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Comcast Hinders BitTorrent Traffic
FsG writes "Over the past few weeks, more and more Comcast users have reported that their BitTorrent traffic is severely throttled and they are totally unable to seed. Comcast doesn't seem to discriminate between legitimate and infringing torrent traffic, and most of the BitTorrent encryption techniques in use today aren't helping. If more ISPs adopt their strategy, could this mean the end of BitTorrent?"
here
iptables -A INPUT -p tcp -dport $TORRENT_CLIENT_PORT -tcp-flags RST RST -j DROP
it's not mine so don't blame me. it's ugly, don't blame me. if it doesn't work, don't blame me. blame Canada.
Wouldn't it be simpler for the telcos to charge per GB delivered in addition to the size of the pipe?
Give all your customers your fastest residential speed. Set your rate so 90% of your customers don't exceed the "monthly allowance" for your low-end rate plan.
For the other 10%, bill them on a pro-rated basis based on how much they use. If they use 2x the allowance, they pay 2x. If they use 100x, they pay 100x.
To prevent runaway bills, allow customers to set their own "caps" and "throttle-down speeds" that would kick in after the cap was reached. If a customer never wanted to pay more than $20, he could set his "monthly cap" at 80% of what $20 would buy, and set the throttle-down rate low enough that he could never use up the remaining 20% even if he was maxing out his connection.
This seems a lot simpler and fairer than traffic shaping by protocol.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
and most of the BitTorrent encryption techniques in use today aren't helping.
Really? So we'd be much better off if we didn't encrypt traffic, because then Comcast could easily monitor all our online usage. That sounds like a much better solution, eh?
I thought it might be some obscure router setting, but I've been having this problem for a few months. Since I barely download things anymore (re: Linux ISOs), it hasn't affected me nearly as much as it would have, say, 2 years ago. Still, this entire situation is pretty ridiculous. Comcast basically says "You can get this speed for $xx.xx a month! It's Comcastic!" but then they act like a bunch of little girls when somebody actually uses what they're paying for. For that reason alone, The guys in suits just want to be able to milk their current infrastructure for longer, and I don't have any sympathy for them. What I find funny about this is that broadband probably wouldn't have gotten as big as it is right now (At least in the U.S.) without warez. Stop and think about how many of your local broadband ISPs were pushing the ability to get music, movies, and games more quickly a few years ago. Comcast was doing that back before legal download services got big. It's like they baited us with the promise of more warez in less time, and now that we're locked in, they want to screw everybody.
Maybe it's the start of customers demanding an actual INTERNET Service Provider and not a Web Access provider, which most so called "ISPs" try for today. Subset-Internet Provider. Shit, SIP is taken too. Oh, well.
One can dream.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
God dam it so annoys me when the ISP's bitch and moan about the customers actually using the bandwidth they have signed a contract, and paid for to use.
I have no sympathy for ISP that oversell their services and fail to invest profits in infrastructure.
GPLv2: I want my rights, I want my phone call! DRM: What use is a phone call, if you are unable to speak?
No one will like this suggestion, but I think it's a valid one. ISPs should start charging for bandwidth used just like electric, gas, and other utilities. Right now, they have "unlimited" plans. This gives ISPs a great incentive to try and control what you do online. It just doesn't cost the same to serve the user who just browses the web (at maybe 100k a page which happens sporadically as users have to take time to read the page) and the user who decides that they want to use their cable modem as a movie downloading service - or even legitimate uses like downloading a new Linux distro every week. ISPs shouldn't care how you use your connection - they should only care how much bandwidth you use. ISPs shouldn't even care whether your bittorrents are illegal or legitimate. That has no affect on them. The amount of data transfered does. So, for the sake of network neutrality, for the sake of our freedom to use the internet how we want to use it, we need usage fees.
It sounds like the real problem is that ISPs are selling people more bandwidth than they want to give them. But when people use that bandwidth for prolonged periods of time, the ISP's business model is buggered up.
Is it because they are using deceptive marketing practices? Because they are over-selling their product hoping that the customer will not expect to make full use of it.
