BEIJING, Feb. 20 -- Alan Wang likes to watch a movie before going to sleep and he gets movies from the Internet. Wang, 26, who lives in Nanjing, has met obstacles getting the latest movies recently because Internet access service providers have blocked his download tool, BitTorrent.

    Wang is angry because he prepaid China Telecom for a whole year's broadband access. He says he received no formal notice that BitTorrent would be blocked.

    The Internet service providers, including China Telecom, China Netcom and China Realcom, have their reasons. They say widespread use of BitTorrent is clogging up online traffic and disadvantaging other users.

    BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer (P2P) file distribution tool written by programmer Bram Cohen and debuted in 2002.

    With BitTorrent, those who get your file tap into their upload capacity to give the file to others at the same time. Those who provide the most to others get the best treatment in return. Each new participant brings not only download, but also upload.

    The most magic thing for BT users is that the more BT users download, the faster your download speed becomes.

    Wang for example, used to download at 180 kilobits a second at the peak time on BT - triple the speed based on traditional software.

    "Now I can download at only 20 to 50 kilobits a second. No one has told me why," Wang said.

    China Telecom limited BT users' speed to a low level in Nanjing, Jiangsu Province. The carrier claimed users have to pay more for the extra speed if they use BT.

    China Railcom said it has limited BT users' speed across the country because some BT programs open 24 hours a day were eating up the network's resources.

    Some of the 1 million subscribers to Shanghai Telecom's ADSL (Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line) also report they can't download through BT Websites. But Shanghai Telecom's hotline service refused to say whether the company has blocked BT downloads.

    Shanghai Telecom is considering charging users based on their online traffic volume, which would be bad news for BT users.

    Most BT users choose to pay for Internet access based on a monthly flat rate, from 80 to 150 yuan in different cities. Many have paid a year's fee upfront.

    "We have paid for fast access but we have products with speed limits. That obviously hurts consumer rights," a user name Zheng told an online forum.

    BT fans have told other online forums that users have the right to access the Internet at the highest speed at all times. The only thing operators should do is to maintain the network, users said in forums including tianya.cn and Sina.

    Carriers argue the program subjects non-BT users to slow Internet speeds.

    About 10 percent of BT users have occupied more than 60 percent of network resources, Nanjing Telecom said.

    "It is a great to burden to us and it is time to solve the problem," Gao Jiang, China Realcom's senior official was quoted by media.

    With the variety of Internet services now available, the telecom operators' networks have faced greater pressure day after day.

    But China Telecom's ADSL network hasn't been upgraded in the past two or three years. For China Railcom and China Netcom, the time since they upgraded is even longer, industry insiders said.

    "BT is just the last straw to the network and it is a good excuse for telecom operators to avoid their responsibility," Wang said.

(Source: ShanghaiDaily.com)