We’ve all heard the rumors, and even seen occasional evidence. Some Internet service providers slow down certain types of traffic, like BitTorrent traffic. Other ISPs slow down their customers’ connections if they download too much data in a month.
If you don't use a secure VPN then your ISP can see your online activities such as the sites you browse the files you download etc. You can hide all your activities by using a reliable, secure and no-log VPN. At least your IP address doesn’t publish your first and last name. But that IP address is all the information anyone needs to see who you are. Not only can ISP’s and media companies see you download, but your neighbor across the street knows if you’re downloading on the same network.
But does your ISP do any of this? It’s hard to tell. You have to run various tests to see if anything look unusual.
BitTorrent Traffic Shaping
Let’s start with one of the more common scenarios: is your ISP slowing down your BitTorrent traffic? Or are your torrents just slow?
Neubot is a useful tool for testing BitTorrent traffic shaping and monitoring it over time. This tool is a bit complicated to use, but is rather powerful.
To install it, visit the Neubot page and click the “Windows” link. Download and install it like any other program. Neubot will run in the background and automatically perform tests. To view the Neubot web interface, open your Start menu and click the “Neubot” shortcut.
After opening the Neubot interface, click the “Privacy” tab, allow the options under Privacy dashboard, and click “Save”. This gives Neubot permission to collect and publish your Internet address on the web for research purposes. If you don’t want to do this, you can’t use Neubot.
This data provides a picture of traffic shaping on different Internet service providers across the Internet, and collecting it is the reason for Neubot’s existence.
To manually start tests, select “speedtest” from the Manually start test box and click “Go”. Neubot will perform a standard HTTP speed test.
Next, select “bittorrent” from the Test box and click “Go”. Neubot will perform a BitTorrent speed test.
As with other similar tests, you’ll want to run this test while you’re not performing any large downloads on your network.
Click the “Results” tab at the top of the page to view your results. From the Test box at the top of the page, select “speedtest” and click “Go!” to see your HTTP speed test results.
Then, select “bittorrent” from the Test box and select “Go!” to see your BitTorrent test results. Compare the speeds shown on the two different pages.
Take the results with a grain of salt. As the Neubot interface says, “[the bittorrent] test is quite different from the speedtest one, so there are cases where the comparison between the two is not feasible”. Just seeing a difference between the two speeds doesn’t mean much, especially if you’ve only ran a single test for each.
However, if BitTorrent speed is extremely low compared to HTTP (speedtest) speeds, there’s a good chance your ISP is throttling your BitTorrent traffic. In the screenshots here, the speeds are actually very similar and we don’t see any throttling.
This tool runs in the background and runs tests automatically, so you can leave it installed and check in now and again to see how the results fluctuate over time. If you don’t want Neubot to run, you can uninstall it from the Control Panel just like any other program.
The Glasnost project once provided web-based tests that could identify whether different types of traffic are being rate-limited (slowed down). However, this tool was shut down in 2017.
Bandwidth Limiting
Is your ISP slowing down your connection because you’ve used too much data? Some ISPs have been known to do this as a way of enforcing their bandwidth caps. Even ISPs that offer “unlimited” connections may throttle you after you hit a certain, usually large, threshold.
To test whether your ISP is slowing down your Internet connection over time, you’ll have to measure your Internet connection speed over time. For example, if your ISP is slowing your Internet speed down, it’s probably slowing it down towards the end of the month after you’ve used a large amount of data. You then probably have typical, fast speeds at the beginning of the next billing period.
You can monitor Internet speed variations over time by using the SpeedTest website. Run a test at the beginning of the month and run further tests regularly, especially at the end of the month. If you consistently see slower speeds near the end of the month, it’s possible that your ISP is throttling your bandwidth. You can sign up for a SpeedTest account to log your results and compare them over time.
Note that other factors can also affect any type of speed test results. For example, if you or any other person on your network is downloading or uploading on your connection, the measurement may not be accurate—you should perform a speed test while your connection isn’t being used. The time of day can also impact your Internet connection speeds. You may see faster speeds at 3 a.m. when no one is using the shared line to your ISP rather than at 9 p.m. while everyone else in your neighborhood is using the line.
It’s also normal if you don’t see the maximum speeds your ISP is advertising. Most people aren’t getting the Internet speeds they’re paying for.
This isn’t a perfect test. An ISP could prioritize traffic from SpeedTest so that you look like you have a fast connection, even if they’re slowing your other traffic. But if you see a pattern, it may be indicating a throttling situation.
Netflix and YouTube Throttling
You may also want to try the Netflix FAST speed test. Netflix created this test to allow you to check whether your ISP is throttling connections to Netflix or not. Compare the results to the speed you see on SpeedTest. If the Netflix speed test results are significantly slower, that’s evidence your ISP is throttling
Google also provides a “Google Video Quality” report which will show the quality of your connection to YouTube’s servers. If you have a fast Internet connection but a poor quality connection to YouTube’s servers, that’s evidence that your ISP may be throttling YouTube connections.
Interconnection Issues
When you connect to the Internet, your traffic travels through your Internet service provider’s network before it leaves your ISP’s network and travels over another provider’s network. ISPs may sometimes degrade performance at these interconnection points unless the other provider pays an additional toll to the ISP.
The Internet Health Test by Battle for the Net checks your Internet connection to see if there are problems at “interconnection points”. By checking a number of different routes, the tool will detect whether you’re experiencing degraded performance at one or more interconnection points.
The tool performances a number of different speed tests across different networks. If all of them are fast, you’re not experiencing this problem.
If your ISP is throttling your connection, there’s not much you can do, unfortunately. You can switch ISPs and try to find a better one—assuming your ISP doesn’t have a monopoly in your area. You may also be able to pay for a more expensive plan with higher bandwidth allocation and, hopefully, without traffic shaping.
