BitTorrent setup help

[#1]

I am using Bittorrent 5.0.8 and my max download speed is around 20 KB/s and my average is around 5KB/s. How do i speed it up 
using BT Voyager 2100 (open port 6881) and Zone alarm Secuitry suite.
I have just run Advanced Port Scanner v1.3 and only Ports 22,23,21,80,8080 are open

[#2]

What product are you signed up for as some products are not suitable for P2P file sharing and a lot of the others are speed restricted for P2P usage.
I believe only Kontiki as used by Sky and Channel 4 for TV on-line are given any sort of priority by the Plusnet Group. The rest are all speed restricted in some way or other depending on the product.
Regards, P.

[#3]

Premier Option 1

[#4]

Well I am on Premier and I did try Bittorrent once and got about the same results as you.
I did get up to 110 download speed but after that gave up.
I wanted to download a Kubuntu iso but went back to downloading it via FTP as this gave me around a 400 Kbytes per sec download.
Not much help I know so I’ll leave it open to others who have more knowledge to help you with this.
Regards, P.

[#5]

This might seem a silly question, but when you say you have opened the port on your router, did you also set the same port in the torrent client. And what are you downloading, some files will have hardly any seeders and thus will be slow to download. Try downloading 3 or 4 files at the same time and see what speeds you get.

[#6]

my advise would be to delete bittorrent and use utorrent
i can give you settings to get speeds of 700/kbps
which is what normally get BUT i must stress to you
that i DO NOT download during peak times!
i set mine to start at midnight through to 4pm
being on premier option 1 like yuorself you shouldn't be limited at those times and it also wont affect your usage either

[#7]

Between midnight and midday there are no rate limits on P2P on Premier Option 1, after midday then the speeds I would expect are as per this page:
http://www.plus.net/support/broadband/products/archive/bb_premier1.shtml
Like Slick I also get good speeds on P2P overnight but it does depend on the torrent as well. I've got one torrent queued up at the moment that's downloading at an average of 7KB/s but that's because there's only 1 seed.
A few other tweaks you can do to your client, set a limit on the upload speed to about half the speed you get on a speedtest like
www.mybroadbandspeed.co.uk
otherwise your uploads can swamp the "ack" packets from the download and slow the download down. Also increase the number of peers the client connects to, sometimes you'll connect to a lot of peers that won't upload anything to you.

[#8]

Could I ask Slick how he schedules his downloads for after midnight?
Thanks.

[#9]

uTorrent (www.utorrent.com) allows scheduling of downloads. I set mine to 10kb during peak times, but unlimited from 12 midnight to 8am. When I get warnings about my usage (very rare) I drop the 10kb and make it unavailable until my usage is reset.

[#10]

as said above my friend,
i tell utorrent that at midnight start downloading and when i want it to stop i set the times in the scheduler.

[#11]

I have just run Advanced Port Scanner v1.3 and only Ports 22,23,21,80,8080 are open << theres your problem
you say youve opens 6881 but in your next sentence you didnt have it listed
you need to port forward or enable 6881 in your firewall/router
personally id use a different client i use azureus and set it to a non standard port ie 4900 or 5700 as its much more efficient
to speed up though you need to open the ports simple