New research shows which ISPs are the worst offenders when it comes to reducing BitTorrent speeds. The best ISP if you’re piracy-minded? The answer may surprise you.
Delimiter reports on the research undertaken by Measurement Labs which looked at the use of throttling measures for BitTorrent and other file sharing utilities between 2008 and 2010. The research was worldwide; while Australian ISPs weren’t the worst offenders, the list of who’s ranked where makes for interesting reading.
Coming it at #1 in terms of worst performance was AAPT with 17.7 per cent of tests having some form of throttling. AAPT’s now a division of iiNet, which itself came in at #3 with 12.8 per cent, ahead of Optus at 15.2 per cent. Primus and Internode fill out the top five with 8.8 per cent and 7.4 per cent respectively.
In terms of the big players, the winning ISP if you are a fan of torrenting? It’s Telstra, with a recorded 6.6 per cent tests reporting throttling. That’s particularly fascinating in light of the number of television and movie content deals Telstra has struck in recent years. [Delimiter]
Image: Shutterstock/astral232
Hesh
Friday, October 21, 2011 at 11:44 AMIm with iinet, i get around 400-500KBs. i live in a old house and bit far out from the exchange. and seeing as how they fought the courts to not to give up customer details im pretty happy
Rhys
Friday, October 21, 2011 at 12:33 PMThey are the only ISP in court, I think they would all fight back. They don’t have much of a choice. Hollywood was going to go after Telstra but it’s too big (I read that info leaked on wikileaks).
Crowknee
Friday, October 21, 2011 at 3:11 PMIt’s comments like these that really make me want to shake my head in dismay. An ISP protecting pirates from the IP owners is nothing to be proud of. In other legal circles, the protection of an offender is of itself a offence.
It a sad state of affairs when people commiting crimes are protected under the guise of privacy.
Rhys
Friday, October 21, 2011 at 3:17 PMHe says behind his screen name. Do good Do gooder I say.
Crowknee
Friday, October 21, 2011 at 4:21 PMAn assumed alias is no crime unless used to commit one.
The ripping of someones IP, however, is. No matter the perps internal dogma.
So yes, I do “do good” in terms of not doing bad.
There is no justification for piracy.
Peter
Saturday, October 22, 2011 at 3:21 AMCrowlee is a government shill. He benefits from the thievery that IP laws represent. It is not the consumer that is the thief, it is the MAFIAA music and film industry.
Johno
Wednesday, November 9, 2011 at 11:18 PM@Crowknee – It would be ridiculous for an ISP not to defend its customer base!! Its common sense, how on earth would they sell 500GB – Unlimited packages if you couldn’t download torrents, no one in their right mind would be able to download 500GB of stuff from I tunes or the like, meaning people would switch to a company that stays loyal,
Either way they should do anyway morally,
G
Friday, October 21, 2011 at 6:18 PMCrownknee, your comment is incorrect and obviously a little ignorant of Australian law.
To politely correct you….
Downloading is not a crime here and most likely never will be.
Its not that we dont understand and mistakenly think it is harmless…. It is because we truly do not consider downloading for personal use to be a crime.
Australian copyright law is purely business law and has no relevance to the public in general.
Darren
Friday, October 21, 2011 at 11:48 AMBigpond Velocity….. Yeah i’m pretty happy ;)
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/685/capturefgj.png/
Sushant V
Friday, October 21, 2011 at 1:33 PMVery impressive for someone in Aus.
Robert (B-ob)
Friday, October 21, 2011 at 11:52 AMSo Internode and Telstra both record 6.6% but Telstra is the winner?
Alex Kidman
Friday, October 21, 2011 at 11:59 AMTypo on my part; Internode should have read 7.4 per cent. Fixed now. Thanks.
Roachless
Friday, October 21, 2011 at 11:57 AMI am with internode, and love them!
Luke
Friday, October 21, 2011 at 12:20 PM+1 on Internode, so far downloading through BitTorrent the fastest speed i have managed to get 1.1mbps download speed which is fast considering my connection isnt the greatest.
Roland
Friday, October 21, 2011 at 12:08 PMyeah ever since moving with iinet I’ve never been as happy as what I was with Telstra… My next place I’ll be sure to have access to that piece of black gold called Telstra Cable…
Greg
Friday, October 21, 2011 at 12:11 PMbring on the NBN ….
