BitTorrent blocking more common with US ISPs
Blocking of BitTorrent traffic is widespread among some ISPs in the US and Singapore, but not in Canada or any other country on the globe, says a new study released this week from German researchers. The study was conducted between March 18 and May 15 by the German-based Max Planck Institute for Software Systems, with assistance with more than 8,000 users worldwide. Together, they implemented a tool called Glasnost to test whether their BitTorrent traffic was being manipulated. Their results pinpointed Comcast and Cox as the leading culprits of torrent blocking in the US, though that may not come as a surprise to many of their customers. The survey was limited strictly to hosts whose BitTorrent transfers to the institute’s servers were blocked — or interrupted by RST packets generated by an ISP — as opposed to being throttled or rate-limited.
Interestingly, in spite of accusations of BitTorrent blocking recently filed with Canadian authorities against Bell Canada and other Canadian ISPs, the study found a total of only one blocked host out of 1,272 hosts measured in Canada. That compares with Malaysia, where one of the 64 measured hosts turned out to be blocked. None of the hosts measured in the UK were blocked, though, and no blocking appeared in Australia, France, Germany, India, the Ukraine, Israel, United Arab Emirates (UAR), China, Japan, South Korea, or dozens of other countries studied. In the US, however, 599 of the 2,714 measured hosts were blocked for BitTorrent transfers. The same held true for 26 of the 70 measured hosts in Singapore. All of the hosts observed to be blocking BitTorrent tracking did so in the upstream direction, while only a handful did so in downstream BitTorrent transfers.
Source: Betanews
that really sucks
Lol I guess USA is ignoring the “freedom of information” now. XD
Wonder when they gonna start censoring emails and the web like China does?
They don’t need to censore the e-mails,they read them before u get them
Sweet we ain’t blocked here in the UK. Wait..BT Slows Bittorrent traffic a lot so these guys tests fail.
why do they blog bittorrent protocol? what if i want to use it for other purposes like transfering data that is not copyrighted material?
Blocking Bit-Torrent Traffic???
why not shut down the whole internet to prevent the big company?
why not stop producing HDD and DVDs???
I think they are out of mind!
Actually, its being blocked in Israel aswell…
I feel truly sorry for you guys. Not that I really care about BT-traffic though, it’s more about the principle of the thing.
Really can’t feel anything but pity for the people in the affected countries.
Bell Canada or Sympatico and Rogers manage torrent traffic. I get 30K a second from 3PM until 11PM 7 days a week. They are rolling in out across the country. These are the two main ISP’s in Canada (or they supply to the smaller guys) so they own the whole market. The numbers in that study are just plain wrong.
I have 3 Comcast accounts here in the USA, 2 in one house & one at our Beach house (near this home).
2 of the 3 accounts are ‘limited’ by “SANDVINE” or whatever flavor Comcsat is using nowdays.
However, I am about to get those 2 accounts freed up of this p2p ‘block’ / ’slow down’…
I discovered that my 3rd account which I pay an extra $10 a month for to get their ‘faster speeds’ (Up & Down) is not effected by any of their throteling.
To make sure, I got a neighbor to subscribe / upgrade their Comcast account.
We tested it before & after the upgrade, sure enough, after the $10 upgrade kicked in not only did his speeds increase but all p2p traffic flowed as it should.
So, 2nd account in this house will be upgraded Monday.
Just upgrade, it’s $10 a month & ya’ faster as well as ’sandvine free’…
They don’t tell you this BTW… you have to ask for the upgrade.
Take a step back and look at it from an UNBIASED perspective.
For example, imagine there is a line of people looting stores and walking away with the goods. USA will at least put some effort in stopping the looters, even if they go about it wrong, they still try. All the other countries aren’t civil enough to even care. All the other countries are like a tribe of apes raiding the more successful tribe. Thus, USA is civil, unlike everyone else.
