Rip's Domain

How To Bypass Comcast’s BitTorrent Throttling: the true way

Posted in TechSupport by rip747 on October 22, 2007

I don’t know why people are constantly trying to come up with all these wacky ways to defeat Comcast’s throttling of BitTorrent traffic. Almost ever single way out there eventually fails.

I’ll tell you this that I have Comcast and use BitTorrent, with no problem. Want to know how? Here is the simple way:

Set your BitTorrent client to use only port 80.

There now you can share all you’re movies and porn to your hearts content. I’ve been doing this since Comacast starting throttling traffic and I’ve never had a problem. So stop trying to be so ultra nerd and use this simple solution.

Happy Seeding! Digg This!

31 comments

31 Responses

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  1. Dan Wilson said, on October 22, 2007 at 11:52 am

    But what if Comcast shuts off port 80?

    Oh, wait…….

  2. rip747 said, on October 22, 2007 at 12:44 pm

    o_O

  3. Josh said, on October 22, 2007 at 7:27 pm

    As far as I can tell, I’ve not been affected by Comcast’s throttling. I typically set my BitTorrent clients to only connect to 15-20 people at a time, and I set my download speed limit to about 70KB/s max. I know most uber-geeks expect to be able to saturate their connection, though, so maybe my limit may be lower than Comcast’s throttle rate.

  4. Eric said, on October 25, 2007 at 3:17 am

    dude, you rock! worked for me like a charm.

  5. rip747 said, on October 25, 2007 at 2:47 pm

    Thanks…. do me a favor and digg this up so other will know the way 🙂

  6. jah_warrior28 said, on October 26, 2007 at 10:11 am

    nice, simple thought… but didn’t work for me 😦

  7. rip747 said, on October 26, 2007 at 10:52 am

    @jah_warrior28

    Are you using utorrent? Make sure DHT is disabled. Some workarounds out there tell you to turn it on.

  8. jah_warrior28 said, on October 26, 2007 at 12:38 pm

    DHT is disabled and encryption is enabled.

    Anything else I should check?

  9. rip747 said, on October 27, 2007 at 12:28 am

    @jah_warrior28,

    got me. Are you sure that it isn’t just the line itself causing the problem? Go to speedtest.net and make sure that you connection is good.

  10. bt_warrior said, on November 4, 2007 at 9:22 am

    Yes, it “somehow” worked for me, but the download speed
    is still pretty low.

    Also, how come some of the torrent got upload speed and some didn’t ?

    Do you have any other tricks for the speed ? My current DL speed is less than half or a third of my previous DL speed…

    Thanks ! 🙂

  11. Meryddian said, on November 19, 2007 at 1:37 pm

    How do you set the BitTorrent client?

  12. han said, on January 12, 2008 at 9:54 pm

    use deluge dude!!!

  13. Alex said, on January 16, 2008 at 8:36 am

    VPN service as http://safevpn.net can be of a help to bypass torrent throttling

  14. Michael Graham said, on February 25, 2008 at 10:38 pm

    This is amazing. I was running at 10kb/s until I switched to port 80, and guess what? Straight up to 148 kb/s! Thanks!

  15. Joe said, on March 1, 2008 at 4:48 pm

    This didn’t work. Comcast is sending a RST to the TCP session, it doesnt matter what port.

  16. Dr. Mythnick said, on March 5, 2008 at 7:20 pm

    doesn’t work your port 80

    i tryed also the proxy thing
    isn’t this kinda of illegal???
    because i pay for a broadband connection that offers me mb speed for download

    and now i can’t use it because i can’t download anything big

    and what is the need for broadband if all u do is check your mail :D?

  17. Shamrock said, on April 19, 2008 at 2:58 am

    This doesn’t work with the new stuff they are doing. They are no longer just throttling bandwidth. They are now breaking your connection with peers when you are seeding torrents.

    There is no way around this other than using VPN.

  18. ComcastTech said, on April 30, 2008 at 5:39 am

    I’m a Comcast Tech support agent for Tier 1. I can tell you that Comcast is now blocking connections based on P2P protocols, not just bandwidth or port numbers, so changing port numbers will not work anymore. HTTP protocol on port 80 will still be fast, but any P@P protocols detected, even on port 80, will still be killed. Note: I don’t agree with this either, but I’m not at a high enough level to change anything at all about this.

  19. Commucast said, on June 2, 2008 at 12:45 am

    But encrypting it will make it tougher for Comcast though, right?

  20. rip747 said, on June 2, 2008 at 8:11 am

    actually that won’t work. sorry.

