broadband speed dropping when torrenting

BurnUp78

So the wait for game of thrones season 8 is killing me and i just had to scratch the GoT itch. reading fan theories just wasnt enough so i decided a full rewatch was in order! Now having been used to watching GoT in glorious HD and not having the money to shell out on the boxset i decided to be a naughty boy and torrent them
yes i know this is illegal and i shouldnt but hey the itch needed to be scratched.
anyway, i am beginning to suspect that my ISP is aware of this and as a result is throttling my broadband speeds as when the seasons are downloading my broadband speed slows to less than a mb/s. i thought at first it was just my router acting the maggot but this has been happening for over a week now and it seems to only happen when im downloading torrents.
so my question is is my ISP slowing my speed on purpose because of my illegal activity? or am i paranoid and its just a network problem?

TheChizler

If we're allowed discuss this... Who's your ISP? What speeds do you normally get? How is your Torrenting device connected? What speeds are the downloads happening at? Which devices and connections get slow?

BurnUp78

TheChizler wrote: »

If we're allowed discuss this... Who's your ISP? What speeds do you normally get? How is your Torrenting device connected? What speeds are the downloads happening at? Which devices and connections get slow?

yeah i didnt mention which ISP as thats probably not allowed.. im on a 24MB line but when connected through wifi the highest we usually get is 10-11MB.
its on my phone through a torrent client but the slow down is affecting every device connected to the network; laptops, consoles etc.
funnily enough, the torrents arent affected. i kept wondering why wont youtube or boards wont load but the torrent is still downloading haha.

ED E

Confusing B and b.

If your torrent client shows 8MB/s thats 64Mb. You're just saturating your own connection.

TheChizler

As ED E says I'd imagine there's some confusion between B and b /s here. I presume you've been sold a 24 Mb/s package (broadband is usually sold by Mb/s) which maxes out at 11-12 Mb/s as you say due to distance/line quality. Any Bittorrent client I've used has MB/s or KB/s as its default unit. So if the download is reported as 1-1.5 MB/s on your phone you're likely saturating your own connection.

I don't think there's any issue with mentioning ISP, some of them treat services differently, I'm not sure of any that would throttle an entire connection based on the type of traffic on it.

9726_9726

The torrent is swamping your line, leaving no room for anything else. It's an aggressive protocol.

Also, your ISP may be limiting number of simultaneous IP connections (flows). Say they are limiting it to 100, of your torrent take up that 100 flows (peers), if you try to open a web page it will fail.

clintondaly

Torrents(Utorrent is anyway) are also based on the ratio of Peers to Seeds etc. and depending on whether or not you are sharing what you have downloaded the program will throttle back the speeds,its to try and prompt people to keep sharing once downloaded