TekSavvy → [DSL] Bell Throttling

Hey Folks,
I guess I've been kind of lucky in that Bell has usually not throttled me when running Bittorent. However, in the past 6-8 weeks it seems that they've stepped up their efforts to piss people off - if I fire up BT I immediately go offline. I will then proceed to go on and off line for as long as BT is running. Closing BT immediately results in a stable connection.

Are other people seeing this same thing or have I just drawn the short straw?

(This is in Montreal, btw)
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Rob

There has been no throttling on Bell for years. Whatever is affecting you must be something else.

Then I'd love some ideas since this is 100% predictable. I fire up BT and DMT shows me as offline a few seconds later.

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Rob

Try a different bittorrent client. See »Torrents & IP location

Your modem may also be failing. Which one do you have and on what service tier?

I have a Speedtouch 516 on the 6MB tier

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Rob

BitTorrent can bring older hardware to its knees if one or the other isn't properly configured. It's not throttling.

I'm going to try a different client and see if anything changes. Is Tixati a good option?

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Rob

I have no problems with Tixati on my Speedtouch 516. Try downloading a Linux distro as a test.

If your modem loses sync or stops responding when you start using torrents, something is wrong with your modem. If you are not already running the modem in bridged mode with your PC doing the PPPoE stuff, you might want to try setting up a PPPoE connection directly from your PC to see if that helps.

When my internet dies, it is usually because my router (N66U/Merlin) decided to barf.

I have no problems with uTorrent with my ST516+N66U (aside from the above) in Longueuil.

I had the same problem with my old speedtouch 516 change the modem tp-link 8816

problem gone.....

Everytime I start utorrent my modem will reset speedtouch 516

Ok, so Tixati works fine and I have no connection issues. Opening up BT causes instant disconnect. I paused my queued torrents and shut down BT, after coming back online I opened BT again and just getting DHT nodes causes me to go offline.

Time to uninstall BT, wipe it from my registry and try reinstalling to see if I can isolate the problem.

Thanks all, you've been very helpful



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Rob

Seems that uTorrent is responsible for a lot of trouble. I also dumped it in favor of Tixati and haven't looked back.

To add to others' comments:

If you torrent a lot make sure your hardware is up to the task. I had an ancient 2Wire 2700HG-B modem that I'd bought refurbished a decade ago. My line would drop every time there were more than 2 or 3 active torrents. I replaced it with a $25 TP-Link TD-8816 and a refurbished Asus RT-AC66U. Problem solved and of course much better WiFi performance, etc.

As for for clients, if you're looking for a uTorrent replacement try qBittorrent. Very similar features and UI but much leaner, no crapware or ads and fully open source.

This.

Indeed, one of the original reasons cable companies throttled BT was because the number of connections BitTorrent was creating was causing issues with older CMTS hardware.

My guess is that you're overwhelming the total number of tracked connections on an older / less robust NAT somewhere on your end.

Definitely not throttling.

Or with the line. Basically, it is possible to have stable sync with very little activity, but have sync drop when the line gets busy. Could be failing modem, could be marginal signals.

So, important duestion for rbdwarf, does the modem lose sync (aka, does the DSL light go out and/or start blinking, or is the DSL light solid green all the time)?

Good question indeed. In my firewall, I have a session limit set to 1000 per host. As soon as I startup uTorrent, the 1000 sessions is hit almost instantly. Guess where it would go if I would let it wide open. For an old hardware, this can pretty much saturate the memory allocated for NAT or any other resource intensive task you router has to do.

As for the question above, I doubt that the number of sessions has anything to do with the DSL sync, unless this particular hardware (which I am not familiar with) is doing both DSL related stuff and NAT/Firewall out of the same CPU. This is why I am running a bridge mode only DSL modem and a separate router/firewall.

it will kill a Sagemcom on a Stinger remote pretty quickly if you're not on the FibeTV profile.

FWIW, the Thomson ST516 has a limit of 2048 concurrent connections. This limit is very easy to reach when you run a typical BT client with many concurrent, popular torrents and default configuration.

Also the OP should make sure the router's limit isn't necessarily the same as the modem's (usually higher, but useless).

Hey all,
I deleted Bittorrent and wiped all of its settings. Running Tixati I don't see the same problems so I'm going to stick with it.

As a test I reinstalled Bittorrent this morning and I'm not seeing any issues so it's very possible that over the years I tweaked something and then tweaked something else which led to my overwhelming the modem with connections. Hard to tell at this point since my old settings are gone.

Thanks for all your suggestions

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Rob

Is it possible that torrent throttling is done on per app base, so the ISP staff hasn't programmed their equipment yet to slow down much less used hardly known to anyone torrent clients?