Sri Lankans heavily relies on torrents for obtaining pirated software, movies, TV series and music. To this date I am not aware of any ISPs in the island throttling torrent bandwidth using deep packet inspection. But things seem to be changing. A friend of mine had a post about torrent downloads being slow in his SLT fiber optic connection. I thought of checking it out. If true, in a time the China Wuhan Corona Virus COVID19 and its lockdown is resulting significant psychological strain, I believe this is not the time to do it.

What does SLT say

Sri Lanka Telecom (SLT) appears to be denying that they are throttling traffic. Friends who are engineers in SLT say the same. The official and unofficial claim appears to be that they are not throttling torrent bandwidth.

What people experience

Torrent speeds drop significantly after midnight. In Sri Lanka, midnight to 8AM is considered off-peak where most packages have half or more of their bandwidth allocated to this time slot. Speeds seem to drop from 2MB/s down to about 50KB/s. That is almost as if the bandwidth quota has exceeded.

My findings

I tried few torrents. At first the download speed started at about 2MBs. Minutes after midnight the most I got was about 500KB/s. I tried adding few but I couldn't go pass the 500KB/s barrier. Then I turned on my ExpressVPN VPN service and the speeds bumped to about 5MB/s.

Don't do it

Dear SLT, people are stuck at home. Many have lost their only income. I understand the government ordered not to terminate connections if bills are not paid and you guys want to maximize your revenue or at least reduce the cost. Some times pirated entertainment through torrents all what people have. Do it any time, after this lock down finishes. Don't think about starting it now.

Conclusion

This is not a scientific test. How ever out of the box, the claims that SLT is throttling speeds appear to be accurate.

SLT has a history of meddling with Internet traffic. Arround 2002 when I got my first SLTNet dial-up connection in Kurunegala I noticed that in time VOIP chat applications kept failing. When we asked about this from the local office they said no such limitations are done. But when I contacted technical support from Colombo I was told some thing in the line that VOIP traffic was interrupted as it was adversely effecting their IDD billables.

Will keep an eye on any further development.