In reply to a post by tommy45:

In reply to a post by Zadeks:

Upload speed is equally important to quiet a few non commercial users , and to cap /throttle it to a poxy 1mb or less ,is just wrong,

Though perhaps not torrent upstream speed generally unless you've a different definition of 'important' to me.

In reply to a post by ukhardy07:

The reasoning is that plenty of torrent applications do not stop seeding. Many like frostwire vuze etc will seed forever. They run at startup too, so whenever the machine is on the user is uploading. This uses far more than the original download and over a week, month, year etc

Also if users have lots of torrents uploading all at once it can saturate the uplink. This is difficult with FIbre but was certainly a bigger issue on ADSL. This in turn can slow down the overall download speeds.

This being said, the throttling seems pointless as the Fibre connection should easily handle the uploading anyway.

BT for you. I have infinity and Sky Fibre. Definitely see the upload restricted, sometimes as low as 1.5 Kb/s (for a few minutes) and then it will jump to around 70 / 80 Kbps. It's 24/7 and is quite frankly annoying.

yes but you are assuming the user will never stop this manually. Not to mention even if someone seeds forever like a madman the content loses popularity so would be no takers for the seeding. All you are saying is that 'some' users will upload far more than they download, this I am not debating, I agree with you on that. What is in question for me is the amount of people doing that and the overall affect on an isp is it to the point they need to throttle to such draconian levels 24/7. From the people I know who torrent and some do it heavily, they actually say they struggle to get 1:1 ratio as they competing against seedboxes etc. and that the content loses popularity very fast so on private trackers there can easily be 100s of seeders with a handful of leechers, in that case the user wouldnt max out even if not throttled due to the lack of demand. This is probably why people arent happy been throttled as I suspect they need to maximise the short time content is popular. So I think the assumption that if a torrent client was left unchecked it will upload at full speed forever is wrong, it will if new torrents keep been added to it, but not just from one torrent.

Good we seem to agree tho that the level of the throttling is probably excessive based on isp's needs. Thats all my original point was about, as to why the isp is doing it.

I personally rarely torrent but it is the odd occasion I will use it, some software is distributed by torrents only as some people cant afford proper hosting, I prefer using torrents to the aweful free hosting services such as rapidshare but find it inferior to normal ftp/http distribution. eg. I downloaded the cyanogenmod for my phone via torrent. My concern as discovered on VM with protocol shaping like this is really (a) should I ever decide to use torrents more than rarely, unlikely but not impossible and (b) false positives on other types of traffic, or even worse do they apply torrent rules to unclassified traffic. It also is probably unfair on light torrent users.

Edited by Chrysalis (Fri 09-Nov-12 11:03:07)