Life in the slow lane
Been banging my head against the wall for the last few days trying to figure out why my Bittorrent downloads have suddenly become so slow. Turns out my ISP (Force9) has bandwidth-limited my P2P traffic because I racked up 60 gigs of transfers last month 
Bandwidth limiting is probably a good solution to greedy users such as myself - still getting full speed HTTP so I can’t complain too much - the only thing that annoys me is the underhanded way in which they’ve applied it - previously was told that I had 100GB allowance per month, and this has changed without notice.
I’ll probably stick with them though - as they still have the best policies I’ve come across so far. Besides, in a few months our local exchange should be getting ADSL 2+, which means I can join Bethere.co.uk - 24 megs down, 1 meg up… and work is paying for it! 
January 7th, 2006 at 1:12 pm
Can’t you just change the port that Bittorrent uses? I’ve heard of ISPs blocking certain ports to try and prevent P2P, maybe changing the port to something non-standard may help. I changed mine and never had a problem (but then I don’t download 60Gb a month!! How big is your hard drive?)
Plus of course, I’m with a decent ISP
Boo to ADSL 2+, wonder how miniscule the chances are of the Lingfield exchange being upgraded!
January 8th, 2006 at 11:11 am
hmm have tried a few different ports - maybe port 80 would be worth a try as they’re not limiting my HTTP use - dunno if that will make any diff tho - i can’t change what other bittorrent users are using, so any of my outbound connections are liable to be bandwith-limited…
the usage did surprise me - I only have a 40 gig HDD!! I did get into a habit of leaving torrents running after they’d finished - so probably ran up a lot of bandwidth that way - ah and internet radio too - sometimes left that running 24 hrs a day without realising
which ISP are you with?
i’m not that optimistic we will get adsl2+ in april when BT says we will - judging by their past performance
January 15th, 2006 at 11:19 pm
I’m not completely sure about how bittorrent works, but I think the port you specify is used for both incoming and outgoing connections, otherwise I think my firewall would be blocking it… I guess the port you use is stored on the tracker.
I’m with Pipex - it costs slightly more, but I get unlimited downloads (or at least what appears to be unlimited)…
March 4th, 2006 at 9:23 am
Bah, spoke too soon, Pipex have started throttling BitTorrent for everyone! Solution - encryption
uTorrent’s latest beta does the trick…