Vuze Blog

Help Us Gather Data on Internet Traffic Throttling!

Is your Internet Service Provider interfering with your Internet traffic? There is an important debate going on regarding this very issue. Vuze has taken a stand on behalf of our users by asking the Federal Communications Commission to adopt rules that would protect consumers against unfair bandwidth throttling practices and require ISPs to tell all of us exactly what they are doing. The FCC held a public hearing at Harvard last month, and is still considering our request, but a growing number of groups and individuals are weighing in with their own concerns. The FCC is holding a second hearing on this topic at Stanford University on April 17th.

We at Vuze decided there was something important you can do to help elevate the debate. We created a simple software “plug-in” that works with your Vuze application to gather information about potential interference with your Internet traffic. Specifically, this small piece of software monitors your network connections and every ten minutes measures the number of interrupted connections (called “reset tcp connections”) and then displays the results to you. By selecting the “share results” check-box you can also share these results with our central server, which will enable us to then aggregate the results and compare them across ISPs. We encourage you to share your results with us!

Be assured that sharing this data with us does not involve disclosure of any of your personally identifiable information. We will aggregate the data and may talk about it or disclose it publicly, but no data about any specific user will be disclosed as part of this effort. The plug-in will have a negligible impact on your network usage.

If you are interested in participating in this research you need only download the plug-in from Sourceforge.net (which also helps us distribute the whole Vuze application)

It’s very easy and takes only a moment. Right now the plug-in only works on PCs, not Macs, but we are actively working on future versions. Vuze and Azureus users from all countries are welcome to participate. Alternatively, you can install the plug-in using the “Plug-In Wizard” built into our application. We also put a video on our site that shows you how to use the Plug-In Wizard. Finally, for those who are interested, we are working on a more advanced version of the plug-in. When it becomes available, we’ll let you know.

Thanks for helping with this important research. We hope that contributing more complete factual data to the traffic throttling debate will lead to a better Internet for everyone.

For more information about our FCC Petition, check out the live testimony of Vuze CEO Gilles BianRosa speaking before the FCC, our Internet Future Hub Page and Internet Future Channel.

Oh, and one more thing. If you want to discuss the plug-in, the FCC or traffic throttling, go to our forums and express yourself!

Thanks.

Jay Monahan
General Counsel
Vuze

1 Comment to Help Us Gather Data on Internet Traffic Throttling!

1. Billy Spinners Fishing, Humor, Gaming World - Help Azureus Gather Traffic on Throttling on March 19th, 2009

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