Or is it because we customers are asking for too much and lured ourselves into a situation where we knowingly bought more bandwidth than the ISPs had to offer.
As a consumer, my knee-jerk reaction is to say the former. On the otherhand, I have known for nearly a decade that cable companies were over-selling their bandwidth.
Metered billing is the easy part. In the long run, it's even easier than the cat-and-mouse game of fighting a particular popular protocol.
The other features, like giving the customer control of monthly caps and throttling, will take a bit of work.
One unintended side-effect is the effect on home users who run wireless networks. "Stealing" bandwidth from an inadvertently unsecured or under-secured wireless connection without permission will now be literally stealing, as the poor subscriber will be stuck with the bill. Expect a few prosecutions under theft or fraud statutes if this becomes commonplace.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Someone should sue Comcast for false advertising. I constantly hear commercials on the radio about how much faster their Internet connections are than DSL's, about how "the other guys" sell you slow connections and make you pay extra for higher speed connections, and all sorts of other crap.
Of course, they don't bother telling you that if you get Comcast, you might not even be able to use your connection, or that they're going to play mommy and tell you what you can and can't do, and punish you for doing things they don't like.
If they're going to do this kind of shit, the FCC and/or the FTC needs to make them disclose it in their commercials. It's a substantial factor in the decision whether or not someone might want to subscribe. And I'd love to see what happens to their subscription numbers when they have to say something like, "We will restrict or forbid some popular services you might want to use on the Internet. Oh, and we require you to use the browser that we prefer, even if you have a Mac and don't have access to it. And last, but not least, if you actually use the Internet, we'll cut you off entirely."
I noticed awhile back that if I run one or the other my traffic is slowed, but if I run both at once they speed up. Not sure if they are looking at it as "One P2P = Bandwidth Hog" but "Two P2P = Normal Usage" or some such nonsense. More on topic, my uTorrent with encrypted is seeding just fine after downloading, from Detroit MI downriver area. *hold up hand point to ball of lowest thumb joint*
Jonah HEX
Horror & SciFi Erotic Nudes
It is flawed because the ISP just needs to look at your HTTP usage and see you connect to a tracker. They can even get the port you are listening on from there! Even if you connect to the tracker via HTTPS, they can still see you connecting to a known tracker IP. Once they know you are on a tracker they can start limiting all traffic that looks like it's encrypted with RC4, because apparently this is identifiable.
It is too much because you don't actually need strong encryption to stop traffic limiting. Simply adding some random padding and XORing the protocol with the torrent's infohash would be enough - it is a private key random enough that they couldn't check them all. The RC4 encryption was seriously over-thought, and what did it give us? Nothing, because apparently it is still identifiable as bittorrent (or at least as RC4 encrypted traffic).
The only solution is to replace the current encryption and always connect to trackers via Tor or some other encrypted proxy. And even then it wouldn't be perfect, because it's plausible they could start limiting traffic on listening ports that get a lot of traffic.
Considering the contracts in place between the ISP and the user, and the promises made in advertisement, is this legal? Couldn't a user simply demand that they remove this block?
In Europe this wouldn't work for more than a week or so.
Find another ISP.
But please, don't get the government involved. They'll bury the Internet providers under a mountain of red tape, until customer service will be the last thing on their minds.
Raise your children as if you were teaching them to raise your grandchildren, because you are.
BitTorrent is a bit like a poor-man's multicast. If the ISPs had properly implemented multicast in the first place, they could have saved themselves a lot of the bandwidth that Bittorrent is using now.
It would be nice to combine BitTorrent with multicast, especially for the initial seeding. Maybe we can have our bandwidth-saving multicast cake and eat our BitTorrent asynchrony as well.
Comcast throttles all p2p traffic via shaping. However, if your client supports obfuscation (and I know at least Azureus and eMule do) you can partially circumvent this. The people on the other end have to support obfuscation too, but statistically this will get you back up to usable speeds since most users do a good job of keeping their clients up to date and most now ship with obfuscation support.
How much would each of your users be willing to pay for the access they now enjoy?