Yoda
Friday, October 21, 2011 at 12:17 PMWith NBN, you will loose torrenting altogether…
u sure you want to bring it on?
Ben
Friday, October 21, 2011 at 12:23 PMOK, I’ll bite. How come?
Rhys
Friday, October 21, 2011 at 12:30 PMYoda is pulling it out of his fuzzy green arse. He thinks that the government will block access because they own the NBN. If the government gets pushed around by Hollywood, then it won’t matter what ISP or network you use.
Marville
Friday, October 21, 2011 at 1:54 PMWhile I agree with you re posterior plucking, he might still be right. I for one am very uncomfortable giving Government that much potential access and control over the web
Rhys
Friday, October 21, 2011 at 2:10 PMThey won’t blind side us on it. If they try to push it on to us we will see it coming. Eg: the foundation will be the proposed firewall. The NBN won’t be the cause. They wanted to put the firewall up before they wanted the NBN, and they would have forced all networks to use it.
Sam
Saturday, October 22, 2011 at 10:29 AMPeople will find a way around it. People aren’t as stupid as the govt. thinks.
Rhys
Friday, October 21, 2011 at 2:12 PMStop the firewall, save the internet/cheer leader.
Ollie
Monday, October 24, 2011 at 10:22 AMThere is NO BLOCKING ON THE NBN.
awallafashagba
Friday, October 21, 2011 at 4:02 PMthere is a way around everything you know !
Harvz
Friday, October 21, 2011 at 12:26 PMsorry if its a stupid question but how so?
Ollie
Monday, October 24, 2011 at 10:20 AMYou what? I’m on NBN and don’t have any trouble torrenting whatsoever?
Sam
Friday, October 21, 2011 at 12:21 PMAlex, you listed them in order of 1, 3, 2, 4 then 5.
Seriously confusing, I had to re-read that paragraph twice to make sense of it. Or maybe I just struggled with it because it’s Friday.
Dave
Friday, October 21, 2011 at 12:23 PMTorrents? I’m with Internode and use USEnet :)
CraftyNinja
Friday, October 21, 2011 at 12:44 PMNo mention of TPG……. Am I missing something here?!
CraftyNinja
Friday, October 21, 2011 at 12:46 PMNot that I use torrents (unblock-us, netflix and hulu plus make it irrelevant to me) but its still something interesting when my ISP isn’t even listed. And I’m pretty sure that TPG has more market share than Primus or AAPT.
Josh
Friday, October 21, 2011 at 1:52 PMI’m with you, ADSL2+ on TPG, i’m 5 doors down from the exchange, I used to think that my PPP was cut during torrenting because I was crushing TPG bandwidth, then i just limited my download speed and everything is gravy. So looks like it was a router issue not TPG.
Anyways, im with you CraftyNinja, since when is TPG not good enough for research? lol
CraftyNinja
Friday, October 21, 2011 at 2:25 PMYup, they’re too busy adding new nodes and exchanges for ADSL2+ to allow some foreign low-life research firm access to their customer data.
I’m about 400m from the exchange (actual line length) which means gloriously fast speeds. Although I do have to admit that they’re getting slightly slower as they add more and more people to their service.
Still – my netflix and hulu connections haven’t suffered.
:D
cayal
Friday, October 21, 2011 at 3:58 PMWould unblock-us work with Amazon? More specifically the free e-books they dont send to users outside the USA?
Just This Guy ...
Friday, October 21, 2011 at 12:47 PMI have better thing to do in life than worry about what TV shows or movies I can torrent and how fast.
There’s simply nothing out there worth watching, let alone worth all the hassle of trying to torrent the stuff.
And if there’s something I really reaally NUST have, I go buy the damned thing.
Easiest … way … ever
John
Friday, October 21, 2011 at 1:14 PMPresumably one of the the better things you have in life to do is to leave entirely irrelevant comments on blog posts that, as you’ve pointed out, don’t actually hold any interest or relevance for you.
Ben
Friday, October 21, 2011 at 1:23 PMI reaally NUST agree with you here
Matt L
Friday, October 21, 2011 at 4:47 PMBuy a movie? That’s so 1980′s
Captain_Picard
Friday, October 21, 2011 at 12:54 PMiPrimus.. haven’t noticed any throttling? I do it often enough to be noticed I’d say. I get around 11mbps on a good day and my torrents do vary quit a bit but I assume that is the server not the ISP
Ammusionist
Friday, October 21, 2011 at 1:01 PMBelieve it or not, I can get 750 – 850kbbs with dodo – in semi-rural South Australia! (ADSL2+)
Turd
Friday, October 21, 2011 at 1:24 PMYou are all terrorists!
