Opening Ports

For some reason, over the last month, my download speeds at my university have become ridiculously slow. Even browsing the internet has become sluggish at times. I remember testing my bandwidth at the beginning of the semester and found it was around 1.5mbs down. Now I cant seem to get above 300kps in my room and it many of my friends. Downloading demos and using bit torrent is impossible.

Is there anyway of getting around my colleges restrictive bandwidth? Ive been researching and it seems to be that there are no open ports or something along those lines. Any advice? What can I do to speed things up?

 

Maybe it is the network being clogged by too many traffic?

 

Are you sure it's the university clamping down on bandwidth and not other students trying to do the same as you and wasting bandwidth on BT and other bandwidth hogging apps?

 

Are you trying to use a P2P program? I know here at the University there are some traffic shapping protocols put in place to restrict that kind of activity.

 

Im not really sure why it is so slow. Everything is slow now whethers its internet dls, p2p, or just browsing. Any ideas? Proxy?

 

If your parents at home have a connection you can make your own VPN.

 

A VPN connection will still be slow as the slowest connection. No speed gain there, but it would remove the blocked ports. I see no advantage except privacy.

 

You're pretty much limited by the upload of the home connection but in most cases it's faster than the 0-20kbps from blocked ports. I also don't trust my school.