Are NTL blocking torrents?

youcancallmeal

Sorry I know this is probably a regular thread here but I can't find any defintive answer and would like to know what people think.

Basically I'm convinced NTL are blocking P2P traffic and in particular torrents. I have ports open on my d-link router for bittorrent and my client shows that I have the correct ports open but I still get really poor download/upload speeds. The strange thing is it seems to come and go in waves, for maybe an hour I'll be at maximum download speed then it'll drop right down to 1kb/s for a day or two? Its been on and off like this the last few months whereas previously(Maybe a year ago) it was consistently reliable?

Did I miss something? Should I change my torrent client?

feylya

It's been consistantly good for me for the past year and a half.

youcancallmeal

feylya wrote:

It's been consistantly good for me for the past year and a half.

Which client are you using?

feylya

UTorrent, Azereus and Ktorrent

ethernet

youcancallme>al wrote:

Sorry I know this is probably a regular thread here but I can't find any defintive answer and would like to know what people think.

Basically I'm convinced NTL are blocking P2P traffic and in particular torrents. I have ports open on my d-link router for bittorrent and my client shows that I have the correct ports open but I still get really poor download/upload speeds. The strange thing is it seems to come and go in waves, for maybe an hour I'll be at maximum download speed then it'll drop right down to 1kb/s for a day or two? Its been on and off like this the last few months whereas previously(Maybe a year ago) it was consistently reliable?

Did I miss something? Should I change my torrent client?

Speeds change? It's hardly just contention? Any other users using your connection at the same time as you torrenting?

DemonOfTheFall

When I had them a few months ago I was *CERTAIN* that they were applying traffic shaping during the day/evening. Not overnight though.

youcancallmeal

DemonOfTheFall wrote:

When I had them a few months ago I was *CERTAIN* that they were applying traffic shaping during the day/evening. Not overnight though.

I'm pretty certain this is whats going on because when I went to bed last I had a few torrents running which had been stuck on 2/3% for the last few days then this morning they have jumped to 50%! I also considered that the contention on the line during the day might be causing it but I ran speedtest and downloaded files from Heanet and they were all maxing out the download speed?

radiospan

Isn't there some feature of uTorrent (and maybe Azureus) to get around that?

Protocol Encryption or Obfuscation or something? Try switching that on.

DemonOfTheFall

Yeah the problem with the encryption feature is you can only have encrypted communications with other clients that support encryption and have it turned on. And depending on how smart NTL's throttling system is, it might catch you anyway

youcancallmeal

I've figured out that public torrents are the only ones that are exceptionally slow for me. When using privately tracked torrents I get full speed all the time. This is kind of strange because most of the public torrents I use would have much more seeders that the private ones?

thebman

Try forcing it down port 80. I did that with ours when we were getting slow speeds on torrents on IBB and they jumped up to full speed again.

mollser

Right, is this how traffic shaping works??

Started using Azureus and tried to download a legit movie trailer from their Vuze service. It started off for about 30 seconds at full tilt, connecting to several peers pretty quickly. Speeds up to about 120kBs. Then, suddenly, all the peers were wiped from the peer list instantly, 0 speed. Some slowly connect soon after, but are wiped quickly again.

Now either its Peerguardian blocking them or its NTL - could well be Peerguardian though. Other torrents really at a crawl as well though.

Will leave on overnight and see if anything happens...:o

radiospan

youcancallme>al wrote:

I've figured out that public torrents are the only ones that are exceptionally slow for me. When using privately tracked torrents I get full speed all the time. This is kind of strange because most of the public torrents I use would have much more seeders that the private ones?

This is completely normal.

On private trackers people want to upload as much and as fast as they can to boost their ratio, so the speeds should be much faster. Also there should be much less leechers.

Most peers on public trackers would have there upload speed limited, and people usually stop seeding soon after their download is finished.

youcancallmeal

plazzTT wrote:

This is completely normal.

On private trackers people want to upload as much and as fast as they can to boost their ratio, so the speeds should be much faster. Also there should be much less leechers.

Most peers on public trackers would have there upload speed limited, and people usually stop seeding soon after their download is finished.

Yeah I suppose that makes sense. The only thing is that I used to always get good speeds on public torrents and only recently have they slowed right down do on average 1 or 2kbs. I can live with that I suppose

mollser

mollser wrote:

Right, is this how traffic shaping works??

