Bittorrent is simply a horrible way to acquire and distribute copyrighted files. One-click file hosting web sites are a superior option because they are secure and because they do not hog the household Internet connection. An HTTP download will slow down when other people try to use the connection. A Bittorrent download hogs the entire connection and makes web pages fail to load at a very high rate.

Since the Federal Censorship Commission (a body that, in my opinion, should be abolished because it abridges freedom of speech by banning words it doesn’t like and violates freedom of the press by artificially restricting the number of TV and radio stations; the FCC is not necessary to stop people from interfering with existing station signals, provided that the stations are granted ownership of their frequency in the area in which they operate and have the right to sue anybody who interferes with it) decided that Comcast (I don’t have their Internet service, by the way) can’t throttle Bittorrent, Comcast decided to do something that I believe should legitimately be illegal (“cap” the amount that each customer can use their Internet service in a month). In my opinion, ISPs should be legally mandated to provide “unlimited” Internet access (“limited” only by their ability to provide the service) to all customers, but they should be free to throttle Bittorrent and to offer highest priority connections to people that pay extra for them. An ISP has a limited amount of connection available to it at a specific moment, but there is no good reason why they can’t let everybody have “unlimited” monthly Internet (whatever they can use with a limited speed, but with less speed when the network is congested) while offering “priority” service (full speed you’re paying for) to people who pay for it and implementing Bittorrent throttling to stop Bittorrent users from hogging the connection. Comcast-style monthly caps and Hughesnet-style (worst ISP ever, by the way) daily caps should be illegal. Throttling Bittorrent and “priority” tiers should be legal. Of course, our government usually does the opposite of what they should do, so they’ll probably outlaw what should be legal and allow what should be illegal.

Bittorrent can easily cause the network to get bogged down (latency-wise) by what I would call an ACK storm. It sounds like this is what is happening in your case. Tomato (not sure about DD-WRT) has an option to minimize this impact in the QOS settings. When I did a similar test, torrent downloads did not have as large an impact as they had before.

Regards,

–Brendan

Thanks..