ntl traffic shaping/blocking ports?

Dariukas

I suppose upload takes a lot of bandwidth from their exchanges, and other people suffer because of that... so they decided to lower upload speed on torrents etc... this is my opinion... What i find really strange that any time i do speed test i would get ~500kbps, but once i run torrents upload never gets over 5kb/s... in 8hours i only managed to seed 40mb, and i used to seed nearly 1gb

Snake Plisken

I suppose they know you can't ring up and complain about not been able to seed torrents, as most torrents are seen as illegal by the providers. I blame Comreg for allowing the sale of NTL go through to UPC, since they've took over they have degrade the service and are constantly looking for ways to make their customers pay for a service that is not up to scratch.

Snake

Dariukas

should ISP state that p2p is not allowed on their package??

zarquon

No throttling problems for me.

Peanut

There have been a lot of posts with questions about whether various ISPs are throttling p2p recently, however I think what people are forgetting is that the restrictions might easily be from the ISPs the other clients on a torrent etc. are using.

I don't know if this is more prevalent in the States for example than here, but it could be just that in the last year or so more ISPs worldwide are attempting to throttle it. Would be interesting if anyone had some info about this.

tylerdurden94

I had just come in to check if there was a problem with the ntl download, downloading torrents was ok a week ago no probs but the last few days have been bad, tonite for example tryin to download and not gettin over 30 and as soon as it turned 7 boom it shot up to over 500.

Do you think they are restricting it at certain times?

coward

I'm having the same issue as most people - within the past week or two downloading torrents is painfully slow. I've only got one popular one going at the moment and the download speed keeps spiking - going to about 40kB before dropping down to almost zero for ages. I used to be able to get a torrent within an hour but now it takes most of the day.

I remain within my download/upload limit. I can't exactly complain because I should not be downloading that torrent. I have no other reason for paying for the more expensive package as I don't exactly need 6Mb to get html. Hopefully it's just another new problem they'll fix in a few months.

VeVeX

coward wrote:

I'm having the same issue as most people - within the past week or two downloading torrents is painfully slow. I've only got one popular one going at the moment and the download speed keeps spiking - going to about 40kB before dropping down to almost zero for ages. I used to be able to get a torrent within an hour but now it takes most of the day.

I remain within my download/upload limit. I can't exactly complain because I should not be downloading that torrent. I have no other reason for paying for the more expensive package as I don't exactly need 6Mb to get html. Hopefully it's just another new problem they'll fix in a few months.

Im exactly the same cannot download a torrent even at a steady dial-up speed. Normal website viewing has however improved today. Over the last week or so its painful to browse the web due to the lack of speed and high latency.

Bob24

I was downloading a torrent this evening, very slowly in spite of a very high number of seeds (fluctuating between 0 and 10 KB/sec), and a few minutes ago it got up to 170-200 KB/sec and has been steady ever since. So for me no doubt they are messing around with bittorrent. Anyone else who had problems with bittorrent and is downloading right now and could confirm it is working well?

Snake Plisken

No the speed was fine for a while today now dropped back down to max 5 kb's a second

Snake

OfflerCrocGod

Bob24 wrote:

I was downloading a torrent this evening, very slowly in spite of a very high number of seeds (fluctuating between 0 and 10 KB/sec), and a few minutes ago it got up to 170-200 KB/sec and has been steady ever since. So for me no doubt they are messing around with bittorrent. Anyone else who had problems with bittorrent and is downloading right now and could confirm it is working well?

You posted that at around 11:00 so it seems that they remove the throttling at around 10:30 or so, the solution seems easy enough do your downloading during the night so you get full speed.

christophicus

We shouldnt have to wait though. this is really annoying me now!!

VeVeX

OfflerCrocGod wrote:

You posted that at around 11:00 so it seems that they remove the throttling at around 10:30 or so, the solution seems easy enough do your downloading during the night so you get full speed.

If thats what their trying to achieve then whats the point in having 6meg. Even on a 2meg connection there are few files youd have trouble getting downloaded over night.

tonyj

When did UPC take over? - I just posted to another thread on here where a bunch of NTL users haven't been able to access blogspot.com for a few days now. And over the past couple of months I've noticed that some websites just appear to be 'blocked' - i.e. they give the network error page in Firefox (but I can access them fine on dial-up or on my mobile)

Mostly photo sharing sites, that sort of thing.

So apart from port blocking, is there http site blocking going on as well? - Damn, and I'd been quite happy with NTL up until now.

OfflerCrocGod

VeVeX wrote:

If thats what their trying to achieve then whats the point in having 6meg. Even on a 2meg connection there are few files youd have trouble getting downloaded over night.

They may not be able to sustain smooth browsing during the peak hours unless they throttle P2P.

mower

still no access to blogspots,down 2 days now,waiting to hear from ntl.:mad:

christophicus

Torrents still ****e slow!!

VeVeX

OfflerCrocGod wrote:

They may not be able to sustain smooth browsing during the peak hours unless they throttle P2P.

Everything was fine until the ownership changeover.

Since then there has been a lot of debate about the quality of the ntl service. The service that I initially signed up for has changed dramatically over recent months and its all related to the ownership change and the re routing of the service through mainland Europe.

Lets be honest, the 6meg package is sold to people who like to download. These people including myself download at all times of the day. To limit and block all P2P traffic during the day is capping your use of the service. There was no problem with http speed and download speed prior to the Chello move. They will charge the same money for a crippled service and probably make more themselves due to the inevitably cheaper routing through Europe.

