Does Comcast throttle me down because I use bittorrent client?

Question

I had a really good cable connection through Comcast, until yesterday I started using bittorrent to download some old movies.

All the time I have bittorrent client on I get dropped internet connections, websites become unavailable, DNS requests fail, "INTERNET" light on my router gets yellow, which means that it loses or resets the connection to the cable modem. I never saw this light going yellow before.

Now I stopped the bittorrent client and connections seems to be good again.
I tried to bypass the router and connect my PC directly to the modem, but I still had the same problem with connections as long as bittorrent client is running.

Bittorrent by it's nature causes many incoming connections from other clients and they may download chunks of data from me, as well as many outgoing connections.

I don't think Comcast is supposed to look at the contents of the traffic, also it shouldn't matter for internet provider how many TCP connections there are.

But that's what I observe: quality of my cable connection correlates to if I have bittorrent running or not.

So is this possible that Comcast tries to hamper my connection in some ways based on the torrent client? Should I just change TCP port to something different so that middlemen can't guess what is that? Or maybe Comcast penalizes me based on the number of incoming connections?

Any guesses or insights insights into this problem?

Answer 1

Comcast doesn't have a right to block torrenting. But they do have a right to manage their networks. When you open a ton of TCP connections, whether it's because you're torrenting or because you're hosting a server, you slow down the Internet for everyone else in your neighborhood.



Comcast's current policy is that anyone using more than 75% of their allotted bandwidth for an extended period of time gets pushed to the end of the line. They don't block your packets, but they'll give them a lower priority. So if you're trying to torrent a movie and someone else wants to check their email, Comcast's servers will let that other person's request go through first. You'll have to wait at the back of the queue.

Answer 2

Does Comcast Throttle

Answer 3

The first thing to do is read your terms and conditions, and any fair use policy. Do they say anything like you should not use torrents? does a fair use policy cap downloads? Once you start downloading torrents it is easy to download huge amounts. Some ISPs include uploads in any allowances. It could be that they are throttling *ALL* your traffic. You would not see it the same on web browsing as that does not need bandwidth the same, similarly email. Other than that there are quite sophistcated methods of monitoring traffic avaiulable to ISPs.

Answer 4

They certainly might. They have the right to control all traffic on their servers, including blocking you from stealing!