#20 [4.0.1] Protocol encryption
As a user of the Dutch ISP "Chello" I had a serious problem with the downloadspeed of torrents about 1,5 year ago. Unofficially I heard Chello used "traffic shaping" to reduce the torrent-traffic over their network. So, first they made tv-commercials telling everybody to join because you can download films, and next they took my downloadspeed down to 4 or 5 KB/sec.! After a few months this weird way of blocking torrent-traffic was over for me but on the Dutch underground Chelloo-forum their's still a conversation going.
http://www.chelloo.com/upc/index.php?topic=12997.280
I've used utorrent for a long time now and I found out that with protocol encryption an ISP is not able to see if traffic is torrent-related or not. So I enabled protocol encryption and a lot of peers did the same thing as well. This results in very good speed between the peers! Here is a link about protocol encryption:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent_protocol_encryption
I hope Tribler will add PE as well! Maybe it's a good idea to turn this feature automatic on for all Tribler users when they connect another Tribler user. So we can accept non encrypted connections with other programs (like utorrent, bitcomet, azureus etc.) But when 2 people connect using Tribler, their ISP's can't slow them down.
Especially when I read that tribler 5.0 is going to be worldleader in downloadspeed I think PE should be taken very seriously
https://www.tribler.org/roadmap
Cheers!
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However, by the time Tribler 5 is released, Chello and other ISPs may have switched to more sophisticated measures, as stated in the wiki link:
"Many ISPs are now using more sophisticated measures (e.g. pattern/timing analysis or categorizing ports based on side-channel data) to detect BitTorrent traffic. This means that even encrypted BitTorrent traffic is now throttled. However, for those using primitive methods to identify and throttle BitTorrent, the current solution remains extremely effective"
Encryption could probably be added to Tribler, but it probably won't help against throttling in the future. On the other hand, an encryption enabled client may see a performance boost not because of avoidance of throttling, but because the BT client can connect to more peers and therefore might discover better peers.