Torrential Complications: Bell, Rogers, Xtorrent, Azureus, & Transmission

I have written about my experiences with the two major Toronto ISPs: Bell Sympatico and Rogers Cable. In my speed tests Rogers came out spectacularly ahead (by a factor of 6x for download and 10x for upload). Because of my extensive use of iChat, and due to its demanding upload speed requirements for video conferencing, I ended up switching from Bell to Rogers.

Today's Rogers speed test result. Pretty good... in theory!

While I have been please with the iChat performance I get through this ISP, the support has been terrible and I have been struggling for months with dial-up modem speeds with my Bittorrent clients. After extensive testing and forum-reading, I am now struggling with what I understand is Rogers decision to limit certain kinds of internet traffic, specifically, torrents. On the bright side, I am learning all the time about the art of bittorrenting - and believe me, there's some voodoo that you must do to get these clients optimized.

Resources:

Azureus (I had to control-click and select "download file" for the installer)

Azureus Initial Set-Up Guide (a very helpful wiki for support)

Xtorrent ("help" takes you to the developer's project homepage, with no support link evident - very disappointing for $20 piece of software built on open-source work)

Transmission (the most stable, and fastest so far)