Sorry, at what point did I say I was getting a poor service? I thrash this 10Mbit connection day and night (it's shared between 5 or 6 people in a flat), torrents, downloads, gaming etc, and most of the time I get 10Mbit apart from when it's throttled. You (obviously) are unhappy with the service you're getting, and unfortunately I can't exactly help you apart from tell you to, say, move to another ISP! Be* for instance.
To give an example of where you're wrong, I have had a couple of torrents overnight recently which, when run concurrently, garnered 1MB-ish/sec (I have 10Mbit available to me). I had about 80 seeds and 100 peers connected at once on that one torrent (and the other one which I started later on pulled 150 seeds and 140 peers), on top of those which I was already seeding (some 100-odd torrents, of which I think around 20 were uploading at any one time, with 1-3 peers connected to me), and the torrent being downloaded finished in about an hour (big F1 nut is I), the other one finished in a little under 5 minutes. [Separately to that, I have successfully hosted a 19-client gaming server on a 2Mbit M service with an ntl 250 modem, so I know the newer modems are more than capable of handling many connections. I received no complaints about ping, in fact they were pleasantly surprised it was so good!] So don't go blaming VM for everything, because they do give me a reasonably good service, and I can't complain especially when I thrash the connection nearly every night. But do by all means go blaming your client / router / modem / NIC, because any one of those could be a problem, be it incorrectly configured BitTorrent clients, just plain wrong system configuration, broken drivers, broken chipsets, dying hardware / cables, etc...
You cannot lay the blame squarely at VMs door, when by your own admission others work fine. What you can do is reduce the number of connections allowed in your torrent client. Mine is currently set at 500 per torrent, with a maximum of 2000 global BitTorrent connections, and 100 upload slots per torrent. I know it won't hit that (2k), or even remotely get close to that, but if I put what it could get (200), I know it would be substantially less than that.
Not everyone in a swarm is connected to your machine. For an example of a currently running torrent which is about 350KB/sec *average* at this particular moment, there are 9 of 112 seeds connected to me and vice versa, and 95 of 604 peers connected to me and vice versa. People do limit their upload speeds, people cheat with clients connected, which is why I expressly prohibit those using BitLord / BitComet / BitTornado to connect to me as a peer / seed by banning those IPs in ipfilter.dat. Again, you can't lay the blame squarely at VM, even though you'd like to. There are many other factors to consider, and a one-minded view does you no good, and doesn't help others either.
EDIT: Apologies Rob, just trying to clear things up. Spent a while writing that post!!!
