Is your ISP throttling your Bittorrent Downloads

So the cat’s been out of the bag for a while now that ISP’s are throttling or in some cases even blocking your BitTorrent downloads or seeding.

Comcast came out and admitted to it’s practices in the United States last year. You can read about it here on wired. Since then there has been lot’s of speculation on if other ISP’s are doing the same thing…

What do you think?

Yeah we do also!

Now there is a free tool that will simulate BitTorrent activities and let you know if your speed or activities have been effected and to what extent. This program (aka bittorrent throttling test) and group have picked up momentum since 2008 and now have the backing of Google and other big names.

Are you curious as to if your ISP is throttling your torrent downloads and doing you dirty?

Well so are we.

Run the tool below on any web browser on any operating system and post back what your results are in the comments. It is strictly web based and nothing gets installed. So you can try it pretty much anywhere.

I tried this in the office on my Cogent circuit. It is a 100mb Ethernet handoff so I was not really expecting any throttling. All you need to run the test is browse on over to:

a title=”http://broadband.mpi-sws.org/transparency/bttest.php” href=”http://broadband.mpi-sws.org/transparency/bttest.php”>http://broadband.mpi-sws.org/transparency/bttest.php.

You will be greeted by a web page that looks like this:

Simply scroll down on the page until you see the Start Testing button. You can run the detailed or the simple test. The only difference is the intensity of the test. Some ISP’s are believed to only throttle torrents after a certain period of time (greater than 5 minutes) so this will have you covered.

After you hit the Start testing button your test will begin and you will see a count down in a window that looks something like what you see below.

When the test is complete you will get your results. They will also look something like mine which you can see below. My ISP is NOT throttling my BT downloads or seeding activity and they go into detail on each point they checked as well as the speeds they were able to achieve with the transfers.

I love geeky statistics. Here are my results: