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.

Comments

Re:What to do???

[tonywong]

Instead of limiting programs and ports, ISPs should implement another scheme that monitors your traffic amounts and limits the speed in inverse proportion to the amount that you've transferred.

That way they can run uncapped cable modems. Infrequent users get maximum speed and transfer rates, moderate users get moderate transfer rates, and heavy users (eventually) get slow transfer rates.

To avoid a congested high speed consumption situation, resets of the rates are done on a rolling basis so everyone has a different monthly reset. A web page should give you your current stats (up, down traffic, current speed cap, amount transferred, reset date etc.)

That way everyone can be happy, running servers or p2p apps, and if they want to use up all their high speed bandwidth they can be stuck with modem like speeds for the rest of the month without suspension of service. I think you'd find that people who are serving without concern for bandwidth will all of a sudden monitor their own traffic a lot more.

This also takes the ISP out of the content monitor police service and relegates them to a bandwidth metering service, which is all they and everyone else wants them to do.

More To Come

[N8F8]

Expect more stuff like this to happen. Here's why:

Collusion of ISPs - Remember the story last month where the leading companies in the Cable internet Biz got together? Think the only thing they talked about was capping bandwidths lower? Call it the OPEC of the internet. A handfull of companies control the fastest growing, and only viable, highspeed internet access. They can either backbight each other or agree to sell under terms where everyone gets a profitable piece of the pie

Market consolidation. look to see even more consolidation in the industry. Bandwidth providers combining with connection providers and maybe even content providers. The market is unhealthy with all the instability on Wallstreet many companies are ripe for takover or ready to deal.

My friends, the days of the "good deals" are over. Cable internet providers know they own the future of internet access and are making sure that future is profitible to the max. Look at it this way, what choice do you have?