In Belgium the Telenet-provider also does it, others don’t so far I know
Ofcourse there’s a very easy way to work around this, just install µTorrent and enable ENCRYPTION of all traffic, this way the ISP can’t filter the packets anymore, and everything works…
cheers
IMo
@ ★★★RLSLogKing★★★
Problem with your logic is that you don’t really derive that store of it’s goods… it’s more like video taping a video on display in the store and walking off. They still got the original video tape and all. you never took the material property itself. you just copied the information…
so no USA isn’t more civil in that sense…
@ Revellion
deprive not derive my bad. no edit feature in place to fix it
America land of the free, well except all the other first-world countries that is.
@10 T@H:
I was also being limited to 30k with bell sympatico which was really annoying. I then got the unlimited package which removed the limit completely. It’s really worth it if you download alot. I can easily do 500gb/month now compared to maybe 80 before.
Here in Brazil, the internet companies Brasil Telecom and GVT from time to time does Traffic Shapping to slow the speed of torrent and emule downloads. Other companies, like NET Cable, allways apply Traffic Shapping.
I believe this will become worst next years.
Blocking of BitTorrent traffic is widespread among some ISPs in the US and Singapore, but not in Canada or any other country on the globe,…
I don’t think so, like Gilvan said, here on brazil, it’s very usual ISPs block bittorrent and others p2p protocols, some ISPs also block voIP softwares and protocols. The information freedom, here on brazil, is already on the trash.
this gives a whole new meaning to the “land of freedom” expression
ahah XD
Sometimes, this site is jus as stupid as Comcast.
so nr.11 you say you actually have to pay to enjoy your free software aka paying for warez i guess. wherever this is going, its going in a wrong direction.
This is false, as Canada is widely being attacked from traffic shaping and deep packet inspection technology. Bell is blocking ALL DSL traffic, since they have full control over the entire telephone network structure with their monopoly.
Rogers, the largest cable company, not only shapes BT traffic, but ALL encrypted traffic. Other major cable companies also mess with users traffic in Canada.
In fact, if you go to DSLreports forums, I don’t think there is a broadband ISP in Canada that DOESN’T use traffic shaping or deep packet inspection. They are using this to set up pier pricing plans to fleece the users out of their money by charging them more.
i use comcast and my speeds are very fast i get over 200kbs per sec and i am very happy with it its been that way forever if they do anything to my internet what i am paying for i am sueing them for millions of dollars and leaving there service forever
ahhahahahahah, usa is civil? i had to laugh really hard. oh yeah, US and A, the beacon of freeeedom !!!
___________
btw, Net Virtua is using traffic shaping as well here in Brazil.
so we have 3 companies that prolly cover around 30 - 40 % of the users.
the difference here is that those A-h*les dont have enough capacity to offer the users as said on the contract, so when the clock hits 8 pm, internet jams like hell and dl and ul rates drop like an asteroid, specially on fridays and weekends.
sometimes it sucks to live in a developing country… but our chicks pay off for the inconvenience auehuaheuaehuaheuahe
i make my own static ip adress i realised my badiwdth going up by nother 10-12 k lately…throttling yes,i got an 6mb connection with comcast never reach my max upload speed.but it has increased on p2ps lately..torrent aint payed attention lately.
This is crap. Shaw and Telus both of Canada’s leading ISP’s heavily throttle BT
“…Blocking of BitTorrent traffic is widespread among some ISPs in the US and Singapore, but not in Canada or any other country on the globe…”
That´s not entirely true… here in argentina 3 out of 5 IMPORTANT ISPs block p2p protocol… they just block it without any excuse…. so… the study is not accurate.
people are obviously unable to read excerpts from an incredibly simple study:
”
The survey was limited strictly to hosts whose BitTorrent transfers to the institute’s servers were blocked — or interrupted by RST packets generated by an ISP — as opposed to being throttled or rate-limited.
”
We all know most ISP’s in most countries throttle/shape. This DOESN’T HAVE ANYTHING TO DO WITH THROTTLING OR SHAPING.
