IOS – Does iOS slow download speed when downloading torrents

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Problem : I live in a country where carriers provide mobile data plans which they offer for 5 dollars; I get the 10GB "night time data package." So I tried to download some torrents from my PC using iOS personal Hotspot feature. But all the time I try to download a torrent it gives like 1KBps speed or less.

I've changed settings in uTorrent according to my internet speed but it gives slow speed. When I try to download large/small files directly from a website (web server) it gives full speed my carrier supports like 40Mbps. I have the problem only when downloading the torrent.

What I've found so far : I thought (still think) that would be a restriction with iOS and contacted apple support team and asked them about that. But they said iOS doesn't slow down speed when downloading a file through personal hotspot and said probably my carrier throttling my speed. But still I think iOS slows down my Internet speed because of a clear reason which I've explained below. So I want know whether iOS slows down my Internet speed when I downloading a torrent or my carrier throttling when downloading a torrent.

Reasons to think Apple may do that : I've downloaded torrents before using hotspot feature like 1 year ago. But several things now have changed.

  1. That time I used a Nokia phone which clearly have no hotspot restrictions.

  2. That was about 1 year ago. So carriers might have taken actions to throttle speed when downloading torrent.

What I want to know :

  1. Does iOS slow down internet speed when downloading torrents?

  2. What could be the reason of slow torrent speed on this situation? ( torrents basically have several hundred seeders)

  3. What actions can I take to get full speed?

Best Answer

I don't know of any traffic shapping or bandwidth throttling capabilities of iOS. Technically, you would need stateful packet inspection to be able to detect Torrents and then slow them down (traffic shaping); this is found on many advanced routers and most definately not in iOS.

Most likely, it's your ISP that's doing the throttling.

Hundreds of larger and smaller ISPs all over the world try to limit BitTorrent traffic on their networks. Unfortunately, most companies are not very open about their network management solutions, with Comcast as the prime example.

Read the full article here.


What you want to do is Test to see if your carrier is blocking/slowing down your traffic.

Test if your ISP is blocking Bittorrent

This is a Java applet and does not require a Bittorrent client. It will compare the download speed of a small test file seeded through Bittorrent with the download speed of the same file through normal file transfer. If the difference is significant it will indicate that your ISP is throttling your file transfer.

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