O Canada! → Canadian → Rogers > [ Express] Recent Massive Torrent throttling in Ottawa?

Up until late September/2010 I was getting great torrent speeds. Often maxing my 10Mb/s connections speed (downloading at over 1000KB/s).

Now for the last weeks or so, my torrents have slowed by a factor of about 10. I now rarely see my TV shows come down at over 100K/s, even when ridiculously well seeded. I still have my full bandwidth for downloading files from Microsoft or similar.

I have been getting my TV via torrent for years and Rogers for 2 years, I have never seen it crawl like this.

Was I just lucky until this week, or did Rogers roll out a new universal Torrent Throttle program?? Is DSL better now?

I too have noticed much slower speeds as of late.

I had been getting 1.2MB/s speeds consistently for well over 4 years and suddenly this week speeds are 300KB/s tops even where there are 100 seeders with very fast upload speeds.

While Rogers policy to set "the maximum upload speed for P2P file sharing traffic (to) 80 kbps at all times" (»www.rogers.com/web/content/netwo···nagement), the fact of the matter is that until recently they weren't actually doing that. Only certain P2P flows were being rate limited; lots of P2P flows weren't. It appears that Rogers has recently made changes to "fix" this.

There are two problems with this:

1) The way Roger did this is clearly broken as not only upstream P2P traffic is getting rate limited. Right now it appears that if Rogers 'network management' system decides you're running P2P software all (or almost all) upsteam encrypted flows other than HTTPS are being collectively rate limited to 80 kbps. So games, SCP traffic on non-standard ports, etc. are all going to be negatively impacted.

2) If all you have is 80 Kbps of upload bandwidth for P2P traffic your download speeds are going to slow regardless of how much download bandwidth you have available. 80 kbps, is 10 KB/s. Depending on how many swarms you're connected to, and the number of peers you're trying to share with, you're likely overloading that 80 Kbps 'pipe' (more then one reasonably busy torrent would be enough to do it). As soon as that 80 Kbps pipe is flooded, there's no bandwidth available for the P2P network overhead (ex: the messages that tell the peers you're downloading from to send you the next chunk). By heavily throttling P2P uploads, they have effectively throttled all P2P downloads.

I've noticed this as well, I'm on Extreme Plus and my torrents rarely go above 50kB/s (despite my speed test consistently hitting the advertised speeds of 25Mbps download, 1Mbps up).
Not sure what to do, the choices are very limited in Ott for cable internet...

300KB/s.

I can only dream of that now.

I am getting closer to Curts 50KB/s. Versus my old of up to 1.2MB/s

Does anyone know how bad the throttling is on DSL these days. I would even go back to DSL if the throttle was less extreme. They have chocked it completely seemingly 24/7. My only heave BW use is Torrent.

When I left DSL it was time of day based.

Then I had 2 years of pure Joy on Cable, now it is worse than DSL was when I left.

Alternately, suggestions for a reliable seedbox. How do people pay for these. I don't think I would trust my CC.

I will try to attach before/after to show how bad it is, how good it was.

Rogers has to be North America's grand master overlord of throttling. Their scripting kiddies mock with network routing all the time.

At least with a company like TekSavvy the company openly advocates net neutrality.

I'd like to see an updated throttling graph of all the major providers, so companies have something to compete for.

i'm in ottawa, haven't noticed any difference in the last few months, pretty consisntently 400-600k/sec

Have you tried this week? This is a fairly recent thing. I have gone from 1.2MB/s two weeks ago to ~50KB/s this week.

I have noticed the better seeded/peered something is, the slower it goes. Like a recent TV show with 27000 seeds running about 20KB/s. Something a month old with only 20 seeds was going over 200KB/s.

I think Rogers has started killing connections after some number so it may make sense to strongly limit your connections in your torrent client. Other wise you keep making connections and Rogers keeps killing them.

Setup Suggestions? What is good max number of seed/peer connections under these connections.

No issues for me in Ottawa in the past week.

As I had issues with the number of connections choking my router, I've got mine set to a max of 300 open connections overall, and max of 100 per torrent.

Its a good thing you edited your post, because I can easily hit 1.2mb/sec which is the max of Rogers extreme just depends on where you are downloading from.

I found the easiest workaround for me was to just go to my friends house with my ESATA 2TB drive and just copy lol.

He has a usenet account and it on a unlimited bell connection, saves me alot of headache.

I did a glasnost test on my connection off Rogers Fallowfield phub and it shows no evidence of throttling.

I don't think Glasnost tells much of the story. I don't think the the new shaping (and something new is definitely going on) targets Torrent protocol, it targets multiple connections.

I also get some minor upload limiting according to glasnost (limit to about 75KB) which is irrelevant as I always had a global upload limit on torrents of 30KB. Glasnost also says no DL limiting is happening.

Now if there was a torrent that could provide 1.2MB in a couple of seeds I would be getting it.

The problem is you need dozens of peer connections, and Rogers is dropping connections after a certain number. Effectively killing a real torrent, but not affecting something like a Glasnost test which provides it's tests in a couple of connections instead of dozens.

I gotta say, it's not BS, and it's not just a few people. I'm also in Ottawa and I've found in the last 3 or so weeks my Torrent performance has gone from being amazing to being virtually worthless.

I use to fire up several torrents, and the next day most would be done.... today, things I started a week ago are still going. My extremely over priced rogers connection has virtually become as good as dialup now.