Started using Azureus and tried to download a legit movie trailer from their Vuze service. It started off for about 30 seconds at full tilt, connecting to several peers pretty quickly. Speeds up to about 120kBs. Then, suddenly, all the peers were wiped from the peer list instantly, 0 speed. Some slowly connect soon after, but are wiped quickly again.

Now either its Peerguardian blocking them or its NTL - could well be Peerguardian though. Other torrents really at a crawl as well though.

Will leave on overnight and see if anything happens...:o

Azureus disabled my internet connection, again. Its a bit buggy that software it seems. Will try again with Utorrent over the weekend and revert!

Any NTL employees reading that know for sure what the story is??

thebman

Azureus is nowhere near as good as Utorrent IMO. Had problems with Azureus and crap speeds before switching to Utorrent.

For some reason, even though the ports were open on the firewall and set in Azureus correctly (checked all documentation), speeds would start off okay and then plummit to almost nothing or nothing. Then it would spike to about 10KB/s at time but never much more.

alhimself

brim4brim wrote:

Try forcing it down port 80. I did that with ours when we were getting slow speeds on torrents on IBB and they jumped up to full speed again.

hey havin problems with ibb and torrents,used to fly at 100KBS even only a few seeding but for the last 2/3 months if not more im lucky if i can top 20 with a whole bunch of 'em.speedtest have the connection runnin grand.so i was thinking ibb was limiting it,running games online has become a nightmare too where the ping'll jump to 500 for a min and drop down again.even then the ins and outs are horrible. now qouting brim4brim how do you this even for bittorrent,the ports only start at 1024 in the options window under the network tab
any help much appreciated,
oh and just another thing,was going to get onto ibb and say it 'em but a little freaked if i start mentioning torrents n stuff,anyone know how they stand?is it kosher?
aL

yan

feylya wrote:

It's been consistantly good for me for the past year and a half.

and what about the traffic limitations mate?

i was looking the other day their plans and the most expensive one has 30GB per month traffic limit....

this is nothing when i normally need about 10GB per day!!!!

any hints?

thanks

mickoneill30

alhimself wrote:

oh and just another thing,was going to get onto ibb and say it 'em but a little freaked if i start mentioning torrents n stuff,anyone know how they stand?is it kosher?
aL

I'm with IBB too. Which sites are you using. The public trackers have gone to crap for me but with the legal stuff happening with torrentspy and isohunt I'm kind of steering clear of those from now on anyway. The private trackers are fine though so for me it's not the ISP.
If you're going to be brining it to their attention make sure you have a torrent for some Linux ISO that is giving you trouble.

feylya

yan wrote:

and what about the traffic limitations mate?

i was looking the other day their plans and the most expensive one has 30GB per month traffic limit....

this is nothing when i normally need about 10GB per day!!!!

any hints?

thanks

Well, they allow for about a gig a day which is usually good enough for home users. They're not overly strict on it either.

yan

feylya wrote:

Well, they allow for about a gig a day which is usually good enough for home users. They're not overly strict on it either.

and what about someone who is into online gaming? can ntl provide?

cause 1GB per day seems REALLY low limit for me

thanks

feylya

Online gaming won't eat a gig a day. I play CSS and Eve online daily as well as downloading and it's grand.

yan

feylya wrote:

Online gaming won't eat a gig a day. I play CSS and Eve online daily as well as downloading and it's grand.

ok thanks mate, unfortunately 1gb is not enough for me per day.

but thanks for the infos

cast_iron

The ISP certainly does affect the torrent speed. I have both NTL and Eircom. Some good torrents download at fill throttle on either, but not so good ones are strange. I don't usually use private trackers.

I'm not sure exactly why, but one torrent might work on NTL (10-20kB), switch over to Eircom and it might die, but another torrent will work (similar speed) that didn't on NTL.

Also, NTL is rubbish all the time, but Eircom is usually pretty fast at night.

mickoneill30

I don't understand that. You're saying some torrents come down at full speed but when other ones from the same tracker to the same PC come down at a slower speed it's the ISPs fault? Is that correct?

mollser

Right, left 5 torrents downloading all night - 1 came down at a good pace at about 120kBs, the others are dripping very slowly, anything from 0 to 4kBs.

Would indicate that there's little traffic shaping through the night if one of them could come at that speed. But why not the others? Seeds are ok on them all

Are torrents just not working as well as they used to in general??

Edit - have another well seeded torrents 2 flying down now - starting to really think torrents in general just not as good as they used to be...

