Bell’s throttling demonstrated

Earlier today I decided to run an experiment to see whether or not I was throttled. Long story short, I am.

I saw on the DSLReports forums that Glasnost was probably not the best way for me to test since it primarily checks for RST packets. That is, it checks for blocking rather than throttling. Here’s how I tested for throttling.

I rent a server down in Detroit as a hobby machine. It’s on a 10 megabit port, multi-homed, and doesn’t use Cogent. I’m able to consistently download at 300 kB/sec from it, even though some luckier friends are able to download at 500+ kB/sec. This is the machine I was using to test the throttling.

The plan was to seed using my Detroit machine and download from home using µTorrent with encryption on, then off, then on. Here’s how the traffic to my seedbox looked. Transfers over my SSH tunnel suffered during this time too.

Encryption on: 200 kb/sec

Encryption off: 5 kb/sec

Encryption on again: 250 kb/sec

And this is why I offer HTTP mirrors of stuff I seed.