Test your Broadband Connection for Bittorrent throttling using Web-based tool

Until now if you wanted to see if your ISP is throttling Bittorrent you would go through some trouble. That’s no longer the case because, fortunately, the EFF found the solution - a guide that, besides other things, requires you to "disable TCP and UDP checksum offloading and TCP segmentation offloading."

Although the previous Live CD made the tests a little simpler, it still needed for you to join forces with another user of the same ISP. According to P2P Blog the latest adjustments are offering a much improved solution using a new web-based tool which was developed at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems located in Saarbruecken, Germany.

On its website you can read:

Our 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, we designed our online tool to detect 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 our tests does not necessary mean that there is no throttling occurring on your link.

If you wonder what you have to do – you need to run a Java applet on your PC that attempts to upload and download data through Bittorrent to and from the Institute's server. Due to the tool actually testing various ports, you will be able to tell whether their ISP is only preventing some port or interfering with all Bittorrent transfers.