Colin Charles Agenda

An online survey (500 Malaysians, all online already, and in total, it was 26,000 amongst the countries surveyed) by The Nielsen Company, showed that Malaysians ranked fifth amongst 52 countries for being digital media consumers. The stats (with more from the NST):

• Malaysians ranked third globally for those that spent more than 20 hours a week watching streamed or downloaded content from the Internet – translation, Malaysians bittorrent a lot, or are in love with YouTube. Video in Malaysia is big, clearly.
• 53%/41% played(streamed, even)/downloaded video/movie/audio/game content online in December 2008. Translation? The ones with 1mbps broadband lines are streaming YouTube content… How about a local video sharing site, or a local site with content?
• 85% got on their computers, while only 77% turned on their TV sets – translation, if you’re not advertising online or your media buyers don’t know how to deal with it, its time to find new ones
• 4% download movies/movie clips more than 30 times in a month – that means about 7.5 TV series that they’re following, or less, but with movies thrown in – eep, no advertising seen
• 8% download music or other audio files more than 30 times – since there’s no iTunes music store in Malaysia, its probably entirely illegal content

So its skewed. With a broadband penetration rate of about 18% only, they asked the choir, and the results aren’t too surprising. I predict we’ll see more people online in the results of the June/July survey, as we face this economic slowdown, and more people buckle up, stay at home, and still live their lives.

I decided to play with the tools at Measurement Lab. Of interest to me was: Test if your ISP is manipulating Bittorrent traffic. I am after all on a Streamyx connection and people tend to complain about it.

I administered the full test, which took around seven minutes (about the time it takes to wolf down a burger, and have a drink), and the results came back mostly positive.

First, it talks about BitTorrent traffic, using a standard BitTorrent port – 6888 – it seems while the downloads show no rate limiting, it seems the uploads have potential rate limiting. On a non-standard BitTorrent port – 10016 – the BitTorrent traffic again confirmed that there was upload throttling. Even TCP traffic on a well-known BitTorrent port, is throttled.

So there, TMNet’s Streamyx, the most popular broadband service in Malaysia (in fact, probably the only widely available commercial broadband service, so to speak), is confirmed to be rate limiting you, based on the BitTorrent protocol, even on non-standard ports (its definite on the standard BitTorrent port, but not so certain on others – its probably protocol level, from what I would gather). Just limiting the upload speed, is enough to do damage to how BitTorrent works, naturally.

Workarounds? I know there’s some service called BolehVPN. I personally use a box located in a colo, that does the work for me, and I bring what I need down, via scp -C. Does encrypting help? I think I need to read up more on how BitTorrent works, clearly…