Helping BitTorrent user get faster downloads

What? Helping BitTorrent users, while saving ISP network’s resources.

During regular traffic analysis, a rather small regional operator found out there are irregularities in the number of active connections in one of his regions.

During those anomalies, the internet worked for the majority of households. However in the target town, radio connection didn’t hold well, leading to small interruptions, delays in domain resolving, and in general, the internet experience worsened.

Technical support often doesn’t have tooling in their disposal to effectively troubleshoot those anomalies that have root cause in their customers behaviour on the internet.

Without user friendly root cause analysis, it is easier to leave a problem intact. In this case, the problem was a few customers who passionately used BitTorrent.

Sooner or later problems such as these pile up and cause something serious. Definitely, customer experience could have been better.

The solution was two fold: finding root cause and then mitigate it

a) The first goal was to get network visibility fast, especially about customer traffic. 

• With FLOWCUTTER, an ISP’s technician is provided with user-friendly analysis dashboards. 

He found the perpetrator’s IP. 

Next this customer’s behavior was revealed as heavy torrent usage.

• See the majority of connections on port 6881 using UDP protocol on.

b) The second step is to mitigate the issue.

Upon calling the customer using BitTorrent, the ISP support didn’t yell or discourage him. They agreed on limiting the number of active connections (~20).

Here comes the surprise.

This not only solved the problem, but it also led to better download speeds for the customer, since freed connections led to better utilization of bandwidth for the whole town.

• After calling the customer and limiting connections, we can see that download was faster.

• User friendly traffic flow analysis in FLOWCUTTER