Seriously, ask them. Have them imagine a world where the bill was by the GB. Ask them how much their share of the bill would have to be before they would change their online behavior. $10/month each? probably no change. $1000/month each? They'd probably figure out some way to save on usage. Their individual "what the market will bear" price for the services they now enjoy is probably somewhere in between.
Now, for you, the problem will be sub-metering. Assuming they aren't the type to cheat, it's easy enough to install a bandwidth-tracker on each computer. If they are cheaters, you've got bigger problems my friend.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Due respect, but your argument seems disjoint to the actual issue.
You want to argue "pay as you use," fine. But that's not what's going on here.
What's going on is that an ISP has decided to limit what KIND of traffic they will accept. You can download 10 MB via FTP at full speed, but NOT via Bittorrent--that's throttled. See the difference? They're not limiting volume, they're limiting protocols.
Now, you can argue that there's a lot of PTP traffic out there, and throttling it will have the EFFECT of limiting overall consumed bandwidth. But, frankly, that's not fair to customers.
Let me give an example. I don't use a lot of bandwidth normally, but I decided that I want to download the new build of Fedora via PTP. It's the only PTP download I've had in months. I get throttled. Now look at someone else who is a heavy internet user. They stream unencrypted net radio for several hours a day, play huge flash games, etc. They don't get throttled, despite consuming MUCH more bandwidth than me. This is fair? This is neutral?
You state: ISPs shouldn't care how you use your connection/ I agree. Which is why your argument is not persuasive here.
"God dam it so annoys me when the ISP's bitch and moan about the customers actually using the bandwidth they have signed a contract, and paid for to use."
Speaking of which. Did you actually read yours? Abusing a shared network is grounds for what Comcast is doing. Don't like it? Start your own ISP and hope your "customers" don't abuse you. I'm certain they'll be nicer to you because you're a geek.
Now, I only get data from them. I'm not interested in TV or phone, but as far as data pipe, I'm saving $20/mo and the connection speeds are faster.
I heard from a semi-reliable source in the late 1990s: 1/3 of Internet traffic was porn and the average user could thank the porn industry for investing in the cool then-high-quality-video- and then-high-bandwidth features that were becoming available at the time.
:).
I'm sure that figure is way out of date by now, I'm just not sure in what direction
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
So would moving the bittorrent protocol to UDP solve this specific problem? UDP doesn't have a reset bit. And you can always just stick something exactly like TCP on top of UDP to make it almost no different.
All that Comcast does is read your packets and send terminate connection packets to whoever you are seeding to. This has no affect on traffic traveling through their network, and only limits seeding to other company's networks if they are currently over capacity.
The telephone companies do the same thing. Dating back for decades, they've price the "unlimited local calling" plans knowing some users will under-utilize and some will over-utilize.
When a shift in usage happens faster than they can adjust, as happened during the BBS era of the '80s and early '90s, their expenses go up and their revenue remains constant.
Back in the '80s, telcos in some states put a dent in the problem by limiting the number of lines you could have in your house without paying higher "business" rates. Some multi-line BBS owners paid out of pocket, others charged their users or solicited donations, others reduced their number of lines.
There was also talk of a "modem tax" but thankfully that never went anywhere.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
If you want to get hyper-technical, IDENT is a server, or rather, a service.
Not much bandwidth there, but it violates the letter of a lot of ISP/customer contracts.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
As a guide,Europe has more internet users than the entire population of America itself. Oh, and then there's the other billion or so internet users in those other countries.
America is certainly a fairly big country but it's far from being a lone influence of the world's technological development and trends.
I don't know their current policy, but in one particular city, at one point Comcast made a point of installing new neighborhood nodes before their existing ones got saturated.
In neighborhoods with low-volume users, you had relatively few nodes.
In apartment complexes with students and young adults who lived above the median income, you needed a lot more.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Isn't seeding kind of like operating a distribution server? I mean, sure, you don't actually spend all the bandwidth yourself but you are acting as the primary distributor, correct?
Does comcast have a no-server policy? Many residential ISP's do. If they do, this just seems like it's enforcing that policy.
Does it suck, yeah. Does it make comcast evil? I'm not so sure.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
If they are smart, the ISPs will collectively do the following:
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
It's not even like Comcast have sensible hostnames to make blocking zombies by PTR easy.
We can dream, can't we?
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
Change your isp? If they start losing customers they may reconsider their business decision.
If both have similar policies - not uncommon - you are stuck.
Sure, there are alternatives like satellite, fixed-wireless, and cell-phone technologies, but those tend to be more expensive for what you get.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
And it's not Comcast's practices (at the moment, at least).
???
...the end of a few of these ISPs?
Unless there is a legal loophole allowing them to unilaterally change the terms of consumer contracts from Internet to Throttled Censornet, only customers having no other choice would stay with companies trying to force them back to the days of scary time- or traffic-based metering (especially given the risk of excessive traffic due to botnets these days) and/or walled gardens with little content exclusively picked at the mercy of one's provider.
Does this have any effect on that at all? IANAL, but it seems like it certainly would. Is it the fact that they are just blocking/throttling a particular type of traffic and not basing blocking/throttling on content?
Comcast, as well as other cable broadband internet providers advertise X Mbps connections yet they are filtering high bandwidth content? Can't we just slap these bastards with false advertising? I use bittorrent to download LEGALLY DISTRIBUTED SOFTWARE, ie linux distros. wtf?
Hehe. That's funny. Now who exactly are they going to lose? Oh that's right. The one's that are costing them money, and giving everyone else a bad experience by abusing the network. I can't imagine why they'd want to lose THOSE.
And since we're going with the "I'll take my ball and go home" defense. What ISP is going to accept an abuser? Looks to me like you all in true fashion ruined a good thing, and now you don't want to live with the consequences.
1 dolar for 10MB Check your math. That's $1/GB, or $4.50 for a DVD.
See my other posts in this thread regarding pricing.
Pricing should be set so less than 10% of the customers pay more, and only a small minority of that pay more than 3-4x more.
One thing I didn't mention:
No user should pay more than some maximum based on the size of the pipe, and that maximum should be significantly less than the per-GB fee low-end users pay.
Let's do some math:
There are 2592000 seconds in 30 days. Suppose for the sake of argument that 90% of users use less than the equivalent of 25920 seconds at the 6Mbps full speed, or around 20GB. That's a 1% utilization rate. Charge them $20, which happens to match the $1/GB rate you suggest. The real numbers may be higher or lower. If someone uses 40GB $40. You would think that at 24/7, this would be 2000 GB or $2000. But you already have an "unlimited business" plan specifically for companies that use full-throttle services and you only charge them $600/month for 6Mbps service. So, anyone using more than $600 worth of bandwidth will have their bill capped at $600/month.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
...in Norway prices are high, but you get what you're paying for. I've been with three different providers (two DSL, one cable) over the last 4-5 years because of moving, and every time it'll run full speed 20+ hours a day. Nobody complains if I load it out 24/7, and if they did I'd take it up with the consumer protection agency that's got real teeth. Whatever weasel words they used in the contract won't matter, if you're not delivering they slap you around good. How the US companies get away with promising "unlimited" plans, disconnecting heavy users, throttling heavy traffic and deliver such shitty service I don't know. "The market" don't fix things in a mono/duopoly, and from what I gather most are stuck with at most one cable and one DSL operator. At least here the phone lines are for rent, so you can pick from several DSL carriers (but the network build-out is still controlled by one ex-state company).
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
What I'm talking about is eliminating "all you can eat" at the low end of the market and replacing it with metered service, but with an initial allowance high enough that relatively few customers will be impacted.
Think of it as the internet-equivalent of "600 calls a month for [insert your usual bill here]" instead of "all the calls you want for [insert your usual bill here]." Very few home customers make more than 600 calls a month. However, back in the days before electronic switches, each call caused wear and tear on the switch. People making high numbers of local calls were costing the phone company more money than those who weren't.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
It seems that they're now directly interfering with the connections, above and beyond sending RST packets. If I stop my client and then restart it, it will send for a while, then quit, even with the RST packets being dropped. I tested this by running a client on a backbone-connected server that I have. Aside from dropping the RST packets, I've been logging them as well, and they are being dropped. Since my server doesn't have any arbitrary restrictions or throttling, it's clearly something being done by or on behalf of Comcast.