  21. joe said, on June 10, 2008 at 10:01 pm

    has anyone looked in to monowall firewall it has a vpn built in if someone could figure out how to set it up and could it work ? Don’t know much about networking so i could not figure out how to get it working

  22. Golds said, on July 9, 2008 at 11:40 am

    lol funny im seeing all this now…. I just got a call from comcast and they told me i need to watch myself. with 442gigs last month. So im gussing I need to start doing some of these things. Thanks

  23. c1337j said, on September 6, 2008 at 6:26 pm

    i was downloading 3 or so things all around 200 kb/s and then all of a sudden out of no where… 30 kb/s, now thats the highest any torrent will go. those bastards and my apartment forces you to have comcast

  24. John said, on July 6, 2009 at 5:27 am

    I’m wondering if the plainly tell the customer at sign up that they intentionally throttle (slow down) their connections and threaten customer because of downloading. We all pay good money for service and can and should use it without interference for basic usage practices. now if you routed your connect to 10 neighbors houses that is only situation along with if a client is hacking that they have a right to complain to customer. Corrupt company. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FrmS19ej73E

  25. Mark said, on August 17, 2009 at 2:40 am

    I moved to a remote part of the east coast a few years ago and we are stuck with crap-cast, every tech person I have spoken to has sounded like they had a mouth full of cheesy curls, and didn’t know the first thing about their jobs, except what was fed to them on paper to say if confronted. They are a shady company at best, if not downright illegally ripping off their customers! We canceled our cable television package, more or less because it sucked. In turn the fool we had cancel it for us raised our high-speed internet (cough, cough) $20 a month since we canceled our TV service. My wife hung up and gave me the news. I told her to give me the phone, I was gonna cancel that also. Well miracles do happen, the lady I got asked me for the previous guys name and told me they were supposed to go to great lengths to keep a customer. And instead of $65/mo. for internet, she gave me a special for a year at $36/mo…..imagine that, there’s at least one brain cell in the building. As far as blocking and cutting bandwidth, it’s like ordering a bowl of soup, and they bring you a spoon full and no crackers….and the spoon looks like it came from a murder scene only to still get the full check, those places close fast. As soon as Fiber Optic Verizon gets to this end of our street, bye bye crapcast! And a quick message to our neurotic,
    crackhead tech support nimrods who posted way earlier. Buy some rope (10 foot should work great),and get a book on knots and nooses. Think about that $9/hr you make sitting in that dank cubicle for a crap company, think about your red 82′ beater in the parking lot….with the black door, maybe get a bottle of whiskey and see whatcha come up with. I didn’t fill out your application, so cry to someone who cares…. maybe put the pipe down and get an education.

  26. Silvernode said, on August 25, 2009 at 4:12 am

    In windows I use Utorrent. I usually get around 30 of 125 seeds. I get about 300 to 500 kbps With Utorrent with any port open. When I go into Arch Linux (or Ubuntu), I normally connect to 89 – 105 seeds using Deluge. I get max speeds at 1.2 – 1.6 mb/s. This will even happen with the same torrent. I would use deluge in Windows though it tends be very buggy.

    I have had Comcast since Janurary 2009 and have not noticed a any throttling. I have no explaination for this unless Deluge uses something to possibly mask the protocol. I do not claim to know much about networking so it’s hard to say.

    I can however recommend purchasing or patitioning a hard drive with some varient of Gnu/Linux and giving this a shot. Deluge has proven time and time again to gain 10 times or more seeds than utorrent. I would greatly appreciate some feedback from those who try. Did you notice any improvements?

  27. Brownbob06 said, on September 21, 2010 at 12:04 am

    I have Time warner, was downloading at 60k MAX for the past week or so (since I got my apartment and demonoid acct.) changed to port 80…and just downloaded a 183 MB file at a consistent .9-1.4 MB download speed in around a minute or so….I believe this works… I posted this on 9-21 at midnight, so it was well after everyone said it doesn’t work. About damn time someone has a legit workaround! thanks man

  28. tim said, on October 20, 2010 at 2:21 am

    Help i have been using final torrent for the past 2 months to download a 37gig file it keeps pausing… i am 54% of the way there or so i usually average 5 to 10kbs i have comporium high speed here in south carolina. i have seen the speed jump to 250kbs or so a couple of times for a few but then paused on me and rarely see that speed agian! like right now it is at 3 to 4 kbs and pauses frequently. I hope to finish this download by the time i die!!!! I am using a pc with windows vista and know verry little about the networking stuff just what i read and have tried from here. if anyone can help me at al please do and e-mail me at nbksuperstar@yahoo.com Please. thanks!!!! oops there it goes pausing again 3 times since i wrote this!!!!

  29. newguy said, on August 14, 2011 at 4:12 pm

    where in utorrent do I change it to Port 80…under what menu and what configuration setting…help for newb!!!?
    thanks in advance

  30. thelolzman said, on March 19, 2012 at 8:15 pm

    well Im trying to download a tv show thats 1 gig. I suspect comcast throttling my internet since I was only getting 10-20 kb/s with 100+ seeders. Then I go and download deluge, and then when I opened it, it jumped up to 1.7 mb/s. Not sure if Utorrent was jealous or it was your port 80 suggestion. Anyway I thank you for the help.

  31. Jeffery Nelson said, on March 12, 2014 at 1:01 pm

    Hi, how do i set utorrent to port 80?, just a casual user here.


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