Networking and download speed

[masterstompy]

not sure if it goes here but...
im in a house share of 5 and we have virgin broadband 20mbps, when i download and one of my house mates isnt i get a good speed of 150-200kbps but as soon as he starts to download i get around 50kbps. despite if everyone is downloading he always seems to get 100+ kbps download speed.
we are both forwarded to the router and his system isnt much better than mine.
just wondering why this is? is there anyway he has allocated his pc to get more bandwidth or limited ours?
any help would be well appreciated, thanks.
ps is there any prgram that will monitor the network usage for each individual pc?

 

[gguerra]

what are you using to download?? bittorrent ?, http?, ftp? are you wireless or wired?? you need to provide more info.

 

[masterstompy]

yea sorry, we are using utorrent all same settings and we are using wireless, but i have the best signal in the house so its not that.

 

[DelJo63]

MOST ISPs are now throttling torrent ports to balance bandwidth across ALL their users.
If they do, there's nothing you can do at your end to bypass it.

 

[gguerra]

There are many variables that affect download/upload speeds with bittorrent including but not limited to seeds/peers (and their speed). Best way to check true bandwidth is with a speed test. Try http://speedtest.net and when testing use the same server on all the PC's in question.