Rogers and BitTorrent: another datapoint

[Mike Kallies]

On 10/26/06, Lennart Sorensen <lsorense-1wCw9BSqJbv44Nm34jS7GywD8/FfD2ys at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 26, 2006 at 10:08:51AM -0400, JoeHill wrote:
> > I knew it! And the most evil part of it is, their blocking affects your
> > connection _in general_, ie. I was finding that as soon as I fired up
> > Bittorrent, even browsing the Web was pointless, it was like being on a dialup
> > connection.
> >
> > Oh, well, whatever 'block' they put up, there's always a way around it. ;)
>
> Actually I find bittorrent slow on rogers, while my web browsing and
> http downloads go along at flying speeds.  So no their bittorrent
> blocking has no effect what so ever on my http speeds.

Bittorrent is definately slow on Rogers... when unencrypted.  This
blocking is so common among service provideres now that it's included
and on by default in the big Bittorrent clients.

This also depends on your definition of "slow".  By "slow", I mean
that last I checked a few months ago, it was utterly unusable, as
opposed to bittorrent's normal... slow speeds due to most p2p members
throttling their upstream for fear of starving their downstream.
Unencrypted speeds would start okay.... then rapidly decay into
infinite ETAs.  Turning on encryption reduces the ETA to a day or so
for 1GB of popular data.

Occasionally somebody doesn't have a cap on their upstream and you get
their full upstream in your downstream, but even then, it's not as
fast as downloading from a service provider's connection when they're
not serving many clients.

I was surprised at the degree of throttling.  If they just set it to a
reasonable level, then nobody would bother downloading a new client
with encryption.  Unfortunately they didn't leave legitimate users of
Bittorrent with a lot of options.

-Mike
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