How do universities limit bittorrent download speeds?

[lmf7000]

Downloading legal stuff (mainly linux distributions). My home connection goes at 1.5 MB per second and I never actually configured any ports for it to work.

But at my university it's a different story. There is no problem downloading the .torrent file, opening it, having bittorrent log in and whatnot, but the download speed is about 0.1kb/s.

How are they limiting the download speed? I'm not really interested in bypassing this (I just download at home) - but I've always liked I.T. and this has aroused my curiousity. So if you can also suggest a workaround to bypass their throttling, and the workaround works, it would confirm that the reason you gave is correct.

P.S. Using "forced" encryption in my bittorrent client made no difference.

[Zei]

its probably a firewall preventing commonly used bittorrent ports to be used and then a QoS (Quality of Service) maybe set up to have bittorent set to low an on some routers even completely blocked