indication that your ISP rate limits all uploads at port 6881. In our test, a TCP upload on a BitTorrent port achieved at least 314 Kbps while a TCP upload on a non-BitTorrent port achieved at least 266 Kbps. You can find details here.

So as can be seen from above. It is (1) shaped by protocal + (2) bandwidth oversold which has been utterly clear. It is impossible at times to stream a 512kbps youtube movie on what they sell as an 8Mbps package. Even the local speed to Thailand yesterday was at 2Mbps!

[2008bangkok]

Torrents arnt illegal..

[CobraSnakeNecktie]

ALL of this is academic because Utorrent 2.0 is coming out and it eliminates the congestion of the current UDP implementation. Did anyone stop it consider it was just dumb software banging its head against the wall?

Under 2.0 Uttorrent has UDP trackers support so itself throttles the users uploads when they start to congest and saturate which are the culprit.

You can download beta's now.

Utorrent beta

Mac users can download .9.2 beta

Windows can dowload 1.8.4 beta

The finished 2.0 version for windows is a few months away

[PMK]

I don't know about True but Maxnet don't throttle any specific port, instead they throttle any port with more than a certain amount of traffic for a certain amount of time. Of course they never admit this but it is easy to see when you use something like utorrent, the connection is fine for a while, then it gets blocked. You can then choose a new port and then it's fine again for some time. Some people have asked for an "automatic port randomizer" for utorrent but for unknown reasons the suggestion has so far been rejected.

By gosh, you are absolutely correct. I wondered why my torrent downloads were consistently at 300 kB/s at 7:00 AM but rapidly dropped down to a 1/10 of that, day after day. I guess they let you get away with it at night. Anyway, after reading your post, I changed ports on uTorrent and my speed immediately went from 25 kB/s, where it had been for the last 4 hours, to 311!

uTorrent does have a random port ability but I think you would have to shut down and start again for it to select another port, and of course uPnP would have to be working.

I also tried Vuse which has UDP support and set it to favor UDP, but it was no better.

Do you know if this throttling also takes place on the Premier service?

[scratt]

For the record here in Nothaburi they are actually kicking connections all day long that use a heavy amount of bit torrent traffic.

This doesn't just affect torrents, it also affects PS3 gaming as well.

As of this week I started running tests..

I ran torrents in the morning and had our connection reset about 15 times. Their servers are so sluggish that it then takes 5 - 10 minutes to get a connection again. This may also be because they kick the connection but keep the line alive and when you try to reconnect their server refuses as it thinks you still have a connection until that times out.

In the afternoon I have been running without torrents and the connection is solid again.

I have also swapped the times I do this at around so that I was using torrents in the afternoon / normal surfing in the morning, and so on.

I can repeat this every day without fail and get the same results.

[scratt]

I meant to add that I can pull stuff down from Apple or our own servers via ftp and the connection will run at max speed all day long. So this does seem to be directly related to torrent traffic, and is not simply throttling, it's disruption of service.

Edited November 13, 2009 by scratt

[nikster]

Really.. that puts a dampener on my excitement about the True 8 and 12 Mb offerings. But it sounds like all you need is better torrenting software to get around this.

I must say I am a little bit sympathetic to these providers. There are people who download torrents 24/7 and these are simply not profitable. ** They'd have to pay way more for their internet connection at fair prices. And if True opens the floodgates at night, that seems like a reasonable compromise to me. Somethings got to give.

True can either throttle BT, or they can start selling limited plans, 10GB, 20GB and so on. And make the unlimited plans very expensive.

** I feel a bit guilty myself, having occasionally abused my CAT CDMA connection with torrents in the high GB range - on a mobile connection where bandwidth is definitely limited. But then again, I go through periods where I don't use CDMA at all so it evens out.

Edited November 13, 2009 by nikster

[PMK]

Really.. that puts a dampener on my excitement about the True 8 and 12 Mb offerings. But it sounds like all you need is better torrenting software to get around this.

And if True opens the floodgates at night, that seems like a reasonable compromise to me. Somethings got to give.

If you were referring to my experience with nighttime torrents, my service is Maxnet Indy, not True. What torrent client do you suggest? I tired Vuse which has UDP support - if anything it was worse, but personally, once I am caught up, I could easily live with just downloading torrents in off hours.

[CosmicSurfer]

Really.. that puts a dampener on my excitement about the True 8 and 12 Mb offerings. But it sounds like all you need is better torrenting software to get around this.

And if True opens the floodgates at night, that seems like a reasonable compromise to me. Somethings got to give.

If you were referring to my experience with nighttime torrents, my service is Maxnet Indy, not True. What torrent client do you suggest? I tired Vuse which has UDP support - if anything it was worse, but personally, once I am caught up, I could easily live with just downloading torrents in off hours.

uTorrent has much better reviews than VUZE.. also UDP is either supported now in thne latest version, or coming real soon!

As for speed... TIT... I just let it run.. stopped worrying about speed... eventually I get what I want.

CS

[nikster]

Tried utorrent once and went back to Vuze. uTorrent didn't seem to do anything that Vuze wasn't doing - it was just as fast though. Other clients I tried were slower than either.

Vuze is unfortunately getting more annoying - you have to say no to the "Vuze network" now and then, and you have to set it to classic interface mode which isn't all straightforward. By default you get a pretty useless interface which has lots of useless adverts and no information about what's going on with your torrents. But once it's in classic interface, it looks just like the old Azureus, and just works.

uTorrent crashed on me and I lost a night of downloads. Then I switched back.

Vuze never crashed, and never lost any data on me. It just trucks along day and night, weeks on end... good qualities for a bittorrent client

PS: Regarding speed - torrent speed really is a science of its own, lots of times people just don't upload enough on a low-seed torrent, and so their download is slow as well. That's the way the bit torrent protocol works, give more, get more, give less, get less.

Edited November 14, 2009 by nikster

[JR Texas]

Really.. that puts a dampener on my excitement about the True 8 and 12 Mb offerings. But it sounds like all you need is better torrenting software to get around this.

I must say I am a little bit sympathetic to these providers. There are people who download torrents 24/7 and these are simply not profitable. ** They'd have to pay way more for their internet connection at fair prices. And if True opens the floodgates at night, that seems like a reasonable compromise to me. Somethings got to give.

True can either throttle BT, or they can start selling limited plans, 10GB, 20GB and so on. And make the unlimited plans very expensive.

** I feel a bit guilty myself, having occasionally abused my CAT CDMA connection with torrents in the high GB range - on a mobile connection where bandwidth is definitely limited. But then again, I go through periods where I don't use CDMA at all so it evens out.

Just a guess, but I think most people who download/upload 24/7 do so precisely because of ISP manipulation. It takes me one month in Thailand to do the same thing that it takes one day to do in the USA.

Maybe if they stop interfering in traffic, more people will shut down their machines........just a thought.

[Supernova]

My ISP doesn't throttle torrents, yet I keep my torrents running 24/7. I have a lot of stuff to download.

[Netfan]

Really.. that puts a dampener on my excitement about the True 8 and 12 Mb offerings. But it sounds like all you need is better torrenting software to get around this.

I must say I am a little bit sympathetic to these providers. There are people who download torrents 24/7 and these are simply not profitable. ** They'd have to pay way more for their internet connection at fair prices. And if True opens the floodgates at night, that seems like a reasonable compromise to me. Somethings got to give.

True can either throttle BT, or they can start selling limited plans, 10GB, 20GB and so on. And make the unlimited plans very expensive.

** I feel a bit guilty myself, having occasionally abused my CAT CDMA connection with torrents in the high GB range - on a mobile connection where bandwidth is definitely limited. But then again, I go through periods where I don't use CDMA at all so it evens out.

Just a guess, but I think most people who download/upload 24/7 do so precisely because of ISP manipulation. It takes me one month in Thailand to do the same thing that it takes one day to do in the USA.

Maybe if they stop interfering in traffic, more people will shut down their machines........just a thought.

Thank you! If my download speed was 300kbs instead of 30, it would take 10% of the time it does to download. So I leave my computer on 24/7 trying to get what i can get.

[trogers]

Could BT speed be slowed because many torrents are still linked to non-existing trackers like PirateBay?

[CosmicSurfer]

Could BT speed be slowed because many torrents are still linked to non-existing trackers like PirateBay?

BOTH Pirate Bay and Demonoid Trackers are functioning at this time!!!!

CS

[PMK]

Could BT speed be slowed because many torrents are still linked to non-existing trackers like PirateBay?

I generally add this tracker list to slow torrents. Probably doesn't do any good, except make me feel a bit better. Disclaimer on the list: It's not a recommendation - just what I threw together on a slow day. Best to do your own.

http://denis.stalker.h3q.com:6969/announce

http://tracker.bittorrent.am/announce

http://tracker.publicbt.com/announce

http://bittrk.appspot.com/announce

http://memtracker.appspot.com/announce

http://tracker.openbittorrent.com/announce

[PMK]

My ISP doesn't throttle torrents, yet I keep my torrents running 24/7. I have a lot of stuff to download.

Supernova, who do you use and which service? I'd be surprised if any of the SME services throttle torrents or anything else. How about the Maxnet Premier service -does anyone know?

[scratt]

For a couple of days I have not used torrents at all. Internet has been stable all day long.

As of this morning I can get torrents to run for about 5 minutes before my connection is kicked by True.

A quick reboot of the router and I get internet back again for another 5 minutes.

Kill Vuze and the internet is stable again.

I can confirm with 100% confidence that True has a policy of disrupting internet connections of those using torrent software irrespective of whether the torrents being downloaded are illegal or legal.

I can rinse and repeat this test over and over again. None of my torrents are running at any greater speed than 20kb/s and all of them are legal.