NTL broadband was without doubt the best broadband provider in this country. It has turned into a complete sham at this stage and theres literally no point in voicing frustration towards the idiots in their customer service dept.

christophicus

I would agree with you sentiments I just want to give a possible reason for the poor service of late.

NTL were Using INEX. UPC did not originally have an agreement to use INEX. However now they do as far as I know. I think UPC may not be using their full resources while they are upgrading their network and trying to sort out their routing through INEX I dont think they are maliciously targeting people using torrents. Once they have everything working properly , everything should be OK for us..............I hope.

VeVeX

christophicus wrote:

I would agree with you sentiments I just want to give a possible reason for the poor service of late.

NTL were Using INEX. UPC did not originally have an agreement to use INEX. However now they do as far as I know. I think UPC may not be using their full resources while they are upgrading their network and trying to sort out their routing through INEX I dont think they are maliciously targeting people using torrents. Once they have everything working properly , everything should be OK for us..............I hope.

I hope so too

cdebru

Has anyone tried using encyrption on the torrents they are downloading

garlad

Have also been having torrent issues, getting up to 30-40K/sec max until a week ago, when it was hitting 50K/sec.
Tried to download the fedora red hat torrent, and it flew down at 350K/sec.
Is it possible NTL are throttling specific torrents/trackers?

dub45

christophicus wrote:

I would agree with you sentiments I just want to give a possible reason for the poor service of late.

NTL were Using INEX. UPC did not originally have an agreement to use INEX. However now they do as far as I know. I think UPC may not be using their full resources while they are upgrading their network and trying to sort out their routing through INEX I dont think they are maliciously targeting people using torrents. Once they have everything working properly , everything should be OK for us..............I hope.

Surely though any company with any respect for their customers would have set up some form of communication with their customers on their website?

If UPC/NTL/Chorus know that they are going to have 'teething' troubles it would be in their own and everyone else's interests to let people know whats going on? Given their arrogance in relation to the onging apalling customer service, the attempt to impose charges for late payments and the impostion of the non dd fee it appears that they have only contempt for their customers and with a culture like that I am not very optimistic for the future.

Fenster

I'll second (fifth?) the torrent and Blogspot problems. I haven't been able to reach any Blogspot site for the last week and my torrents have been in the gutter most of the time.

fatherdougalmag

I've come to this conclusion to. I think it's something to do with uploads though. Previously you could tell if it was a bad torrent because uploads would usually be normal and, if you have it limited, you could see that your upload capacity was maxed. Now I'm seeing jagged upload speeds. I can only imagine that it has an effect on your download speed.

giddyup

Uploads is the problem for me. My ratios are for ****. I tried a dload tonight just to see what would happen. Dload at an avg of 209.3 kB/s which is acceptable (I'm on 3) but my upload is very up and down and avg over 2 hours is 1.0kB/s. It would normally be 25-30.

Snake Plisken

Yeah have to agree with most here Chello/UPC, shouldn't even be using the NTL name as the service it provides now doesn't even come within 100 miles of the old NTL, I like alot on here are paying for the top package, the Max Package! And first off you have to worry about going over your 40meg download allowence, now they are killing the upload speeds, don't get me started on the punishment for late payments when the bill arrives the day before its due to be paid and the punishment for not paying via direct debit
All I can see is this getting worse, as folks who use private trackers for torrents you know that you have to share back what you download, but how can you do that if your upload speed is being targeted.

Back to the subject in hand one or two afternoons last week the routing changed for a couple of hours and the up speed came close to normal, but then it dropped down again when they rerouted their traffic.

There used to be some helpful guys who worked for the old NTL and where on here who helped us out with some of the issues, but looks like they got sense and got out.

Oh well

Snake

christophicus

Snake Plisken wrote:

There used to be some helpful guys who worked for the old NTL and where on here who helped us out with some of the issues, but looks like they got sense and got out.

Oh well

Snake

Really I never knew that , that must have been a good few years ago.

rogue-entity

I dont know about traffic shaping, but (excuse me if this is a little off topic) I can confirm that BT are blocking some ports and possibly some types of connections. For example, it is impossible to connect to an external SMTP server with BT, any attempt to use one returns a Relay-Access Denied Error. And I tried different email servers, including one of my own. The only way to send email, even if you have a different email addy on your own domain, is to use BT's outgoing SMTP server, or possibly, setup your own on your own network and use that. They probably block other stuff that they dont want you using as well since they do seem to block HTTP Proxies. I tried a host of different ones from a well known site, and all of them gave me a Connection Reset by Peer error, yet they worked just fine if I connect to the internet on eircom.

CiaranC

rogue-entity wrote:

I dont know about traffic shaping, but (excuse me if this is a little off topic) I can confirm that BT are blocking some ports and possibly some types of connections. For example, it is impossible to connect to an external SMTP server with BT, any attempt to use one returns a Relay-Access Denied Error. And I tried different email servers, including one of my own. The only way to send email, even if you have a different email addy on your own domain, is to use BT's outgoing SMTP server, or possibly, setup your own on your own network and use that. They probably block other stuff that they dont want you using as well since they do seem to block HTTP Proxies. I tried a host of different ones from a well known site, and all of them gave me a Connection Refused error, yet they worked just fine if I connect to the internet on eircom.

If you are getting a relay denied error from an external SMTP server, then you are connecting to it and its refusing to relay mail, which is what it should do. Nothing to do with BT.