My choices:
- Only seed torrents from my server
- Switch to AT&T (yuck, and they'll no doubt be doing the same crap)
- Switch to Speakeasy (the Best Buy deal gives me the creeps)
- Switch to Covad (expensive)
- Switch to a local fixed wireless provider (my employer has this, and it sucks for VoIP)
- More cat & mouse games with Comcast
Oh, no! You have walked into the slavering fangs of a lurking grue!
We should be kicking all of those MMORPGs and retarded-ass YouTube vidoes off of the networks instead!
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
ISPs should start charging for bandwidth used just like electric, gas, and other utilities.
Charge by the minute ISP sucked, but it's nice of you to compare it to other monopoly services. You might as well tell me the break up of Bell was a bad idea.
Outside of a monopoly, charge per bandwith will fail and drive most people right off the internet. 25% of windoze users are part of a botnet. Disconnecting them until their computers are clean is a better idea than serving them a big fat bill. It would also clear up a lot of bandwith that people could use for things they want, which is the point of internet service to begin with. Only a monopoly service would dare hinder the core function of a service. If they dare make it so that one in four people are ripped off at random, average users will panic and drop their subscriptions. The people served big bills may never come back.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I don't know what a "consumer contract" is, but I bet you that most, if not all, ISPs' terms of use reserve them the right to do whatever the hell they want with your traffic.
sic transit gloria mundi
Satellite has much-higher costs than similar-priced DSL and has poor latency.
Latency isn't a huge issue for web-browsing but it's not so great for gaming.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Indeed: volume in practice isn't free or unlimited; it's a scarce resource that different users compete for. In fact, a well-priced volume plan, perhaps with peak and off-peak rates and the ability to pre-purchase gigabytes, would remove a lot of the uncertainty and unpredictability surrounding hosting.
Unfortunately, the market isn't really competitive, and the few providers that have wires into your home can afford to cater to just the average consumer and not worry about offering something for geeks and high bandwidth users.
Yes, Comcast ist offering unlimited* service. Please note the asterix.
As helpfully pointed out a while ago in marketing speech an asterix negates the word it stands after.
And honestly who would buy "a (usually) really fast internet connection for a flat fee no matter how much or long you surf, but actually we'll throttle the thing to a crawl if you download too much."
My recommendation (IANAL): Tell them (first via phone, then via postal mail) that you paid for an unmetered account with speed X and that you consider this kind of traffic shaping and throttling as a breach of contract on their side. Reserve yourself the right to sue in a small claims court. Demand that they either restore the service to full functionality (i.e. no traffic shaping and throttling) or reduce your monthly fees by a significant amount (50% or so). Be sure to mention legal uses of Bittorrent (FOS like Linux, Demo Software, Patches, that online video on demand store that uses BT) that are affected. If all that does not help, send them an immediate cancellation of your subscription citing their breach and contract and failure to rectify the issue, stop paying, and look for a new ISP.
+++ MELON MELON MELON +++ Out of Cheese Error +++ redo from start +++
God dam it so annoys me when the ISP's bitch and moan about the customers actually using the bandwidth they have signed a contract, and paid for to use.
We're the people who build and run these systems. Comcast...or anyone for that matter...can't win that fight. I've worked with you wankers for 15 years, you're clever, relentless, and infinitely creative in a mischievous kind of way. If Comcast closes off BitTorrent, you'll find another way to disguise the traffic. They'll figure it out after a while and you'll figure out something else or go somewhere else. It may be difficult some days to motivate you at work, but you'll drive yourself until the early hours of the morning figuring out how to get around whatever filters they put in place. I've seen this arms race take place in every type of communication technology out there and you've won every time. Telephones, mainframes, PC networks, the internet. The road of technology is littered with the bodies of people who underestimate the technical genius of people who don't like being regulated.
