First, you need to make sure you know the difference between bits per second (kb/s, Mb/s etc, lowercase b) and bytes per second (kB/s, MB/s etc, uppercase B).

The specs for your internet connection states a speed in bits per second, while the uTorrent interface (and almost all other applications for that matter) shows a speed in bytes per second. One byte per second = eight bit per second, so your 10 Mb/s connection is 1.25 MB/s.

Second, you need to check whether or not your upload and download speeds are the same. If you’re on a ADSL connection, your upload speed will be a lot slower than the download speed.

Third, configure uTorrent to limit its *upload* speed to around 80% of your total upload bandwidth. If your upload bandwidth is 10 Mb/s, set the limit to 8 Mb/s = 1 MB/s.

Finally, your ISP may be throttling filesharing traffic. Check the following site: http://www.azureuswiki.com/index.php/Bad…

Additional note:
Some network routers have trouble with bittorrent, because of the high number of simultaneous connections. If this is the case you may want to configure uTorrent to limit the number of connections, or get a new router.