Alright heres the deal, im set up with my computer, and i use it for gaming and torrenting. My torrenting speeds are slow, so naturaly i went on to the forum and took a look at the post on slow download speeds. The only problem is that our router is a Apple Extreme, my mom uses it for her work laptop. We have a Shaw High-speed Extreme-I, so normal downloads are pretty fast,800kbs or so, but when it comes to torrent downloads.. 25kbs at best? Does the airport cause this? If not then why hasn't anything else worked? Help?
Is that Shaw in Canada because they throttle torrents on the upload side but not in all areas, from what I hear. The Shaw forum should provide you more info: http://www.dslreports.com/forum/shaw This pretty well sums it up. Shaw has a stated policy of throttling Bittorrent traffic whenever the node is busy. Unfortunately for many customers in the denser areas of big cities, that's almost all the time, and the throttling reduces Bittorrent to nearly unusable rates.
Changing the port number doesn't help, as Shaw uses software that examines the content of each packet and recognizes Bittorrent traffic indepdendent of the port number.
Encryption does help, because it completely obscures the content of the packets. But it only works between Bittorrent clients that support compatible encryption and are using it with the current torrent. Clients supporting encryption now include BitComet, Azureus, and uTorrent, so it's getting more popular. But keep in mind that it's a game of one-upmanship between Shaw and its customers, and the next move is Shaw's. I'm pretty sure that it's technically possible to block encrypted Bittorrent traffic too. If you like to use Bittorrent frequently, and you happen to live in an area where Shaw is throttling, you would be better off to switch to ADSL. You'll get much better performance on ADSL, and Shaw doesn't want you as a customer anyway.