Time to change internet provider, unless someone can point me to a source that will allow me to hide the fact that I am using Vuze / torrents.

Cheers.

Edited November 15, 2009 by scratt

[trogers]

For a couple of days I have not used torrents at all. Internet has been stable all day long.

As of this morning I can get torrents to run for about 5 minutes before my connection is kicked by True.

A quick reboot of the router and I get internet back again for another 5 minutes.

Kill Vuze and the internet is stable again.

I can confirm with 100% confidence that True has a policy of disrupting internet connections of those using torrent software irrespective of whether the torrents being downloaded are illegal or legal.

I can rinse and repeat this test over and over again. None of my torrents are running at any greater speed than 20kb/s and all of them are legal.

Time to change internet provider, unless someone can point me to a source that will allow me to hide the fact that I am using Vuze / torrents.

Cheers.

Are you running torrents through a wireless connection? What limits did you set for total number of connections and global upload speed?

[Supernova]

Supernova, who do you use and which service? I'd be surprised if any of the SME services throttle torrents or anything else. How about the Maxnet Premier service -does anyone know?

uTorrent 1.8.3

ISP: Ji-net

Connection: 2Mbit (2048/512) @ Bt930 per month.

[scratt]

Are you running torrents through a wireless connection? What limits did you set for total number of connections and global upload speed?

Nope the machine I am doing this from is directly connected to the router via ethernet.

Not sure on the number of connections. Whatever is standard with Vuze / Azureus. I will check.

Upload speed as far as I am aware is not limited. It rarely reaches our limit anyway.

Download speed as I have said I have both left at Max, and tried throttling per torrent to about 20 or 30k/sec. So with 4 torrents going this never reaches much more than 120k/sec when limited. But True will still kill this connection within minutes of Vuze starting time after time. I wouldn't mind if they simply blocked the torrent port, but the connection is useless. ADSL still shows as connected but all PPP had gone.

Our package is supposed to be around 350 - 400k/sec maxxed out, and can quite happily do that all day long pulling down files from either our own server or that of Apple (for example). It's simply torrents at any speed and of any type that mean that the entire internet connection gets disconnected.

Interestingly my wife's machine (which is connected via Wifi) will quite happily get around this problem, but I cannot tweak Vuze to get any decent speed out of that because of vagaries of our home network.

Edited November 15, 2009 by scratt

[trogers]

Not sure on the number of connections. Whatever is standard with Vuze / Azureus. I will check.

Upload speed as far as I am aware is not limited. It rarely reaches our limit anyway.

Many people do not know that in order to download, you need to upload as well. Data are sent in packets, not a flow. When you download, your comp receives the data packets, and after a predetermined amount is received, it will send out an acknowledgment to the sending source that all have been received. If the other party did not receive this acknowledgment, it will retransmit the same data packets.

When you do not limit the global upload speed in your torrent program, it will congest the upload bandwidth, and your comp cannot send out acknowledgments in a timely manner. Thus, your may be downloading lots of retransmitted data.

We usually limit upload speed in the torrent program to 50-60% of what your ISP gives you.

[scratt]

Not sure on the number of connections. Whatever is standard with Vuze / Azureus. I will check.

Upload speed as far as I am aware is not limited. It rarely reaches our limit anyway.

Many people do not know that in order to download, you need to upload as well. Data are sent in packets, not a flow. When you download, your comp receives the data packets, and after a predetermined amount is received, it will send out an acknowledgment to the sending source that all have been received. If the other party did not receive this acknowledgment, it will retransmit the same data packets.

When you do not limit the global upload speed in your torrent program, it will congest the upload bandwidth, and your comp cannot send out acknowledgments in a timely manner. Thus, your may be downloading lots of retransmitted data.

We usually limit upload speed in the torrent program to 50-60% of what your ISP gives you.

Hehe. All good advice, but I am well aware of what you say. Disclosure : I have been a software engineer for over 30 years!

As I have said very clearly True *kill* the internet connection to your building in Nonthaburi if you use torrents. I am not talking about no torrent traffic, or torrent throttling, I am saying that web surfing, mail, the whole kit and caboodle is cut, and only the ADSL base signal remains.

I need to investigate more and see if it's linked specifically to trackers, torrent clients and commonly used ports or not and what True are doing exactly. Once I have done that I will tackle them directly, and if necessary put a web site up about it / contact various NewsPapers. The problem on their side is that I assume they are doing this to pay lip service to copyright holders requests. The problem for them (and the effect on us) is that we use it as both an inter-office / home-office and personal file transfer tool and they are cutting off a connection that is using torrents for legal purposes.

I have to wonder if True are testing it in certain non-critical areas for later roll out Nationwide...

Edited November 16, 2009 by scratt

[CosmicSurfer]

I can tell you that this ^^^ absolutely, positively, is NOT happening to me... Or anyone else I know or talk to...

I strongly suspect that this situation is local to you!

CS