Recently, I found out that my ISP does traffic shaping with respect to Bittorrent traffic. After my clients sends the Bittorrent handshake, all packets from the respective TCP conversation were dropped, so the remote peer sees nothing of the following. That's not just a minor issue in quality of service, right? That's a breach of contract with respect to universal IP service agreements. If you are subscribed to UPC in Vienna, this letter to my ISP might be interesting to you. Next to regular rhetoric that they should immediately stop that practice, they are also warned that otherwise I will get them in front of the national conciliation body for telecommunication (http://rtr.at/en). If you are unlucky to be subscribed such an ISPs, you can use Azureus to work around that. Find out your public IP and ensure that there is some open/forwarded port in your firewall/router or whatever you may have. Get and setup up http://www.torproject.org/ and Azureus. Run TOR with its So