Aug

Glasnost – Check whether your ISP is Manipulating P2P Traffic

By Sticky

Here is another good untility to Check whether your ISP traffic shaping, boosting or blocking your bit torrent traffic. This is a good solution for those to find out if the slow bit-torrent speed is due to the client misconfiguration or due to traffic shaping techniques by their ISPs.

Certain ISPs have been shown to rate limit or block BitTorrent traffic sent by their customers. While there are multiple reports of this on the web, only a few ISPs have admitted that they manipulate BitTorrent traffic. And, to date, it is hard for users without networking expertise to gain evidence about the behavior of their ISP.

This test suite creates a BitTorrent-like transfer between your machine and our server, and determines whether or not your ISP is limiting such traffic. This is a first step towards making traffic manipulation by ISPs more transparent to their customers.

What can you test?

Glasnost 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 (e.g., TCP port 6881) or by BitTorrent content headers which occur in the packets.
Therefore, their online tool to detects whether your ISP is using 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 their tests does not necessary mean that there is no throttling occurring on your link.

Who they are…..? Read Below

Who are we?

We are researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems. Our research focuses on characterizing residential broadband networks and understanding their implications for the designers of future protocols and applications. In case you have questions about this tool or our research, please visit our network transparency project webpage.