Do BT block ports?

[Urban]

Hi, just a quick question following a very long call with the BT 'technical support' line.

I moved to BT from tiscali last week as I had been politely asked to leave due to excessive downloads.

Before I joined, I asked if they blocked any ports etc, even gave them specific ranges and was assured that no ports were blocked.

Bitlord, bit torrent etc... now gets a very minimal download rate when compared to what I used to get with Tiscali (especially when you consider I've moved from a 1mb line to a 2.5mb line)

So yeah... another call to BT today. they assured me no ports were blocked again. It is my router/firewall that is causing the slow downloads.

All ports on my router are opened/forwarded etc...

So what the buggery is going on? Are BT feeding me BS??

Any help appreciated as always!

Chris

[JohnnyReb51]

Hiya.

They may be telling you the truth.

I would re-phrase the question you asked them and change it to "Do you throttle ports". Specifically torrent ports.

Blocking a port is denying access completely, throttling a port is restricting it to a lower throughput than normal. It may also be called Traffic Management and many ISP's, now use some form of management during peak hours, which is relaxed in off peak hours by some.

[rizla15]

They don't block ports but if you want to download torrent files they throttle the speed from 6pm till 12am,they are now the same as Tiscali and Toucan, a total waste of time trying to download during peak times.

ive been haveing problems i get 12kb/s-14 download on torrents its a mixed exp i can upload decent speeds ocassionly but this doesnt help as the only time i can use a pc is uring daytime

this seems odd but my torrenting is effected all the time theirs a small period that i can get decent speeds usally in the morning

You can get around the throttling by encrypting your torrent traffic.

uTorrent can do this.

[dubaiexporter]

Hi I moved to BT from virgin last week
I was getting a very minimal download rate maximum 5Kb on Bitlord, bit torrent, torrents etc... I was thinking its blocked from BT but when I forward port & disable firewall now I am getting between 50kb to 250kb so anyone getting low speed try this
Hope it will help

[Scoobs]

They throttle p2p stuff no matter what port you move to. is ok in the early hours so just set it to dl then.

[patioheater]

Or pay a decent ISP a decent whack and schedule your downloads after 10pm. Which ever way you look at it bandwidth costs money, the days of unlimited download as much as you like are long gone unless you can get LLU(Sky/Easynet)
The old maxim applies "You get what you pay for" and as most folk want "As cheap as chips" then stop complaining