According to this – http://www.abc.net.au/technology/articles/2011/10/20/3344351.htm
CraftyNinja
Friday, October 21, 2011 at 2:23 PMGood link. Thanks.
light487
Friday, October 21, 2011 at 1:37 PMThe problem is, P2P tech that is not related to BitTorrent stuff gets flagged and throttled.. then you have to spend a week jumping through hoops to get your ISP to realise the mistake and unrestrict that service.. *sigh*
Rick
Friday, October 21, 2011 at 1:58 PMUsenet, that’s all I’m saying.
silne
Friday, October 21, 2011 at 2:17 PMSince when does Internode throttle torrents? Since NEVER. Probably just people who have nfi how to setup their torrent client so that the upstream doesn’t limit the downstream.
Plus, who needs torrents 99% of the time anyway? Usenet is fast and you don’t have to upload or worry about ratios.
lolwut
Friday, October 21, 2011 at 2:22 PMbeen with tpg for quite a whiel…i know they have appaling customer service
but in terms of speed, i usually could crunch about 800-ish KB for a stable one
not too shabby, since i experienced the good ol days of 56k :P
CraftyNinja
Friday, October 21, 2011 at 2:27 PMDunno about appalling customer service – they’re usually pretty good with me. But then again, I normally only call up if there’s a problem and I KNOW that its something that only they can fix.
Being a networking techie has its uses
:D
sunny
Friday, October 21, 2011 at 3:55 PMAnyone who reads this article/site & understands anything here isn’t going to call an ISP to receive technical support – we’re going to call so we can give -them- technical support…
Adam
Friday, October 21, 2011 at 4:59 PMlol.
Dan
Friday, October 21, 2011 at 4:41 PMGiven that Telstra meters uploads I wouldn’t think they would rate very highly for torrenting at all? Assuming you are torrenting properly….
Greg
Friday, October 21, 2011 at 5:32 PM108mbps Telstra cable, regularly torrent @ 10-12 megabytes/sec. Hard to beat for the price.
G
Friday, October 21, 2011 at 6:05 PMThe whole report sounds dodgey to me. Seems to me like it was written by someone out of the country who has no idea how differently things work here.
Australian ISPs sell their product by bandwidth. More correctly, they mostly re-sell various bundles of the same Telstra bandwidth.
Which stands to reason Telstra rated the best on whatever statistics they were really noticing, as they are the original source of most of the other companies products.
If they were truly found limiting the top speed of their customers connections they would be defaulting on their contract with the customer.
… But of course this was a worldwide survey, and the people who controlled it probably just assumed the system of measurement they use in their own country would work equally well everywhere.
chugs
Monday, October 24, 2011 at 11:02 AMAustralian ISP might buy the access (aka, tail, port, a L2TP service with biz talk) from Telstra and have the choice of different supply options.
For example you can have the NAS-session terminated onto your LNS/Network and then you supply as much or as little bandwidth.
The same with supply through Telstra. Sure it costs per mbps however what the real differentiator in the Australian market is how much bandwidth you allocate.
This known as the contention ratio. Old school used to have business services 1:1 (which means you’d supply 1 mbps for every 1mbps sold) whilst for consumer it was 10:1 (10mbps required : 1mbps supplied).
These days its blown out. Talk around town (and ones contention is ultra top secret) is TPG and Dodo are hooking thousands of customers to 1mbps of bandwidth.
All this talk about speed tests is pointless. Any individauls access to bandwidth is dictated by so many factors that the conditions will change all the time. There is no control.
What the market is need is transparent pricing and bandwidth allocation stats. Like unit pricing that we have in the supermarket.
Chris
Friday, October 21, 2011 at 6:32 PMYou do know that even though people are downloading stuff, these media companies are still making a shitload of cash. The problem for them is that they could be making an even bigger shitload.
Hellmouth
Saturday, October 22, 2011 at 3:46 PMInternode does not throttle traffic of any kind, period.
The test is flawed.
case
Monday, October 24, 2011 at 11:31 AMI have been with iinet and now with TPG. Used directions at http://www.portforward.com to forward a random port for torrenting. Have had excellent speeds with both providers. 1MBPS or more for popular torrents.