It has become public knowledge in recent months that some ISPs (Internet Service Providers - the folks who provide you at home with your internet connection) are blocking or throttling bittorrent traffic. Bittorrent as you might know is a very popular P2P (point to point) file sharing client which lets you download torrent files. But, how can you tell if YOUR ISP is blocking or slowing down this traffic

Thanks to Google's Glassnost tool, you can go to their website and check if your ISP is blocking or slowing down your BitTorrent traffic. One of the projects owned and participated in with Google can help you determine this, the web site where you can perform the test is located at http://broadband.mpi-sws.org/transparency/bttest.php . Keep in mind that sometimes their servers are busy and you might have to try a few times to get a result.

Popular bitTorrent client Azureus (now knows as Vuze) also came out with a plugin which allow you to determine if your bitTorrent traffic is being throttled by your ISP, you can read about the plugin here: http://azureus.sourceforge.net/plugin_details.php?plugin=aznetmon . Newer software clients for bitTorrent such as uTorrent have capabilities of encrypting the header block of bitTorrent traffic so your ISPs can't know about it, but again its just a matter of time, and they would come up with something newer, hence the debate rages on!