A recent study made by the computer research group, Max Planck Institute for Software Systems, showed that U.S. cable broadband provider Comcast is slowing BitTorrent traffic through all times of the day. Comcast insisted that it slows down some peer to peer traffic during peak times of congestion but the study suggests that slowing BitTorent traffic is independent of the time of day.

The study used more than 8000 nodes worldwide for testing. They found out that Comcat interrupted at least 30 percent of BitTorent upload attempts around the clock. The study showed that Comcat was slowing more than 60 percent of BitTorent traffic at times including midnight, 3 am and 8 pm ET in the US.

Comcast responded to this by saying that P2P traffic makes up 50 to 90 percent of the network’s traffic and that it doesn’t necessarily follow normal traffic flows. They also said that the internet users who participated in the study may not be representative of overall internet users.

“We have acknowledged that we manage peer-to-peer traffic in a limited manner to minimize network congestion. While we believe our current network management approach was a reasonable choice, we are now working with a variety of companies including BitTorrent [to] move to a protocol-agnostic network management technique,” said Comcast spokeswoman.

Source: IDG News Service.