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 (Azureus) 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 (Azureus) 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 (Azureus) application)

continued on orginal post

Orginal Article and Azurues Vuze Blog