Irish Broadband Throttling BitTorrent?

prof_darkins

I think IBB have finally started to throttle BT traffic. My HTTP traffic is running at top speed, the blackknight speed test giving me the full 3 meg either way, however, my torrent download speeds will not get about 50k, except for the odd burst up to 150 that lasts maybe 20 seconds as a peer connects un filtered. I am just posting to discover if anyone else is having this problem.

Red Alert

I'll check this one out later. Are you sure there's no rate-limiting in terms of your BT client? I have suspected this before but I've no hard facts on it.

Red Alert

Yes I'm now reduced to about 4k/sec and have had difficulty starting a couple of torrents this morning.

prof_darkins

Im quite sure its not my client. I switched to Azureus to find the same problem, tryed different limits on amount of connections etc, all to no avail. Whatever identification system they are using, I dont think our encryption is making any difference. If anyone finds different clients manage to bypass the throttling, or if there are any workarounds at all I'd love to hear. I will post here if I find anything that works.

Redisle

This has happened many times before.. search the boards, there have been at least 10 threads on the topic already, and yes I have noticed it too but then it seems to start working again.. it appears to be totally random tbh.. and last time this happened the really strange thing I noticed was that downloading things like trailers from azureus vuze I got full speed and got crappy speed from a normal torrent site using a well seeded torrent..

ntlbell

mine's been throttled for about a year now at 20kB/s

i've been fowarding the traffic over ssh to get around it

ExoduS 18.11

i have that same problem, although sometimes i get crap speeds even of my browser. All torrents are very slow for me. My neighbour has 2mb bb with eircom and gets higher speed than my ib 3mb line

el dude

This sucks balls. My speeds now won't go above 50kB/s. So whats the point in me paying for 3meg when i won't be able to utilize the speed. I'd rather they cap downloads then pull this crap. Think I'll threaten to go somewhere else and see what they say about that.

ntlbell wrote:

mine's been throttled for about a year now at 20kB/s

i've been fowarding the traffic over ssh to get around it

What is that then? Much hassle?

ian_m

I cant imagine any ISP deliberately trying to slow any kind of traffic down. It would not be in their interests to displease their customers. They are not coming from any pressure from anyone in authority so why should they care what is passing through their servers??
I don't believe they would be doing it on purpose.

Bambaata

i'm in the same boat. i sue to get 180 at a previous address. i then moved and use to get up to 120 or so but i ahvent seen above 60 for 1 torrent in weeks. that said my upload sometimes goes up to 120 on one torrent!!? Unfortunately i dont think i have any iotehr bb options but i think i might start looking harder!

el dude

ian_m wrote:

I cant imagine any ISP deliberately trying to slow any kind of traffic down. It would not be in their interests to displease their customers. They are not coming from any pressure from anyone in authority so why should they care what is passing through their servers??
I don't believe they would be doing it on purpose.

What else could it be though. I still get max speed when doing tests, or directly downloading.

azzeretti

ntlbell wrote:

mine's been throttled for about a year now at 20kB/s

i've been fowarding the traffic over ssh to get around it

Where have you being tunnelling to? Did you buy a shell account, or do you have an open public box?

In which case, why aren't you downloading from that!!?

EDIT: Or did you mean you were just using the BT client to encrypt the traffic?

Feeder

I'm the same in Limerick here,2Mb Breeze running off the Ballysimon transmitter, up til this week I always got my full 230kB while downloading torrents then all of sudden it slowed to no greater than 50k/B.

I had Azureus Vuze running but I could only get 7-8k/B, so then i went back to utorrent where I get 50.

Has anyone found any solution to this or found out what IBB have to say ?

Nevyn

Check your contacts terms and conditions.

mrooqie

as i understand this is discussion about their DSL service...

Feeder

Utorrent says my average speed is 33 kB/s, and it took me 1 day and 7 hours to d/l a 1.37GB file. I'd rather have a cap on my limit than slow speeds. Any one notice any improvement ?

Nevyn

mrooqie wrote:

as i understand this is discussion about their DSL service...

and ?

prof_darkins

Still no change for me. I'm going to ring them 2m and see what the story is. Will post with update. I don't care if BT is illegal, it was the ONLY reason for having a 3 meg line, and I'm out of contract here too. The reasons IBB were best for so long were: no cap, and symmetric connection, both things that BT depends on big time. But at this rate, I might as well go back to a cheaper ADSL, at least my seeded torrents will download at a good whack. Ah **** it anyway...