We run your switches, your networks, firewalls, databases and your web sites. We are root and domain admins, we have the back door passwords to your routers. We run packet sniffers and Snort, know what a clever fella can do with xp_ extended stored procedures and javascript, we grew up on ping and tracert....we don't need no steeking GUI.
You can work with us or spend your life on an endless treadmill fighting a losing battle. But one thing history should have taught you...
....do not fuck with us.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Freaking brilliant! Everybody wins!
Back in my day when we chiseled our bits into stone and sent them by mule train from village to village...
Come on, haven't you figured out that "unlimited plan" doesn't mean "unlimited"? Just like "satisfaction guaranteed" doesn't actually mean that. It's just one of those phrases.
In fact, the best thing to do would be for ISPs to scrap unlimited plans and return to volume pricing, preferably peak/off-peak. That way, people pay for what they actually use and we can eliminate the guesswork.
Simple economics tells you that the monthly payment you make must more than cover the average monthly bandwidth costs, with a tidy profit. So, normal iTunes and YouTube usage are covered. And, in fact, neither of those comes close to what a serious Torrent user will consume.
We may change our prices, fees, the Services and/or the terms and conditions of this Agreement in the future. Unless this Agreement or applicable law specifies otherwise, we will give you thirty (30) days prior Notice of any significant change to this Agreement. If you find the change unacceptable, you have the right to cancel your Service(s). However, if you continue to receive Service(s) after the end of the notice period (the "Effective Date") of the change, we will consider that you have accepted the changes. You may not modify this Agreement by making any typed, handwritten, or any other changes to it for any purpose.
I'm calling Monday and canceling on the grounds that this constitutes a Service Change, and too bad about their stupid term agreement. I live in Tacoma WA so I get to choose between multiple cable ISP's, DSL, etc. I give a damn about any fine print in a TOS agreement, I pay for an internet connection and I want what I pay for. They cannot be allowed to dictate what class of packet I can or cannot upload through the connection I pay for. Bandwidth yes, but that's not what they're doing here.Samsung took back my unlocked bootloader because Google wants me to rent movies. They're both evil.
Erm, we currently have Net Neutrality, and it doesn't seem to be probihiting anything. Also, I'm sure most folks here are NOT against net neutrality. It's as if you've mixed the whole thing up, and thinking NN is the bad thing looming in the future and not the other way around. Maybe I just didn't understand, but I'm baffled at the amount of people who don't even know if Net Neutrality is the old way or the new way proposed by ISPs.
So use IPsec in ESP mode.
Ironically, I've hated IPsec since its inception. I always though security should be end-to-end on the connections, since in theory it was just the data, and the end point authentications, that were important. Now it appears that IPsec actually has a valid use. One problem is that it won't completely protect from provider abuses, since once they determine some IP address on the network is a Torrent or Tor site, they can throttle based on that IP address (source IP). And we also need to be using IPsec/ESP for other communications as well.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
If you look at your Comcast terms of service, you will find that you're not allowed to run any servers at all. So, to all those people complaining about Comcast not honoring their "unlimited" plans, you're not honoring your part of the contract either. Comcast will tolerate a limited amount of "serving" (webcams, remote access), but torrents go far beyond that.
Now, this situation sucks. I don't use a lot of volume, but I want fast speed when I need it and I'm basically subsidizing people who send around porn and warez. Furthermore, abuses by high volume server and p2p operators on the network not only limit the performance I paid for, they also may force Comcast to institute filters that also interfere with my usage.
I think the solution is to go to volume pricing and drop unlimited plans altogether. That way, if you want to run p2p or some server over cable, you pay for what you use. Or you can do what what I do for my high-volume server needs: colocate.
I have comcast. My connection lately has been passing the speakeasy speed test at 20Mbit down, 2Mbit up.
I use bit torrent to get game demos and betas, Linux distros, and to share music that I have composed and hold copyrights for.
I can seed just fine. You have to find that sweet spot. (the point at which your upstream starts to impact your downstream). for me, it's about 80KBps.
