DSL Vs. Cable modem

[Demolition]

I am in the process of switching over from Verizon DSL to Charter cable. I had the line and modem activated the other day and I have noticed that the speed is a little faster now (3Meg service on both). Then I happened to look at my ibook that I have Transmission running on. DSL can download a file at 50Kb/s, connect the cable modem and the download speed goes to maybe 1Kb/s. Whats up with that? So I figure that they are blocking the ports for Bit Torrents, and then I setup port forwarding on my router and setup both Azureus and Transmission for, lets say port 65502. With my new cable modem attached, Azureus seems to run pretty fast (over 150Kb/s), but if I switch over to Transmission, the down and up speed is like 5Kb/s.

What could be the culprit besides Ip shaping?
Also, what solutions besides setting up port forwarding as well as changing my ports every once in a while? Any help would be greatfully appreciated.

Also, I am not using torrents for illegal purposes whatsoever, just really big files for work, just wanted to say that up front.

 

[yg17]

Charter doesn't packet shape (at least in the St. Louis area they don't) so it's probably not that. BitTorrent is not the best way to measure speeds though, it can be going slow due to lack of seeders and such. Try running a speed test at http://www.speedtest.net

If you get something above 2.5mbps, you're fine.

 

[shabba]

Ahh the problem is actually quite obvious, Transmission does not support encrypted packets yet. Which Azureuz does along with uTorrent. This is very very important for Cable and DSL users. Alot of ISP's now cap bit torrent connetions.

 

[rogersmj]

Ahh the problem is actually quite obvious, Transmission does not support encrypted packets yet. Which Azureuz does along with uTorrent. This is very very important for Cable and DSL users. Alot of ISP's now cap bit torrent connetions.

I was just about to bring that up. I agree that's probably the issue. I run uTorrent through Parallels for my torrents, and to get any decent speed out of my 15Mbps cable line I have to run it encrypted. Otherwise, the ISP can inspect the packet headers, see what type of traffic it is, and throttle it way down.

 

[yg17]

I use Charter with Transmission all the time and have no problems. Perhaps it's different in his location (I'd imagine their policies are the same all over though), but here, they don't do anything to stop P2P

 

[Demolition]

Well, after doing a test with the same torrent file on both apps, I would have to agree that it is an encryption issue. Same port on both apps, and Azureus has encryption turned on. Transmission is getting like 5Kb/s if that, and Azureus is getting over 50Kb/s.

before I noticed the problems with the torrent speeds, I did do a test at the same time of the day with cable and DSL. Cable got over 4Mb/s and DSL was just around 3Mb/s. I think I used speedtest or speakeasy.

It's also kinda funny how the speed changes with cable depending on the amount of users in the area. Around 1 pm I was getting a speed of 4.5Mb/s and then at 6pm it was down to 2Mb/s.

I agree that Charter has the same policy for all of its regions, it doesn't make sense to throttle back in 1 area and not another.