May 07, 2009 by sharky
There are good ISPs and then there are bad ISPs. A good ISP will allow you to virtually max out your Internet connection speed for any online activity including P2P/BitTorrent transfers. It’s no secret that bad ISPs - such as Bell Canada & its wholesale partners, are known to limit transfer rates to as little as 30 KB/s from 4PM - 2AM, essentially crippling many Internet apps for up to 10 hours each day. You pay top dollars to your provider for Internet access, yet can’t even use it to 10% capacity during the time when you need it the most - when you’re actually sitting in front of the PC. These practices are commonly considered to be net neutrality violations by ISPs.
The solution? Switch providers. But how do you know for certain that your ISP is meddling with your torrent transfers? Aside from the obvious clue that download speeds come to a crashing halt during peak-times, or seeding is all but impossible - there’s a clever new way to test your ISP for throttling & rate-limiting with the DiffProbe ShaperProbe utility.
DiffProbe Shaper Module: Detecting ISP Traffic Rate-Limiting
The goal of DiffProbe is to detect if an ISP is classifying certain kinds of traffic as "low priority", providing different levels of service for them. DiffProbe actively (and non-intrusively) probes the network path and tries to diagnose the nature and extent of traffic discrimination. The ShaperProbe module attempts to identify if ISPs are rate-limiting certain types of traffic for both upstream and downstream directions.
ShaperProbe is currently in alpha testing and available for Windows, Mac OS X & Linux machines. For Windows users - download, save, and simply run ShaperProbe.exe then click OK to begin the test.
If you suspect that your ISP is rate-limiting during particular times of the day, repeat the test more than once at different daily intervals. For the Bell example, a test may suggest "no shaper detected" during off-peak times, yet otherwise confirm the shaping through peak hours.
Pathload2 — We also suggest you try their recently-announced PathLoad2 utility, which is an "Available Bandwidth Estimation Tool". Pathload2 measures the available bandwidth of your Internet connection. The available bandwidth is the maximum bit rate you can send to a network link before it gets congested.
Coming soon will be the first release of DiffProbe, which will detect if an ISP is doing different forms of discrimination (such as delaying and/or dropping traffic) on certain applications (such as Vonage, Skype, and BitTorrent), in addition to detecting rate limiting.
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