How to enable Port Forwarding on your router, if you have one???

Port Forwarding is necessary to get the best data transfer speeds from the BT client. The first thing you’ll need to do is log into your router’s administrative settings (the address is usually 192.168.0.1 or 192.168.1.1) and go to the section that deals with “Port Forwarding”. If your router doesn’t support this, you’re out of luck. Some broadband routers put port forwarding in the advanced section.

Note that you can only forward a series of ports to a single computer IP but luckily, the BitTorrent client allows you to configure which ports it runs on, so you can set a different port number to be port forwarded to an additional PC. Something to keep in mind if there are multiple BitTorrent clients operating off the same router in the home, or dorm.

In the last couple of years a few organizations have begun seeding the internet with bad torrents. Generally these are manifested as torrents that stall or fail at 95%, even though there may be many seeders. Other reports tell stories of entirely blank data after decompression. These false and fake torrents probably exist for a couple of reasons; to frustrate users, as vehicles for delivering viruses and trojans, or potentially for gathering IP information that may be used against you in any situation that warrants it. The good thing is, there are a limited number of bad torrent seeders out there, and a quick Google search (say for “bad torrent IP“) will give you the information for reacting. For example, IP addresses of “questionable torrent seeders“ can be blocked in most Bit-Torrent clients. If the torrent client is set to block the IPs in question, you essentially mask yourself from these organizations. Look through the settings or options of your torrent client, and you could save time by not downloading bad torrents, or being directly tracked.

The Bit-Torrent protocol is one of the most popular ways of transferring data on the internet. However, many ISPs throttle traffic back because torrents eat up a ton of bandwidth. If your torrent downloads are coming in at 5KB/s or lower, it’s probable the ISP is artificially slowing down traffic. There is an easy way around ISP throttling, what you’ll need to do is enable encryption in one form or another – ie. header encryption, message stream encryption, etc. of the Bit-Torrent data stream. This masks the nature of the traffic, and in most situations prevents the ISP from knowing what it is.

Encryption is not a native feature of the Bit-Torrent protocol, so to enable it you’ll need a third party program like Utorrent. Once installed, load up the program and go to its configuration area. Encryption is usually located with the connection options, from there enable the form you find suitable (in this case, check “forced encryption), save, and restart the client. Your Bit-Torrent downloads will hopefully be much faster.