Help Required

[christof21]

Morning people. I am hoping I can get a touch of help with my torrent download speeds. Before you read any further and say "oh my god not another download speed question!", I am an advanced user of torrent clients, have been using them for longer than a week!, and know how to set them up.

I was previously a dedicated follower of Azureus. Everything has been setup correctly, I was green across the board. Port forwarded and exceptions in firewall all setup. I have a 2mb broadband connection, with no monthly limits, on a wireless network, which is about 10 meters away from the router, going through a single skin internal brickwall. Signal strenght is excellent, and showing 54mbps.

I had been getting download speeds of between 90/120kb/s on files with plenty of seeds.

Within the last 2-3 weeks I have noticed that my downloads haven't been getting above 30kb/s at best! I am currently downloading a file with 2287 seeds with 45 connected, and 566 peers with 5 connected, and am only getting 28kb/s, were previously I would have been getting 90kb/s+

I changed client to uTorrent, as I have found out that some people have experienced this change in speed when they have updated to the latest version of Azureus. Unfortunately I am still finding the same problem with uTorrent.

I am at a loss to explain why I all of a sudden have a difference in speed.

I do know that some ISP's in the UK are implementing a bandwidth shaping policy. I think that is the correct name for it. I am assuming that they wouldn't tell you they were doing this. That would be too kind of them!!

How can I find out if this is the cause of my problem? I am currently with PIPEX as my ISP.
If this isn't my problem, what could it be?

Thanks for any help.

[thepuzzler]

Who is your ISP?

Have you enabled encryption in the utorrent options? (If you have make sure "allow incoming legacy connections is ticked)

[christof21]

My ISP is PIPEX.

I have not enabled encryption, but the "allow incoming legacy connections is ticked"

[multi]

try this search
http://www.google.com/search?q=PIPEX+shaping

[thepuzzler]

Enable encryption!

[christof21]

many thanks for the google link.

I only watched something about traffic shaping on BBC TV's click online program on Saturday morning, so this answers my question.

This blows big time!

[Auggie2k]

As puzzler stated, enable the encryption and if there is no change, then it's time to change your ISP I'm afraid.

[Mels_Smileys45]

Most all ISP's are planning to start bandwidth shaping from what ive read. I hope encryption will save us all but I have a feeling its only a temp fix.

[christof21]

turned on the encryption, and I saw a definate increase in the speed of the download. Not back up to the 90-120kb/s I was getting, more around the 50-85kb/s mark, and fluctuating a lot between those figures, but it's better than the 25kb/s I was getting.

Just making sure that it's the same for other torrents now.

Oh, funnily enough this morning, after I selected the encryption option last night, we had a phone call from pipex asking if we were happy with the service! Coincidence or what. Any how we told them we weren't happy because of the obvious bandwidth shaping that has been implemented on our line. The customer service muppet said that it wasn't the reason as we don't have what they deem to be excessive use on our account, so it must be something to do with our equipment!!!

He actually went into our account on his screen, and saw the stats for us. That's how he came up with this gem of information!

[charlesmelissa]

I screamed and yelled at Charter also, and they denied it through their teeth. I told him he was a liar. I them installed Azureus and incripted my headers and changed the port so they no longer know what I am downloading from where. To make sure DTH is working or continues to work, put a 1 in front of the port you use or change it to some other port, 16651 or some other port. This throws them off as they can also block traffic from specific ports.

After updating, encripting, and changing the ports, I am back up to speed, I reached 2.5 meg on a download last week.

[christof21]

unfortunately my initial excitement at being back up to speed has proved short lived. Even with the encryption enabled my speeds are back down to maxing out at 30kb/s.

I have set my port for uTorrrent to an obscure number like 52300, but the connection is still slugging.

Damn Pipex to hell !!!!!!!!!

[christof21]

also forgot to mention, that on uTorrent, at the bottom of the screen where the green circle is, to the left of that it says download limited, and it says that for every torrent, regardless of the amount of people seeding or peers for that torrent.