To those who genuinely are being blocked (in the USA and other countries); HawHaw!!. j/k - they are probably doing you a favour, torrents aren’t brilliant anyway. fight for the right to use your connection how you want to though.
hell yeah, long live Canada
@27
“This is crap. Shaw and Telus both of Canada’s leading ISP’s heavily throttle BT”
Shaw and Telus are not Canada’s leading ISP’s, Bell and Rogers are. But they all throttle and screw with your traffic. Canada has no net neutrality.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogers_Cable#Controversy
Rogers is by far the most disgusting ISP in Canada. I remember last summer it was not at all possible to use BitTorrent via Rogers. I despise those @rseh*les.
You get what you vote for.
I am trying to download a torrent now and it shows several seeds but yet nothing is happening. It seems to do this from time to time. I hate Comcast.
what is everyones problem - Vote with your feet - Leave the ISP (assuming of course you wernt daft enough to sign up for a 12 month contract)
Also - Funny, that the man who advocates unbiased opinions thinks that “USA is civil, unlike everyone else”
They are going to have to blok my port 80 to bring me down
Dozens of you are missing the point when you say your traffic is also shaped.
–”The survey was limited strictly to hosts whose BitTorrent transfers to the institute’s servers were blocked — or interrupted by RST packets generated by an ISP — as opposed to being throttled or rate-limited.”–
There is a class action lawsuit against Comcast for using RST packets to shape traffic, on the grounds that 1) they must impersonate the user to include those RST packets 2) it’s an invasion of privacy because they know what type of traffic it is. Typical ISP traffic shaping is more passive.
I dont know what this stuff about Shaw and Telus throttling BT is, cause I download off BT at my top d/l speeds. Meaning, the fastest I ever get off legit sites is 290kb/s, and the fastest I get off BT is also 290kb/s.
Comcast considering bandwidth caps and overcharges:
http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Comcast-Considering-250MB-Cap-Overage-Fees-94185
MALAYSIA AND SINGAPORE SUCKS THEN, NO?
@27, @31: Telus DSL user - my BT traffic rates regularly achieve my max web d/l rate. AFAIK Shaw *does* shape BT traffic; Telus does not.
Australia does not have bittorrent blocking because ISPs have download limits on their plans. Theres only two options for your internet plan, either it gets shapped to 64kbps or you pay stupidly high amounts for “excess / over quota” GB.
If the USA is having issues with people abusing their “unlimited” bandwidth maybe rather then playing with the traffic they should set limits too?
Mines, ADSL2+ 40GB a month, after that im back to 64kbps/128kbps. Personaly I think AU needs more bandwidth to USA/Asia then the limits could be moved up to say 100GB for the same price
Virgin in uk throttle ALL download traffic… if you download more than 300mb between 16:00 and 21:00 your download speed will be reduced to 8kbps for 5hours (even longer sometimes) I will shortly be leaving them for a useable isp…. just a heads up to anyone in uk DONT USE VIRGIN!
btw i think b.t do the same thing.
How exactly are they identifying bitTorrent traffic and blocking them. Bittorrent clients connect to many IPs and start downloading the file from them, if thats how it works - then how could they block/delay bitorrent is it by blocking those IPs, that would be real hard or is itby some other way.
@44 even my router can do that.
I’m using multiple proxies from time to time, and I can say for sure that blocking is very commen. In KSA they even blok the sites directly, like in china, which ofcoz does not work very well, since you can still get through their systems. Anywho in Denmark 1 of the broadband hosts are also limiting the connections for ISP, but the major host is actually both half funded/controlled by the state but is also hosting p2p servers mostly DC servers…Even thou the state it self is not very happy for that part but they can’t do much about it, so the don’t..LOL
Hmm, it almost seems that everyone will have to learn to hack just to use the internet the way it should be. As soon as someone figures out a way to make every computer it’s own wireless isp server, no one will need to pay for it again… (sigh) hope for the future.
Here in Brazil we have serious problems with NET/VIRTUA . They block sites, bit torrent traffic comes in a 8 mega connection to 5k/s WTF!!!! Freedom to all EARTH! Peace.