Comcast Appears To Have Eased Up On Bittorrent Traffic Shaping
This past Tuesday I on my Bittorrent client to download a few movies. To my surprise my upload speed “soared” to 80 – 130 kb/s+. I know this doesn’t seem that fast, but ever since Comcast started shaping Bittorrent traffic I haven’t seen upload speeds greater than 40 kb/s. My first thought was that this must be a fluke but, after half an hour the upload speed seemed to maintain itself.
Next, I wanted to test the latency. Previously, whenever I started a Bittorrent client the latency on my families network would increase dramatically. The high latency made Skype calls, Xbox Live, or any other service that depended on a low latency connection impossible to use. The first test I performed was a test on Xbox Live. I had my younger brother sign into Xbox Live, because he plays more frequently than me and knows how the service normally performs. After fifteen minutes my younger brother confirmed that Xbox Live had no more lag than usual, even though I was uploading torrents at 80 kb/s.
Skype was the next test. My dad frequently makes phone calls over Skype to save minutes on his cell phone bill. Previously, I would hear him yelling at me to pause my BitTorrent transfers because they were causing his Skype calls to drop. Needless to say, I was pretty anxious to see if I could run BitTorrent while he was on Skype (which even with an ISP that doesn’t traffic shape is a pretty amazing feat). That Tuesday evening my Dad made a Skype call to a friend from Arizona. After fifteen minutes in Skype, my dad confirmed that that call was working flawlessly even though I was using BitTorrent.
Next I tested the latency of my connection. I used Terminal to ping a Google IP address. When I was having trouble with my BitTorrent connections I would frequently get pings all the way up too 500 ms or get pings that never came back. To see how much my latency improved, I pinged Google four times with Terminal while running BitTorrent at full speed. The pings had an average speed of 57.502 ms with 0% packet loss. Although not a perfect ping it is fairly respectable. I wish I had exact ping times and packet loss numbers from before, but sadly I don’t.
After a few days of playing with BitTorrent on my “new connection” I found that my upload speed would change depending on the time of day. I get a much faster upload speed at night, usually around 130 kb/s. Presumably, because Comcast now uses a smarter traffic shaping system. I also found out from my younger brother that his Xbox Live would still occasionally lag (not as bad of a lag as before, but enough of a lag to be annoying). I fixed this problem by capping my BitTorrent upload to 80 kb/s during the day and 130 kb/s at night.
All in all, this makes me much happier with Comcast’s internet service. I would really like to know if other Comcast users are able to upload at the same speed with similar latency. I tested and achieved similar upload speeds in Rehoboth, Delaware and Columbia, Pennsylvania both on 8MB connections. I believe this change in the handling of Bittorrent traffic is in response to the recent complaints from the FCC. I can now happily recommend Comcast as a 100% viable ISP even for Bittorrent users.
