Imagine being faced with an un-crowded piste and being unable to take full advantage of the inviting high-speed run that lies ahead of you because your skis weren’t up to the task.
This analogy sums up what some users end up feeling like when they are similarly unable to take advantage of the information super-highway ahead of them. If you are one of those that feel they can’t take full advantage of the high-speed data opportunities available, then here are some pretty straightforward strategies to help you get up to speed.
Bandwidth
Your ISP is a great starting point when you are addressing problems with speed. Check the maximum download and upload speeds that have been set by your ISP.
Clearly you can only go as fast as your provider will allow you so do a broadband speed test and then see if there are any other issues that could be resolved to give your speeds a boost. You can often increase the speed of your internet by improving your RAM, getting a fast browser and tweaking your hardware amongst other ideas.
Bittorrent
Choosing the right bittorrent client will help you in your quest for speed and Vuze is a good example of a bittorrent client that offers you the chance to take advantage of high speed downloads once you have your system and hardware tooled up to cope. Always remember to use Vuze only for sharing files that do not infringe upon copyright.
In good health
Another straightforward bit of advice would be to make sure that your go for healthy seeds and peers. As you probably know, a peer refers to any computer that is participating in either the download or uploading of a torrent file and a seeder is anyone who has a complete copy of the file that is being shared across the torrent network.
The thing to remember about high speed torrents is that it is basically a numbers game, so the greater number of seeders there are then the healthier the torrent is likely to be and the greater chance you have of achieving the high speeds you want.
Configure your firewall
Firewalls are there for a good reason but they can block all incoming bittorrent connections unless you configure yours to accept the trusted connections.
If your home computer operates behind a router then that should also be configured using the Port Range Forwarding feature so that torrent traffic is enabled.
Upload rate
Although an unlimited upload rate sounds like a good idea it can affect the download rate as a result. Use the speed test results to find your maximum upload speed and then set your global upload rate to about 80% so that it runs at a fast pace but is not flat out.
Switch ports
The default rate for the bittorrent protocol is generally between port numbers 6881 and 6999. The problem is that ISP’s can apply restrictions within these port ranges as they know that it will be involve high bandwidth usage.
Try switching ports to a number above 10000 as a way of getting around the ISP restrictions.
Protocol encryption
What ISP’s loathe about protocol encryption is that they can find it is almost an impossible task to detect if the traffic is coming from bittorrent.
Experiment with enabled, disabled and also forced options and see if you could be getting better speed with encryption disabled.
Follow some of these simple strategies and you might just get that high-speed run down the information super-highway.
About the Author
Lucas Weston is constantly sharing and securing data online. He enjoys blogging about ways the average web user can maximize data management capabilities over the internet.
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