Which Australian ISPs Throttle BitTorrent And By How Much?

A list revealing the peer-to-peer throttling habits of the world’s biggest internet service providers has been made public by Measurement Lab, a Google-backed platform that allow researchers to perform extensive tests on the performance of the internet, among other things. The list includes a number of Australian ISPs, including Telstra, Optus, Internode and iiNet.

The first table on this page shows the data the lab has collected so far, spanning April 2008 to May 2010. The relevant values are the number of valid tests conducted and the percentage of those test that detected some sort of P2P throttling.

The list has AAPT consistantly at the top with 21 per cent in 2008, 38 per cent 2009 and 21 per cent 2010, however, the valid test count is of a moderate-to-small size and M-Lab notes that with limited tests comes a large variance in results. Optus is the worst offender with consistent percentages and large valid test counts, ranging from 7-26 per cent over the same period.

Surprisingly, Telstra delivers the best results, never exceeding 10 per cent from 2008-2010. It should be noted it has the largest sampling sizes and thus, the most consistent values. Internode maxes out at 13 per cent, while iiNet fluctuates between 5-17 per cent. Of the latter two ISPs, iiNet had the larger, more consistent pool of valid tests.

If you think these numbers sound bad, they don’t hold a candle to Comcast in the US, which throttled almost 50 per cent of BitTorrent traffic during 2008.

MLab-Data [via Gizmodo]


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