Bambaata

any word?

prof_darkins

Ok, this is it. Hello Mr Broadband man by the way if you're reading this, Im sorry I was too scared to admit that it was me that used all the BT. Anyway. What he said was firstly, no IBB do not block any ports or throttle traffic. However, in extreme cases, they will start to throttle p2p traffic for specific "heavy users", but throttling did not happen across the board. He wouldnt tell me what constituted heavy usage, and I doubt that there is a publically released threshold. Now for the bad bit though. Once a customer is red flagged for heavy p2p use, throttling comes into play, and he said that was permanent. Bloody hell. What to do. SSH I suppose? Can anyone fill me in on traffic tunnelling? Lets band together. Us against them. Radiohead are on our side, btw.

Feeder

Does anybody have the contract ?

Does it say this on the contract ?

el dude

I sent them a friendly innocent email just giving out a bit about my download speeds. Got a reply today asking me to do a speed test and to mail them back the results. Which we know is something different altogether. I was about mail them back to complain some more, but i tried a torrent again to see and low and behold my speed is back. Fingers crossed!

el dude

Feeder wrote:

Does anybody have the contract ?

Does it say this on the contract ?

http://www.irishbroadband.ie/terms.php Terms and conditions.

Feeder

6.10 Irish Broadband customer account descriptions in some cases may specify limits on bandwidth or simultaneous network connections for residential Subscriber, and use up to these limits is included in the subscriptions for that type of subscriber. In the event Irish Broadband determines that a residential Subscribers is exceeding the bandwidth, or number of simultaneous network connections, the residential Subscriber will be notified by email. If the excess use continues for more than 48 hours after such notification, the residential Subscriber may be requested to upgrade to the appropriate service level agreement or to modify the activity creating the excess use. If excessive bandwidth or simultaneous network connections is determined by Irish Broadband to adversely affect Irish Broadband's ability to provide service for all Subscribers, immediate action may be taken to alleviate the problem. In such event, the residential Subscriber will be notified by email as soon as practicable.

Did anyone get an email about this ? If I had been warned I could have done something about it

Bambaata

prof_darkins wrote:

Ok, this is it. Hello Mr Broadband man by the way if you're reading this, Im sorry I was too scared to admit that it was me that used all the BT. Anyway. What he said was firstly, no IBB do not block any ports or throttle traffic. However, in extreme cases, they will start to throttle p2p traffic for specific "heavy users", but throttling did not happen across the board. He wouldnt tell me what constituted heavy usage, and I doubt that there is a publically released threshold. Now for the bad bit though. Once a customer is red flagged for heavy p2p use, throttling comes into play, and he said that was permanent. Bloody hell. What to do. SSH I suppose? Can anyone fill me in on traffic tunnelling? Lets band together. Us against them. Radiohead are on our side, btw.

i had a similar chat with one of them before too. I asked him what he meant by heavy users and he said it would be well more than what i was doing (roughly 100GB a month) so unless u are an extreme user i doubt very much they stopped all of u for heavy use. I suggested 1TB a month and he said that wud be more like it

prof_darkins

i was nowhere near a TB. i was 40-50gb a month for the last year id say, rarely above that. theres only so much porn you can watch. lawl.

Bambaata

haha. i seriously doubt the stopped u for being a high user. My torrents seem a little better today. getting 60 - 70 out of 1 and 190 max total uploads

prof_darkins

IMPORTANT EDIT

First of all, let me say I am happy to report that my torrent speeds have dramatically recovered, literally in the last day, having tested last night and now. Where as I was locked tight at 50kbs across the board, I am now getting speeds up at in the 200kbs's again. I do not think that this thread was premature though, there was definately some throttling going on I think, but maybe it is an emergency system brought in by the network in times of low bandwidth, and it wasnt a local connection problem for me because my http was at full pace the whole time. Either way its all good news as everything is back to normal, at least for the moment. Will post if there is any change.

Cheers everyone

cmdrpaddy

I've found most P2P downloading has been relatively slow for me lately. The speeds can vary over the year. From christmas to early summer this year was quite fast. Over the summer it was quite slow and then picked up a lot over late august september now its around 100Kb/s. Seasonal variations?:rolleyes:

bertisevil

lol much more likely due to the universities been back i'd imagine

Feeder

i'm still not getting any joy with the torrents :mad: , can someone pm me with one that they used to get good speeds. did ye forward different ports or anything ?

I can get good speeds from vuze trailers? ? ?

Did everyone who called them see an improvement if so i 'll give them a ring

prof_darkins

Well i didnt tell them who i was when i rang, so thats not what made the difference for me anyway...

Nick_oliveri

They are probably testing the port throttling system. It seems to have been a success. Uh-oh!

