Does anyone in the UK get to use BitTorrent?

Factual Questions
#1

I can’t. I am on TalkTalk, who use traffic shaping to throttle P2P down to essentially zero at all hours. I try using both ways encryption in microTorrent but it doesn’t help. Tiscali also throttles P2P traffic and I hear this is typical. OK, these are ‘unlimited’ bandwith services. If you are on a bandwith-limited service you can probably use BitTorrent just fine, because the ISP doesn’t care how you use the bandwith up. Say you are on BT plan 2, 6 GB a month. That gets you one and a bit movies a month, or one movie and some use of the rest of the internet.

Are there actually people in the UK who happily download as much as they like with BitTorrent?

#2

Not wanting to be a junior mod, but P2P topics are frowned upon here.
For general information, however, there’s plenty of ISPs which offer a no-port-blocking policy, provided it’s within their terms of use (which still means no copyrighted filesharing).

#3

I can use it here, on a BT connection and I use it at home on NTL cable. I’m not sure if it’s being throttled, but it doesn’t look like it, as the total transfer speed does tend to reach near the top of what my connection is capable of.

For the record, I truthfully do actually use it only for downloading ISO images of Linux distributions (so I don’t use it all the time - perhaps once or twice a month at most).

#4

So you’re not one of the bad seeds, then?

#5

I can use BitTorrent on Plusnet - they throttle some accounts, but the PAYG account is unthrottled.

However, I agree with GM that this isn’t approriate for SDMB. If you want the files you see on BitTorrent, go out and buy them like the rest of is.

#6

Nope. I know it sounds trite and implausible, but I really do use it just to download open source stuff. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a torrent file for anything else - I wouldn’t know where to look for them (and please, don’t anybody enlighten me).

#7

I was making an attempt at humor (bad seed…)

#8

I know. I just felt like reasserting myself in the light of e-logic’s torrents=stealing equation (which is itself quite astonishing, given that the post begins ‘I can use…’)

#9

How do I find out if my provider is throttleing my p2p ? We are use Pipex Max.

#10

There are other boards where you can talk about P2P freely. But this one is closed.

samclem GQ moderator