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. (more…)