Hello
I have a symmetrical 2mbit connection, and it seems to work very well - except when I use BitTorrent, making it difficult to download distros. The speed is throttled down to about 50k/s downstream, but the upstream is not throttled down. I tried turning protocol encryption on, but it doesn't seem to help. Everything is slowed down, including HTTP, when BitTorrent is running, and the download speeds are very low (It's not because of a lack of upstream bandwidth, I tried limiting it).
Does anyone have any suggestions on how to bypass their traffic shaping?

This is plain rude, not to mention annoying.. I paid for 2mbit, and I'm certainly not getting 2mbit.

Change providers.

Or read up on the network neutrality fight, understand what it is about, and understand why ISPs want to throttle bittorrent. Then start working for an equitable solution.

a lot of things can effect torrents if they shape it normally goes down to 5kb/s or 40kbps. If your gettin 50KB/s or 400kbps its not likely to be shaping. I had to go up and use 49100> port numbers all the standard ports like 6881-9 were slow for me the port change with encryption really picked it up. even with the same number of seeders and the same files it was 5 times faster.

You may be throttling yourself. If you use more than x-percent of your upload capacity, you will start to affect your download capacity. Try limiting your upload to 50% of rated capacity and see if your download doesn't work better.

Of course your download rate is limited by the seeds. Just because you paid for 2M/bit doesn't mean you can expect to get anywhere near that by itself. The peers have to have enough bandwidth to be uploading to you at that rate and that very rarely happens.

@jiml: I know what net neutrality is about.
@pupthai: I'm already in the high 40-50000s with my port numbers.
@randux: I think you might be on to something... I tried to change the maximum speed limit, and it seems to have had at least a temporary effect.
Here are two statistics pictures from the torrent client. The black line represents my speed limit, the blue line is the average, and the red line is the actual speed, which you can see, is a tad erratic.
I'll keep experimenting and see if I can get it to go any faster. =)

[img=http://xs432.xs.to/xs432/08404/stats174.png]

I limit myself to about 40-50% upload and that seems to give me the best results. Post back with your observations after you tried a few different values. Remember the seeds have to be uploading or there isn't anything for you to download.