ISPs are increasingly deploying a variety of middleboxes (e.g., firewalls, traffic shapers, censors, and redirectors) to monitor and to manipulate the performance of applications like peer-to-peer and Torrents. Most ISPs do not reveal the details of their network deployments to their customers. This knowledge is important to help users make a more informed choice of their ISP. Further, such knowledge is also useful for researchers designing protocols and systems that run on top of these networks.

To improve network transparency, Prof Krishna Gummadi, along with 4 of his students has come out with an online tool which tests if your ISP is manipulating/throttling BitTorrent traffic called Glasnost.

There are 2 online tools devoloped as part of this project, one, to Test for BitTorrent traffic manipulation and the other to test for Broadband link characteristics. The second tool measures certain characteristics of your broadband link like link bandwidths and potential router queueing delays.

Test for BitTorrent traffic manipulation here