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RoadRunner Blocking Use of Kazaa
An anonymous reader submits: "You should know that RoadRunner is quietly blocking the use of Kazaa in
certain markets. Particularly in Texas, they have some sort of port scanner
in place which scans for Kazaa activity and then disables use of that port,
rendering the program completely useless. Grokster, iMesh, and all other
FastTrack programs are similarly affected. Yet RoadRunner is not disclosing
the practice in any way. Not only that, I'm troubled by the possibility of
them arbitrarily choosing to block other programs in the future. If this
becomes more widespread, they will have many angry (and former) customers." The poster provides these four links to forum postings with more information: one;
two;
three;
four.
As other posters have pointed out, this is very probably a few users with technical problems blaming it on their ISP.
However, this entire issue is a red herring. Roadrunner, as with most cable ISPs, caps upstream and downstream bandwidth. I'm not going to be able to transfer enough over my cable connection, even if I saturate it, to make much of a difference for others nearby. Now, if everyone on my block did this, then we'd notice a problem. But at that point, demand for bandwidth has exceeded the available infrastructure, which obviously did not anticipate people actually using the bandwidth they were told they had.
As for cost, this is also a bad argument. Yes, you can buy a large pipe for some incredible sum-plus-usage-costs for "business use". You seriously think major ISPs pay the same incredible sum for bandwidth? Many have peering arrangements, and for those, more traffic is better - you get more other providers wanting to peer with you. Even if you don't, your bandwidth is so cheap that a sizable percentage of your customer base saturating their connections 24/7 probably wouldn't cost you more than $500 a month.
(To say nothing of the rediculousness of charging for bandwidth usage anyway. Bandwith isn't a non-renewable resource. Any bandwidth not used in a given time interval is wasted and unrecoverable.)
No, to see why this is happening, follow the money. Who gains by preventing citizens from having an easy avenue for sharing music and video? The media cartels. Who's hurt by preventing it? Their indie competition. Wow, what an astonishing coincidence!