Comcast/Belkin/Azureus/Mac/BitTorrent help please

[cleantone]

So today my questions do come to Bit Torrent. I used PF.com to get my ports forwarded properly. I have been using Azureus for a client. I do not tweak settings in it as I don't know enough to really know what they do beyond the port settings. I started some torrents and the trackers verified that I was not firewalled. Speeds stared out okay but quickly dropped to lame as hell. They were healthy enough torrents. I don't think it was the peers not giving enough data. I know only a little about the throttling claims. I have seen ways around it for PC's but none for Mac. Can you help please?

use a port between 50,000 and 60,000, enable encryption, and make sure your download speed is set to unlimited (0)

[cleantone]

Will try. Where do I enable encryption specifically? I assume Azureus yeah? Where? I'm looking...

It's this I take it?

That's it, you got it. RC4 is better than standard I think. It's been a while since I've used Azureus.

[diggrd]

Comcast was killing my upload speed almost all day long. I think I now get decent speeds at least some part of the night, but I got fed up and started using a VPN account to get around their game. It was the only way I could post and seed my shows at a decent rate.

[cleantone]

What is a VPN account?

I am still not in the clear. I am also coming up as firewalled when I should be configured properly. I tried port 51501. I wonder if it this Belkin. Would bypassing the router and plugging in to the modem help me trouble shoot that part of it?

[cleantone]

So I got around the firewall thing. canyouseeme and azureus tell me I am not firewalled. My speeds ramp way up but then squish right down to well below my old dsl rates. I am getting about 40up and 40down right now. I am capable up 300up and 600down or something like that. I do not think it is these particular torrents. I am connected to a few from different trackers. my old connection was about 90up and 300 down and this setup would have me maxed with that connection. Is this comcast? My router perhaps?

[U2Lynne]

It's Comcast. Do a search in this forum for either Comcast or Sandvine (or sandvining) and you can read all about their efforts to stop bittorrent traffic.

[cleantone]

I thought that something could be done though. Am I wrong? What does this encryption setting do?

[diggrd]

In my case it didn't do much. Peers would connect then the rates would climb beyond Comcasts limits and they would drop off one by one till nada, then it would start over again averaging under 20 for the most part.
The VPN is

A virtual private network (VPN) is a communications network tunneled through another network, and dedicated for a specific network. One common application is secure communications through the public Internet, but a VPN need not have explicit security features, such as authentication or content encryption. VPNs, for example, can be used to separate the traffic of different user communities over an underlying network with strong security features.

A VPN may have best-effort performance, or may have a defined Service Level Agreement (SLA) between the VPN customer and the VPN service provider. Generally, a VPN has a topology more complex than point-to-point. The distinguishing characteristic of VPNs are not security or performance, but that they overlay other network(s) to provide a certain functionality that is meaningful to a user community.

What it does for me is diguise the traffic on my end as "legitimate" use of Comcasts network in that they cannot detect it as bittorrent traffic. I think Comcast is getting enough heat about throttling users bandwidth that the practice may stop soon and I can go back to the way things were.

[cleantone]

How can we expedite that?

It's odd that it would affect your download speed as well. When I was being traffic shaped by Comcast, I could still download at like 600 kbps on BT, probably more with http. Does sandvine affect the download speed as well? I thought sandvine was affecting uploading after completing, i.e. not being able to upload after completing the BT download.

[diggrd]

What I found was if the majority of seeders came from comcast my DL speed was greatly reduced as I got dropped from their connections over and over.