Orangeman Burns - Sriram Sridharan's Blog

Blocking of BitTorrent traffic is widespread among some ISPs in the US and Singapore, but not in Canada or any other country on the globe, says a new study released this week from German researchers. The study was conducted between March 18 and May 15 by the German-based Max Planck Institute for Software Systems, with assistance with more than 8,000 users worldwide. Together, they implemented a tool called Glasnost to test whether their BitTorrent traffic was being manipulated.

Their results pinpointed Comcast and Cox as the leading culprits of torrent blocking in the US, though that may not come as a surprise to many of their customers. The survey was limited strictly to hosts whose BitTorrent transfers to the institute’s servers were blocked — or interrupted by RST packets generated by an ISP — as opposed to being throttled or rate-limited.

Interestingly, in spite of accusations of BitTorrent blocking recently filed with Canadian authorities against Bell Canada and other Canadian ISPs, the study found a total of only one blocked host out of 1,272 hosts measured in Canada. That compares with Malaysia, where one of the 64 measured hosts turned out to be blocked. None of the hosts measured in the UK were blocked, though, and no blocking appeared in Australia, France, Germany, India, the Ukraine, Israel, United Arab Emirates (UAR), China, Japan, South Korea, or dozens of other countries studied.

In the US, however, 599 of the 2,714 measured hosts were blocked for BitTorrent transfers. The same held true for 26 of the 70 measured hosts in Singapore. All of the hosts observed to be blocking BitTorrent tracking did so in the upstream direction, while only a handful did so in downstream BitTorrent transfers.

Source Rlslog