Russia seems to be the most permissive with its internauts when it comes to torrents

Oct 21, 2011 11:32 GMT  ·  By

A recent interactive report shows how much Internet service providers around the world slow down the use of BitTorrent for their account holders and the tendencies from 2008 to 2010.

Supported by Google and the New America Foundation, the Measurement Lab revealed an interesting study that resulted from testing whether an ISP is blocking or throttling BitTorrent or other protocols.

The results show that in the past few years, ISPs worldwide gave up on policies that slowed down the traffic generated by the popular torrent client.

87% of tests indicated that UPC Poland was manipulating the use of BitTorrent, placing it on the first position as the ISP that throttles its customers the most. The curious thing is that the same test made in 2008 showed a result of only 38%.

On a global scale, only about a dozen companies don't implement any type of blockage, among them being, Invitel Holdings from Hungary, Wind Hellas from Greece, Kabel BW in Germany, and Center Telecom in Russia.

In the United States the progress in very interesting. In 2008, Cox Communications and Comcast were limiting half of their traffic, but now they both dropped to an insignificant 3%. The US chart is currently topped by Clearwire, which throttles 17% of its BT traffic.

In Holland, UPC showed the least improvement over the years, its blocking practices dropping only by 7%, currently being outrun only by Zeelandnet which comes in with a score of 13%.

If we change continents and go to Brazil, we see that Global Village Telecom went from one end of the chart to the other, in the second quarter of 2010 being the least dictatorial.

Other findings reveal that in the Czech Republic there is a big discrepancy between ISPs as Telefonica O2 CR slows down only 9% of traffic while GTS Novera makes sure that in 80% of situations BT clients are decelerated.