I reach maximum download speed (1.5MB/sec in my case), and after a few minutes of sustained speed, all internet traffic suddenly halts. It's as if the modem were unplugged. Between 1-5 min later, internet suddenly starts back up. Rinse and repeat.

As far as I can tell, this has never happened with any other program. Not once! Only uTorrent seems to trigger it. Sometimes I can torrent for about an hour before experiencing the throttling; but it always eventually happens.

I'm actually glad they throttle me, since I don't feel bad about hogging bandwidth anymore! But that's just a personal quirk... =)

There is one other interesting aspect to the throttling: during the download, my upload speed is capped to 0.5kb/sec. (that is not a typo.) And when the torrent finishes downloading, the upload speed immediately drops to zero.

In other words, Charter seems to be entirely blocking all Bittorrent seeding. My little conspiracy theory is that the 0.5kb/sec are "keepalive" packets, which trick the Bittorrent protocol into allowing me to download without seeding at all. If true, then that's very crafty of Charter... And no one complains, because no one tends to notice/care about upload speed. (and if they did notice, they probably say "yay, that's cool, torrenting without saturating my upload!". But I feel greedy.

There's probably a mundane explanation; maybe our Linksys router is misconfigured somehow? But then why does my download speed work correctly at 1.5MBs, with upload speed capped to 0.5kbs? And when a download completes, why does the 0.5kbs drop to zero?

To me, it seems like there's a mystery there. But I'm likely just stupid. =)

I don't suppose your router happens to be a blue-and-gray El Cheapo Walmart Linksys, like mine...? Haha. It's so ghetto; I can only forward 10 port ranges total, for example.

Out of curiosity, does uploading/seeding work correctly when you torrent?