Domestic odd network/internet speed issue

[Greenbeast]

At my home (a farm) there are two main properties

 

The first house has the phone line and main router (BT Home hub) but we have cat5 running underground to the second building (my place) which has a couple of 8 port switches, with my sheevaplug Linux torrent machine connected to one of them.

 

I usually have torrents ticking away all the time.

 

Recently my step-dad in the main house was having trouble with internet access being slow (PDFs take ages/don't complete, etc...) and experimented with disconnecting my cat5 connection at his end.

The connection immediately improved.

We've since tested this with me sitting in his house using a speed checker and pausing/resuming the torrent client.

 

I don't notice any speed issues my end on my laptop/phone connected via wireless access point hanging off of one of the switches, whether the torrents are running or not.

 

I would like to keep using torrents but can't really (during the day at least) if it practically disables my parents internet at their house.

 

 

Any ideas why a few measly trickling torrents would cause network/internet slowing? especially as it doesn't seem to affect me?

any tiups on improving the situation, that enables me to still use torrents?

[arwen]

If you've set your torrents up to automatically adjust their up/down speed then they could well be hogging it. Try limiting both at various speeds to try and get a happy medium?

 

Not sure why your other devices would be unaffected however however...

[Michael]

I agree, by manually limiting the upload this will improve the download in most cases.

 

The other possibility is one of the switches at your end being faulty, possibility generating traffic. If it's a managed switch you could check various logs, but if not, try using one switch at a time.

[jlucas]

BT throttle P2P downloads during peak times.

Mine go from over 1mb/s down to around 10kb/s at those times.

 

Tends to slow everything down and occasionally will disconnect entirely. Have to reboot the router to get the 'net back again.

 

I have mine scheduled for BTs 'off peak ' times, 1am until 3pm.

[Greenbeast]

ok interesting from all there, thanks.

 

I checked the d/l speed of the torrents when troubleshooting and they were at the 4-10kbps level, so I couldn't understand it

 

The access point i'm currently using is actually another wireless cable router as it's got better wireless capability than the WAP I replaced it with. And that change was only recent (month ago maybe). So that and the switches are definitely something to change out and check