Aky

Hi guys.

Unfortunately i have the same problem with my download/upload speed when i try to use torrent client.
Could one of you explain me how to set up Utorrent or Azureus with SSH. I know i have to use putty but nothing else.

Thx

carbsy

Aky: you need another box configured outside of your ISPs network to 'SSH' into and then out through that.

prof_darkins

Ok, my speeds are ****ed again. Now stuck down in the 60s. God damn it. A box outside the network? I'm not sure what you mean. does that mean we have to own a server to use SSH?

carbsy

Well I wouldn't use the word server as it doesn't technicially have to be but ... you need to SSH into a box outside the ISP network in order for it to work.

Aky

I found this link about SSH configurtion : http://whalesalad.com/2006/08/27/tunneling-bittorrent-over-ssh/
but unfortunately didn`t help. My download speed is still around 5-10kb/s which is really bad :mad: I don`t know what to do now.

stanley1

prof_darkins wrote:

Ok, my speeds are ****ed again. Now stuck down in the 60s. God damn it. A box outside the network? I'm not sure what you mean. does that mean we have to own a server to use SSH?

Stuck down in the 60's!, I can't get past 10.

Pacifico

Speeds are ok for me. They were crap though a few days ago (when you created this thread)

I'd rather be able to connect to the Playstation network than get good torrent speeds!!

ntlbell

Aky wrote:

I found this link about SSH configurtion : http://whalesalad.com/2006/08/27/tunneling-bittorrent-over-ssh/
but unfortunately didn`t help. My download speed is still around 5-10kb/s which is really bad :mad: I don`t know what to do now.

where are ye ssh'ing to?

dwayneburke

Folks

Im using our company mail server which requires SSL on ports 995 and 465 (i think)

My mails nearly always have large graphics attache 5-30 MB. It worked brilliantly up until last weekend then just kept bombing out saying in outlook some error about SSL and for me to contact my ISP i.e. IBB

Do you think that these problems are connected? If so this is definitly not on as i purely went with IBB due to 2 meg upload and could send huge files very fast etc.

Could be back to Digiweb metro for me if this carries on.

BTW tried my laptop with metro and sent a 35 meg file no problem then switched over to IBB and same error

Any ideas?

prof_darkins

You see here I'm getting confused. Whereas my http was good whilst my torrents were bad last week, at the minute my http is running at 1meg, (not great for a 3meg connection) and my torrents (from a private tracker with excellent seeding) are disasterous again. To be honest I don't really mind if this is just a bad patch the IBB network is going through, its not that I'm in any mad hurry, it's just that if this is all part of a crackdown on p2p, I'm not interested IBB anymore, and I would imagine many others would feel the same.

dwayne, I have no idea about how such a link would exist, but the timeline sure seems the same.

Aky

ntlbell wrote:

where are ye ssh'ing to?

ssh.silenceisdefeat.org

Feeder

I must try rapidshare over the weekend and see, I saw in the sticky about NTL that someone changed utorrent port to 80 and encrypted the traffic and that worked for them. I had no joy though !!!:mad:

Moriarty

Aky wrote:

ssh.silenceisdefeat.org

Unless you've got explicit permission to be routing your bittorrent traffic through them, you're probably going to have a very unhappy sysadmin getting in contact with you shortly.

Red Alert

I'd just like to point out here that Bit Torrent is not illegal. I used it to download Openoffice a few days ago, and have often pulled Linux ISO's off it. So IBB have no business using a cloak of perceived illegality to throttle it.

ntlbell

Red Alert wrote:

I'd just like to point out here that Bit Torrent is not illegal. I used it to download Openoffice a few days ago, and have often pulled Linux ISO's off it. So IBB have no business using a cloak of perceived illegality to throttle it.

No one ever stated it was throttled to prevent illegal downloads.

Red Alert

Point being that they have no business throttling it at all and that the throttling is indefensible.

raven33

im using 2mb breeze.

download speeds on dc++ (p2p i used to use) is terrible, not even a 1kb/s. switched to utorrent, but nothing changed - random 10-40kb/s. it started to happen about 3 weeks ago........

if ibb is throttling p2ps why any emails hasnt been sent to users to inform them about that?

i think ill switch to imagine soon. why would i need 2mbit connection and be limited to 900k/s?

prof_darkins

The thing is, IBB have probably brought the throttling in under "network maintenance", in order to provide a good quality of service to all the poor people who arent hogging the bandwidth with torrents 247. I don't think that they need to inform customers about moves like this. Hopefully though some next gen encryption should sort the problem. hurry up utorrent 2.0!