Is My ISP Throttling BitTorrent? Test Your Connection Online

By now surely everyone is aware of how Comcast had been throttling BitTorrent connection speeds as part of its network traffic management program. It was only recently that it announced in a joint statement that it would collaborate with BitTorrent Inc. to develop practices that are "protocol agnostic"

In any case, determining whether or not your ISP is throttling BitTorrent traffic is important in order to determine either what steps you must take to circumvent it perhaps even to change to a different file-sharing protocol if problems persist.

It's with this consideration that researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems has developed an online test to show whether or not your ISP is throttling or blocking your BitTorrent traffic. Established in November 2004, the institute's charter is to "...conduct world-class basic research in all areas related to the design, analysis, modeling, implementation and evaluation of complex software systems."

Specifically, researchers there focus on "...characterizing residential broadband networks and understanding their implications for the designers of future protocols and applications."

This online tool is but one means of assisting customers so that they make more informed decisions about the ISPs they choose as well as what software and applications they may decide to use.

"This test suite creates a BitTorrent-like transfer between your machine and our server, and determines whether or not your ISP is limiting such traffic," the test site reads. "This is a first step towards making traffic manipulation by ISPs more transparent to their customers."

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