bandwidth limiting?

Just moved in to new accommodation, all the rooms have internet access via Ethernet connection. Tried downloading a few torrents seemed far too slow 5-10kbps, then tried downloading latest ep of SG Universe, speed shot up to 150-200kbps and was steady till the download finished. Now trying again on a different torrent and only getting 10-12kbps. New torrent from same website and approx same amount of seeds/peers, this is 5 minutes after I finished downloading the SG episode.

I'm guessing this low download speed is due to some kind of bandwidth limiting, I'm not interested in bypassing this in any way all I wish to do is confirm whether bandwidth limiting is in place and why I got such a huge difference in dload speeds from one minute to the next.

thanks in advance

RIPSTER

edit -
Found details of the ISP providing the internet access:

Service Restrictions
The following traffic will be allowed access to the Internet via the Internet Service.

• HTTP and HTTPS (web browsing protocol)
• SMTP (email protocol)
• POP3 (email protocol)
• IMAP and IMAPS (email protocol)
• DNS (domain name system)
• FTP and FTP-DATA (file transfer protocol)
• Telnet (remote computer access protocol)
• AOL (America On-Line)
• MSN Messenger
• RSYNC (incremental file transfer facility)
• SSH (secure socket shell)
• NTP (Network Time Protocol)
• AFS3-PRSERVER (File system)
• Half-Life (online gaming protocol)
• Unreal Tournament (online game)
• Blackjack (online game)
• SOCKS (proxy server/client protocol for handling requests)
• Lotus Notes

All traffic not detailed in the list above is blocked.

I don't see P2P anywhere on that list or would it be called something different?

found a test to see whether ISP shapes traffic here didn't report any sort of traffic shaping in place.

found another test for general link characteristics -

* Downstream Bandwidth: 2014 Kbps * Downstream Queue: 1241 ms
* Upstream Bandwidth: 2013 Kbps * Upstream Queue: 750 ms

said that the down and upstream queue was too high, how does this reflect on download speeds exactly?

problem solved although I don't exactly know how


I use torrentleech, according to they're rules, DHT Network and Local Peer Exchange Must be disabled. I had them disabled and this seems to be what was causing the low speeds, as soon as I check the three boxes in Utorrent

- Enable DHT Network
- Enable DHT For New Torrents
- Enable Peer Exchange

the speed shot up, so whats going on?

the green tick showing whether utorrent is connecting properly is intermittent, sometimes green tick sometimes exclamation mark.