That being said, I am forced to use peer guardian 2 and alternative ports to see to it that my traffic gets to its intended location.
Comcast has noticed that bit torrent defeats its "Power Boost" technology which bursts full bandwidth for the first 20 or so MB.
With Bit Torrent, it's all the first 20 or so MB. so everyone that can seed that fast is allowed to.
Bit Torrent is a legitimate technology. I has legal uses. I use it legally. Comcast wants to throttle it because they're losing money on it.
They're using their grammar skills there.
Ending Comcast the right answer. Leave, don't use their crappy service. Tell them why. If you're stuck in a monopoly zone under them, complain to them, complain to whatever city,county,state or federal government has any regulatory influence over that monopoly. They can either provide good service, or go rot.
Start Running Better Polls
Fine. Assuming the cable company can make good money at $600 selling you a fully-utilized pipe, and assuming YOU will take full responsibility for your downstream users, they'd probably be happy with that arrangement.
I'm sure this kind of thing already happens under the table. I pay $49.95 for my 10Mbps/connection and set up a wireless connection to my 2 neighbors and charge them $16.65 each, off the books and in blatant violation of my contract.
This will work out fine for small cooperatives like you describe, where everyone knows each other and the cooperative is built on personal trust as much as anything else. Scaling it up could be problematic.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
You want to run a server without hassle? get a business account. I have Comcast workplace at my home and I get 6m/768k with 6 static ip addresses and no port blocking or restriction on servers for $100/month.
Look, I'm not totally happy about it, but this is how it works today. You want a restrictive, "client only" connection to the internet you can do that for $20-$60 a month. You want a real internet connection you are going to have to pay $100+ a month in most places (in the US).
Frankly, I am hoping the ISPs finally just come clean and admit that their bottom tier service is client only, practically web/email only. There is a market for that and there is nothing really wrong with them selling it that way.
Verizon's FIOS service supposedly has a comparably priced business tier as well, and they are laying fiber on my street as we speak. I might check that out when it lights up (although I generally find Verizon slightly more evil than Comcast).
Finkployd
ABEND 322
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I'm pretty sure if you dug down deep in your 'contract' you signed with your cable internet provider that you will find the truth about how there is only so much bandwidth available to your entire neighborhood, and that they are free to throttle you whenever and for whatever reason they wish in order to keep everyone within the norms. So you're downloading or seeding 500TB/day while the guy down the road can't even load up his G-Mail account to view pictures of his brother on vacation due to your consumption. For this, I understand and applaud their decision to enforce the throttling... However, I think they should have made this more apparent to the customers from day one.
While cable offers greater potential for speed/burst speeds since you can 'leech' the bandwidth from your neighbors, you might want to consider a high-end DSL or even a T-line if you want more stable and pre-defined throughput values.
I currently use a mid-tier SBC/AT&T DSL plan, and it's plenty for my personal uses, but just like all of the cable internet users out there, I am having bandwidth issues as well, so this might not be the way to go. I've been having problems with an online game, the same one quite a few people have been having problems with lately. It's kind of sad that their attempts to squash torrent traders is affecting other things, such as gaming.
Sooner or later, ISPs are going to say "enough" and their new consumer offerings will be metered-bandwidth-only.
You want that fancy new twice-as-fast pipe we are rolling out just in time for Christmas? Fine, give up your all-you-can-eat contract.
Within a few years, the only people still on the all-you-can-eat plans will be relatively-small-pipe customers and people willing to pay high-end business rates.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Personally, I'd love it if my ISP has a "virtual firewall" that I could administer, which blocked all incoming and high-abuse-potential-outgoing ports by default.
When I signed up, I would be given the following template, with some check boxes pre-checked:
_x_ Disable all unsolicited incoming traffic
_x_ Disable outgoing email except through ISP mail servers and through web-mail
___ Only allow web and file-transfer traffic (http:, https:, and ftp:)
_x_ Filter using ISP-level antivirus tool (no guarentees!)
_x_ Filter using ISP-level ad-blocker (no guarentees!)