Edit2 - and now they've both stopped - aaarrrggghhhhh

matrim

yan wrote:

and what about someone who is into online gaming? can ntl provide?

cause 1GB per day seems REALLY low limit for me

thanks

There's no ISP here that has a cap that will allow a home user to download 10Gb a day.

yan

matrim wrote:

There's no ISP here that has a cap that will allow a home user to download 10Gb a day.

smart telecom mate

over 300 gb per month and no problems at all

Kernel

The definitive answer is YES. NTL have traffic shaping. Try using another p2p, such as DC++ and you will see connections being closed and dropping or running at less than 1kps.

NTL suck.

youcancallmeal

Kernel wrote:

The definitive answer is YES. NTL have traffic shaping. Try using another p2p, such as DC++ and you will see connections being closed and dropping or running at less than 1kps.

NTL suck.

Yep this is true, I just turned on DC++ after having not used it in months and nearly every download I tried started off great but dropped down to a few kb/s after a minutes.

delllat

I am trying to get torrents up and running on a friends computer,its connected to ntl max pack 6mg and the torrents are running at 5-10kbps
the broadband repotrts a speed test of about 1meg so they definately have enough bandwidth,ive tried encrypting the torrents,tried bittorrent,azureus and utorrent
nothing seems to be working,does anyone have any ideas on how to get around this traffic shaping if thats what causing it?

DemonOfTheFall

Have you done port forwarding etc?

delllat

i tested a few ports in the configuration wizard,they all failed
the default setting waas on 14495 i think and i tried this and about 10 other ports but all failed,ranging right up to 60000 and still download speeds of 5k on well seeded torrents on 6meg broadband

christophicus

Yep I am still expeariencing teh traffic shaping. Yes I so have all ports forwarded correctly, and yes I have tried the enctyptio on utorrent (and I think azureus aswell) and that hasnt worked. I am very annoyed. Seeing as it seems that private trackers are not affected too badly( I dont know I am just going by what other people have said, I havnet downloaded anything off of a private tracker in a long time) do you think its possible that Either NTL or one of the companies that actually provide the internet links(backhaul? ) could possibly be severly limiting bandwidth to a number of public trackers??

delllat

my friend is going to call ntl and cancel his 6meg contract if he cant torrent at reasoable speeds so il keep u all informed of what happens and if theres anyway way around it
if anyone finds a fix before that please let us know,thx.

latenia

Easiest way to test it is to get a torrent of a really popular tv show late on the day it was released. You'll usually have several thousand seeders with a very high ratio to leechers, all on a public tracker. 90% of the time it'll be at max speed throughout.

watty

However there are lots of legal use of torrents, that is illegal and can't be discussed here. Get TV aerial, Satellite Dish, Cable etc or wait for the DVD box set. Better quality too, and doesn't slow down the Internet for the rest of us.

mollser

Left a very well seeded torrent on a semi private tracker running all night and it barely budged.

Using Utorrent, port 65505. I have opened this specific port in Windows SP2 firewall. On NTL, am I correct in saying you cannot port forward? I'm using the small purple modem (NTL:250??) plugged directly into the PC via ethernet. Encryption is turned on in Utorrent settings, although turning it off makes no difference.

Utorrent continues to tell me that the port is not open, even though I do on occasion get quite good speeds. These occasions are fewer and fewer though.

I have no other firewalls running, only other thing on computer is AVG Free anti virus and peerguardian.

For those who have few problems with torrents on NTL, can you give me a steer here? And if anyone can advise step by step as to how to open ports on that NTL modem specifically, and if any other tips to try - increase number of connections in Utorrent or something?

Thanks:)

christophicus

No you cannot open up ports or change anything really on NTL modems. I dont bother with encryption because as far as I understand, then you can only connect to other people using encryption, and there are likly to be fewer of these people, also I dont think it really makes any difference to the speed you are going to get off of NTL anyway.

Anti

Ntl do not seem to watch their caps at all. In the last 6 months ive pulled over 2TB in both directions through them. And no letters or anything.

dub45

Anti wrote:

Ntl do not seem to watch their caps at all. In the last 6 months ive pulled over 2TB in both directions through them. And no letters or anything.

Famous last words?

youcancallmeal

Anti wrote:

Ntl do not seem to watch their caps at all. In the last 6 months ive pulled over 2TB in both directions through them. And no letters or anything.

Nice! Actually maybe you live next door to me and thats why everything is crawling :eek:

christophicus

lol. No they do watch the caps although it seems at random. A few months ago they sent out letters to loads of people on one go saying that we had all gone over the limit.