Test if your ISP is manipulating BitTorrent traffic

The wide dissemination of the peer to peer technology, which may come to occupy up to 75% of the total bandwidth has led some international providers to prevent traffic congestion (and consequent complaints from the users) by limiting the P2P traffic, and especially that of the BitTorrent network. A somewhat questionable move, which is implemented by the ISP for not making the purchase of new traffic.

Here then arises a question: our provider manipulates the torrent traffic?

The answer is offered by a free website Glasnost, through which you can make a test and find out the truth.

The test focuses on the popular BitTorrent protocol as many ISPs are suspected to manipulate BitTorrent traffic. This type of traffic can be identified by the port it is sent on (eg, TCP port 6881) or by BitTorrent content headers which occur in the packets.

ISP uses one of the following techniques:

• Throttling all BitTorrent traffic.
• Throttling all traffic at well-known BitTorrent ports.
• Throttling BitTorrent traffic only at well-known BitTorrent ports.

Note that some ISPs do not throttle all BitTorrent traffic but only if this traffic exceeds a certain threshold. Thus, passing this tests does not necessarily mean that there is no throttling occurring on your link.

Everything you need to do to find out if our provider manipulates the torrent traffic, you put the check mark next to "Full test (~ 7 minutes), click on the blue button "Start testing" which is located almost in the front page.

Following the opening of some Java elements in 7 minutes you'll have the verdict. Be stressed that, due to an overload of requests to servers of Glasnost, the test may sometimes fail in the first shot. In these cases, just groped on a continuous basis and in a few minutes to get the much desired results.

Wow, I think this is a first step towards making traffic manipulation by ISPs more transparent to their customers. I tried this and found that the test suite creates a BitTorrent-like transfer between your machine and Glasnost's server, and determines whether or not your ISP is limiting such traffic.