Are you experiencing slow (0 to 20 kb/s) download speeds on programs such as bittorrent or emule, even though you have a high speed internet line? Then your bandwidth is probably being “throttled”. In recent years, many broadband companies have taken up Packet Shaping technology to throttle bandwidth. This technology basically scans the passing data to see if it is p2p or not, and limits the ports (kind of like water taps controlling data flow), thus limiting the speed of the download.

I’ll get to the point. After doing some research on why my downloads were so slow, I found two ways of getting around this “limiting”. Bittorrent users should start using BitComet 0.60, a bittorrent program that has a feature that encrypts the data header, hiding that the data is p2p and thus avoiding being limited. It worked for me. Give it a try.

For eMule and eDonkey 2000 users, I recommend changing the tcp port 1720. This is a port that is normally used for teleconferencing, such as Microsoft NetMeeting. Using this port disguises the p2p data as teleconferencing data, and isn’t limited in bandwidth by the traffic shapers.

Hopefully this helps for all those frustrated p2pers out there.

Colin is a college freshman in Vancouver. Please take some time to check out his websites. You'll find them quite useful and interesting!

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