Certain ISPs have been shown to rate limit or block BitTorrent traffic sent by their customers. While there are multiple reports of this on the web, only a few ISPs have admitted that they manipulate BitTorrent traffic. And, to date, it is hard for users without networking expertise to gain evidence about the behavior of their ISP.

This test suite creates a BitTorrent-like transfer between your machine and our server, and determines whether or not your ISP is limiting such traffic. This is a first step towards making traffic manipulation by ISPs more transparent to their customers.

You can also load this tool on your own server or laptop computer running Apache and PHP 4.3 or above. I couldn’t get the tool running at home due to the measurement servers that the tests depend being either offline or being blocked by Comcast or under very heavy load. Running the glasnost test suite now gives this response:

The connection to the measurement server timed out.

Testing from the hosted version also gives an error:

We are sorry. Our measurement servers are currently busy. Please try again later.