Image Credit: Jerry John on Flickr
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Unless you are paying your bill or having connectivity issues, then you might not give much thought to your Internet service provider (ISP). Do you ever stop to think about what your ISP can actually see and knows about you? Much like Google, your ISP knows pretty much everything about you. And ISPs share your personal information for marketing and other uses.
FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler doesn’t believe consumers really grasp how much personal data they hand over to their ISPs, so the FCC wants ISPs to get their customers’ consent before sharing that data. Wheeler pointed out that all your network traffic goes through your ISP which can see all unencrypted traffic and even “private information such as a chronic medical condition or financial problems” when the data is encrypted.
Some high-profile ISPs were not pleased after the FCC proposed rules (pdf) to give broadband consumers more privacy. To dispute the notion that ISPs are “somehow uniquely positioned in the Internet ecosystem,” AT&T wants you read Georgia Institute of Technology professor Peter Swire’s paper titled “Online Privacy and ISPs: ISP Access to Consumer Data is Limited and Often Less than Access by Others.”
Although Swire’s paper may be used to assist the FCC as it decides how to handle broadband privacy, the same paper was criticized for technical inaccuracies by Princeton professor Nick Feamster before Feamster revised his statement to say Swire’s paper skips over “important additional facts that should be considered by policymakers.”
Technologists at Upturn, who “understand law and policy,” also believe Swire’s paper could mislead readers into believing what broadband ISPs can see. So the Upturn team provided an “alternate, technically expert assessment” of what ISPs can see; it includes four key technical clarifications.
1. Truly pervasive encryption on the Internet is still a long way off.
Of the 50 most popular websites in three areas, 86% of health and shopping sites and 90% of news sites do not encrypt. ISPs can see the site URLs and content on each page. “Many sites are small in data volume, but high in privacy sensitivity,” Upturn wrote. “They can paint a revealing picture of the user’s online and offline life, even within a short period of time.”
Even a site that uses HTTPS can throw browser warnings at users because some part of the site is not encrypted, such as third-party advertising. Then there’s IoT devices that fail to encrypt all traffic sent and received. That’s a lot of data that’s fully visible to your ISP.
2. Even with HTTPS, ISPs can still see the domains that their subscribers visit.
When a site does use HTTPS, the Upturn team explained that an “ISP cannot see the URLs and content in unencrypted form,” but it can see and monitor requests made to the Domain Name System (DNS). Swire’s paper suggests that it “appears to be impractical and cost-prohibitive” for ISPs to collect and use DNS queries, but Upturn argues that ISPs logging DNS is pretty common “to detect potential infections of malicious software on user devices;” it’s “relatively cheap” and your DNS logs can be stored for later analysis. Comcast, for example, deploys “security-focused, per-subscriber DNS monitoring functionality on its network.”
“Detailed analysis of DNS query information on a per-subscriber basis is not only technically feasible and cost-effective, but actually takes place in the field today,” Upturn wrote. If you don’t really grasp the problem, Upturn offered this example of what an ISP could determine about a person based on domains visited over a short period of time:
- [2015/03/09 18:34:44] abortionfacts.com
- [2015/03/09 18:35:23] plannedparenthood.org
- [2015/03/09 18:42:29] dcabortionfund.org
- [2015/03/09 19:02:12] maps.google.com
Adobe cs4 master collection serial number. Now add metadata collected over a longer period of time by an ISP and it “paints a revealing picture about a subscriber’s habits and interests.”
If you’ve never checked and you are curious, you can see what DNS servers you are using; you can even setup alternative DNS servers to use as well a protocol that will stop DNS spoofing.
3. Encrypted Internet traffic itself can be surprisingly revealing.
Upturn cites numerous research studies that show how much monitoring an ISP can still pull off even if a subscriber’s Internet traffic is encrypted. Such “side channel” monitoring is a big hit in countries which censor the Internet.
While the Swire paper claims that “[w]ith encrypted content, ISPs cannot see detailed URLs and content even if they try,” Upturn technologists claim, “Web site fingerprinting is a well-known technique that allows an ISP to potentially identify the specific encrypted web page that a user is visiting.”
Even when users surf over HTTPS connections, researchers have been able to successfully infer “the medical condition of users of a personal health web site, and the annual family income and investment choices of users of a leading financial web site,” as well as “reconstruct portions of encrypted VoIP conversations.”
ISPs overall may not rely on those methods, but that can certainly change if people start using encryption more. “Policymakers should have a clear understanding of what’s possible for ISPs to learn, both now and in the future,” Upturn wrote.
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4. VPNs are poorly adopted and can provide incomplete protection.
Although you can protect your privacy by using a VPN, Swire cited a survey which found a pathetic 16% of users in the US have ever used a VPN; many of those are believed to be business users. Upturn suggested, “Relative to other countries, the rate of VPN use in the US is among the lowest in the world.” The cost of a reliable VPN might be an adoption hurdle. There are free VPN services, but Upturn noted that “subscribers generally get what they pay for.”
Swire maintains that using a VPN blocks an ISP from seeing where you surf and the domains you visit, but Upturn says that’s not always true; a VPN is not a “privacy silver bullet.” It “depends entirely on the user’s VPN configuration – and it would be quite difficult for non-experts to tell whether their configuration is properly tunneling their DNS queries, let alone to know that this is a question that needs to be asked. This is particularly common for Windows users.”
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It’s your data and you should care about the FCC’s proposed rules to protect your online privacy from ISPs. I highly recommend reading the Upturn post in full. Oh, and happy Pi Day! If you think about it though, every day is PII day.