…so, for the last few days my Rogers cable internet connection has been acting strangely. BitTorrent (BT) downloads were coming in at a trickle, yet both the Rogers and Sympatico speed tests showed things were fine. Debian updates were lightning quick downloading, and FTP uploads would max the connection… so it wasn’t a problem with the modem or signal strength.
After combing through firewall and routing rules to see if I messed things up (though I hadn’t changed anything), I decided to check some newsgroups and ISP forums.
It turns out many people had seen the same problems, and some claim to have talked to Rogers reps on the phone and were told that, yes, BT in general was being throttled. And it sounded more sophisticated than just port throttling, as people that were using non-standard ports were affected too. Suggested workaround: change your BT listen port to 1720, as 1720 is apparently the port used by Rogers’ own VoIP service (and thus opted out of any sort of throttling).
So I made the change…
…and my BT speeds jumped from what were 5KB/s up and down, to capping my upload and 200KB/s download (see jump at 10am):
All my Linux distribution downloads use BT, as do games like World of Warcraft for their updates. I wonder if enough people will complain about their legit BT downloads being throttled that Rogers will revert the change?