Rogers isn't simply turning down the performance a bit, they're turned it down so much, if you torrent at all, you might as well get another ISP since torrenting is just short of useless.

Hey guys, just found this thread on Google... I am located near Barrie Ontario and have had some major issues for the last week, maybe 2. I have extreme, was getting torrents around 2-3mb/s... on a private tracker. And now i top out around 400kb/s and average at the 300 range.

First i thought internet issues, but steam downloaded a game last night at about 4 megabytes per second... So def some new shaping.

has anyone tried that method of encryption. I used to use Vuze(?) because it could encrypt traffic to avoid shaping/throttling.

as another poster was mentioning... if rogers is limiting connections. would it be beneficial to limit utorrent connections to like 10 and just hope to connect to a seedbox?

I may have switch providers or get my seedbox back.

I don't think encryption matters because they seem to have a formula that looks for multi-connections and just starts cutting connections. From a shaping persepective that makes sense, since they can keep shaping no matter what the protocol changes or encryption.

I now find that the fastest torrents are old ones with few seeds/peers.

But attempting to limit connections to a small number doesn't help because your odds of getting a 10 good peers/seeds on a well seeded torrent are slim.

Ideally we would need to know Rogers connection dropping algorithm and then have a torrent client that stays under that connection limit, but cycles out its worse connections looking for faster ones...

maybe it's specific areas? i'm east end and downloaded a few LEGAL movies this weekend, all were done within 2-4hrs

I don't know about locality issues. I am west-Nepean.

I am a heavy torrent downloader and until last week or so, I never saw any sign of throttling, but I always had set my global upload to about 40K so I wouldn't choke my connection.

I would almost daily see Torrents that would max my 1.2MB/s download.

I could also run a few simultaneous torrents.

Then Bang. Something changed drastically. Now I am lucky to see 100KB/s and if if I add more I will be lucky if it doesn't drop even lower for all the torrents combined.

I do see older torrent with few peers/seeds actually do pretty decent. But heavily seeded/peered torrents seem to get choked off.

So your LEGAL movies may have fewer more generous seeders and be OK.

I am DL a movie right now and it is running ~40KB/s and has about 10 hours to go...

Glasnost result in London:

1 out of 3 BitTorrent transfers on port 6881 failed to download any data. It seems like your ISP hinders you from downloading BitTorrent traffic on port 6881 to our test server.

Is your upload traffic rate limited?

Your ISP appears to rate limit your uploads.
However, some of the measurements were affected by noise, which limits Glasnost ability to detect rate limiting.

Details:
Your ISP appears to rate limit your BitTorrent uploads. In our tests, uploads using control flows achieved up to 52 Kbps while uploads using BitTorrent achieved up to 11 Kbps.

There is no indication that your ISP rate limits uploads on port 6881 or 40723. In our tests, uploads on port 6881 achieved up to 53 Kbps while uploads on port 40723 achieved up to 52 Kbps.

Is your download traffic rate limited?

Your ISP appears to rate limit your downloads.
However, some of the measurements were affected by noise, which limits Glasnost ability to detect rate limiting.

Details:
Your ISP appears to rate limit your BitTorrent downloads. In our tests, downloads using control flows achieved up to 4804 Kbps while downloads using BitTorrent achieved up to 2591 Kbps.

There is no indication that your ISP rate limits downloads on port 6881 or 40723. In our tests, downloads on port 6881 achieved up to 2983 Kbps while downloads on port 40723 achieved up to 2591 Kbps.

( »loki10.mpi-sws.mpg.de//bb//glasn···ate23=8& )

Detailed download results: »loki10.mpi-sws.mpg.de//bb//glasn···ails=yes

I found a packet reset detection tool.

»www.nnsquad.org/agent

But it doesn't work on win7....

I'm in Kanata, and experiencing essentially the same thing. No changes on my end and average DL speed has gone from ~1MB/s to less than 50kB/s.

I called Rogers, where the tech initially claimed that they were throttling up and down speeds, but after speaking with his manager he informed me that they only throttle UP. He then proceeded to try to blame my router, which I had already told him I'd removed, and then used his call-centre-fu to get me off the phone.

Needless to say I'm pissed right off, and happen to be moving in a week or so, so they really should be trying to appease me, but oh well.

At least you guys are able to torrent anything. Whenever I even so much as seed one torrent I can no longer browse the internet. This happens even though I've rate-limited the torrent to 10kb/s and reduced the maximum global connections to 10.

I'm in Kanata as well and can confirm the same throttling.

My torrent connection went from 1+ mb/sec on private trackers down to 300kb/sec, max.

Enabling encryption and changing ports didn't fix the problem - its definitely a form of deep packet inspection.

This does work, it's just the winPcap that comes bundled with it.
I already had it installed because of Wireshark, and the nnagent program did give an error at the end but still installed fine.

Thanks. Installed wireshark first and it looks like it is working now.

But not sure where the resets would accumulate.

Resets appear as a popup window from nnagent. You'll see multiple windows if you get lots of them. As I said, Rogers doesn't do forging of rst packets.

Ok.

Do you have any what it is that Rogers is doing?

Rogers throttling consists of dropping packets. which slows things down

•»flic.kr/p/8HT4y8

I'll just leave this here... results from a ping -t rogers.com