Raymond.CC Blog

TM NET, a Internet Service Provider(ISP) in Malaysia has started traffic/bandwidth shaping Bittorrent connections of their Streamyx users. I heard about it a month ago but never study more in this problem because it didn’t affect me. I thought that maybe some users didn’t know how to configure their router and BitTorrent client properly. Finally it has caught up to me today while I was trying to download something off a BitTorrent tracker website. I kept on getting the message “connection closed by peer“.

Other BitTorrent clients might have different but similar messages as utorrent. I’ve searched hard and tried all methods to bypass this traffic shaping with a little success.


According to AzureusWiki, Malaysia ISP TM Net is on the list of Bad ISPs for shaping traffic. There is nothing much we can do to achieve full maximum speed downloading from torrents but there are ways to at least allow you to connect to the tracker. If there are local seeders, you might get a fast download. Otherwise it’s only less than 1KBps. It’s ridiculous to download a 650MB linux distro with the speed of less than 1KBps.

A few BitTorrent clients such as utorrent and Azureus has encryption which works on some other ISPs but not on TM Net. Somehow they’re smart enough to get a hardware that’s able to throttle encrypted traffic that is generated by BitTorrent. So we can skip the encryption part.

TM Net is blocking BitTorrent based on user-agents. So if you change the user agent, you will be able to connect to trackers. We can achieve this by using a proxy server which allows use to change the HTTP header. So here’s a way to connect to tracker and get a “working” tracker status message instead of “connection closed by peer“.
Please take note that THIS WILL NOT SOLVE THE THROTTLING PROBLEM. It only allows you to connect to the tracker, a slow download is better than no download.

1. Make sure you have Java installed.
2. Download PAW from RapidShare. Alternate download mirror.
3. Extract the files to wherever you like.
4. Run “startServer.bat“.
5. Configure your BitTorrent client.
For uTorrent, go to Options -> Preferences… -> Connection
Select and change the following.
a. Proxy Type: HTTP
b. Proxy: localhost
c. Port: 8080

Now you should be able to connect to trackers and not getting the error message “connection closed by peer” anymore. Remember, this DOES NOT improve your download speed, it just enables you to connect to trackers.

Another way is to use VPN. I’ve not tested it because I never had the chance to get a free account. It’s always full due to too much traffic shaping going on. I’ve written an article about bypassing most firewall and proxy restriction using HTTP-Tunnel which might also work for traffic shaping problem.
If you’re going to pay for the VPN service, do try out first before paying as it might not work for you. Here are the few VPN sites.
1. XLCORE VPN
2. Relakks
3. SecureIX

If you have any other ways to bypass traffic shaping to benefit all victims especially Streamyx users, please drop me a mail or comment and I’ll add it to this page. Thanks, good luck and happy downloading!

Weirdly, I was able to download BitTorrent the next day without getting “connection closed by peer” error message. Maybe TM Net decided to turn off traffic shaping?