Speed Disparity

Nefarious · 7 Oct 2008 at 11:21

I have an '8Mbps' connection but it downloads between 0-3KBps during the daytime and will achieve quite reasonably speeds between 3am and 7am general use is not effected particularily.

Any ideas as to why this would be?

wij · 7 Oct 2008 at 12:38

Who is your ISP?

Is the line stable too? I.e. it does not re sync regularly.

Nefarious · 7 Oct 2008 at 12:43

My line is provided by Talktalk.

I get a reasonable speed when downloading over port 80 or SSH or FTP, it's just bittorrent that slows to an unmanageable trickle during the day time.

wij · 7 Oct 2008 at 12:49

Sounds like its just their traffic management policy kicking in then if its during 'peak' hours that you get the problem.

Nefarious · 7 Oct 2008 at 12:53

hahaha, I love their idea of peak hours being any time when those not addicted to WoW aren't sensibly asleep.

I don't suppose you can suggest any way round that? Some sort of external port redirection is the only thing that springs to my mind.

Nefarious · 7 Oct 2008 at 12:59

Hmm, I just tried something that seemed to have limited success - changing the port of BT to the 20-120 range.

The success of that is VERY limited though

wij · 7 Oct 2008 at 12:59

You could try encrypting your torrent traffic, but if their traffic shaping is any good it will be running at quite a deep inspection level.

Short of moving to an ISP that does not shape traffic there isn't a lot you can do.

Be* are pretty good (if you can get it), but if you play games they are having latency issues at the moment so maybe something like an Enta reseller or if you're not bothered by cost then Zen are pretty much as good as you will get.

Nefarious · 7 Oct 2008 at 13:09

Sounds reasonable - how would I go about encrypting my packets, got to be worth a try

wij · 7 Oct 2008 at 13:12

Depends on your torrent client, for uTorrent (http://www.utorrent.com/)

Preferences -> BitTorrent -> Protocol Encryption (Enable, allow legacy connections)

Nefarious · 7 Oct 2008 at 13:16

OIC - I use BitTornado so there's no option for encryption, I'll try utorrent and see where that gets me

Nefarious · 7 Oct 2008 at 13:33

Hmm, no luck so far - I've started getting 10KBps but that's what I got for swapping ports. I'm still in contract with these jokers so am stuck till then.

Thanks for your help, I'll let you know if I come up with anything better.

pennywise · 7 Oct 2008 at 14:05

Nefarious said:
I have an '8Mbps' connection but it downloads between 0-3KBps during the daytime and will achieve quite reasonably speeds between 3am and 7am general use is not effected particularily.

Any ideas as to why this would be?

Remember, your connection is "up to 8Mbps", two little words most people don't seem to notice when they decide to complain about their broadband

Also, remember that torrents hardly ever give you your full speed unless you download off a private torrent site, or the item you're downloading happens to have plenty of seeds

Nefarious · 7 Oct 2008 at 14:43

Pennwise - I agree that many people are far too quick to jump on ISPs but my problem is that I get practically nothing bittorrent wise but reasonable speeds with most other things (e.g. SSH transfers, FTP, etc)