___ Override above and allow everything needed for IRC
___ Override above and allow everything needed for torrents
___ Override above and allow everyting for [repeat this line for the top-10 consumer applications that require firewall customization]
___ custom
Where custom was a full firewall editor.
This service should be built into the cost of the contract because it will reduce the chance that my computer will become a zombie, and will reduce the ISPs costs of delivering traffic to me.
In addition, for an additional charge, I'd be willing to pay for parental controls.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
What will it take for the public to realize that some things simply can not be handled well by the private sector? The only way to stop people from ripping us off for a necessity they have a natural monopoly in is for we the people to take control of it ourselves.
The ones that charged per minute were charging way too much compared to the all-you-can-eat model.
If they'd lowered their prices or adopted an "allowance" model, that amounted to "all you can eat" for 90% of their customers they would've survived. The other 10% would've either anted up or left to another carrier. Either way, the ISP wins.
Some dialup providers implemented pseudo-bandwidth caps by cutting you off after X number of hours. This was more to free up their modems than to conserve bandwidth though.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
With the "common Carrier" status, ISP's pipe suppliers and what not can claim they "just carry traffic" they don't know or care about the content.
Now it seems by actually Identifying Torrent traffic, and throttling, regulating, metering or in any way attempting to regulate it, they could quite possibly setting them selves up as an RIAA target.
It would seem to me, and perhaps a lawyer or two, that by doing so, they are "knowingly, transmitting, Allowing to be transmitted or perhaps even facilitating the transmission of prohibited ie: Copyrighted Material".
Just one of those things that makes you go hmmmm.
Also it seems to me, that a minor software update to the bit torrent software could circumvent the whole process. Simply add code that will allow the software to start randomizing ports during the transfer. It would be simple enough for the packet exchange to carry a "Next Packet on port n" and completely avoid the entire throttling mechanism.
Just another one of those things that makes you go hmmmm.
Hey KID! Yeah you, get the fuck off my lawn!
I utilize comcast and I have noticed a slight different, but nothing too bad. I can't seem to get over 100KB/s of torrent traffic, but I am alright with that. However when I am using uTorrent it seems to make comcast or something uneasy and all of my computers get affected. When I use Azerus I don't have that problem. Just some food for thought
"terms of service subject to change without notice"
wouldn't Net Neutrality prohibit Comcast from engaging in this sort of behavior?
No. Net Neutrality has nothing to do with this sort of traffic shaping.
or any other filesharing.
lets face it - web surfing and filesharing are the bulk of all activities people do on the net. if they hamper either one, people will just go and find an isp that doesnt hamper them and thats it. its the people who decide.
Read radical news here
Absolutely not! I don't want to go back to the days where I have to fear outrageous on-line bills. I still remember being burned by $6.00/hr charges! Once you start down that path you can expect ISPs to start milking the new payment strategy to maximize their profits.
The internet could end up being a "pick up your mail, serf one or two sites, get the hell off" experience. If you did anything more you could expect a $200.00 bill due to the high cost per megabyte. Hell no!
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
"Comcast doesn't seem to discriminate between legitimate and infringing torrent traffic"
Can Bittorrent discriminate between legit and infringing?? Because if you can't why should you expect Comcast to do so? In fact are there any statistics to indicate that a majority of the traffic is legit? I would suggest only a timy minority of stuff on Bittorrent comprises legit stuff.
i use azureus and encryption, i have to start and stop the torrent every 30 seconds, becuase of comcasts "burst" i can seed in spurts at 200kbps but if i want to seed something over 100 megs i need to be able to sit down for a few hours, its annoying but not impossible
I would know the answer as to how and why they do it because I help set up the hardware that does it locally for my system. It doesn't affect all markets nor does it affect customers all of the time. They can do it because of the no server clause in the contract. It doesn't however have to be determined by someone that you're running a server. How it works is there is an actual piece of hardware that is placed into the routing of packets. It inspects the header bits of the packets and determines if the packets being sent are p2p or simply network/server traffic. If it is p2p traffic then the routing priority level for those packets matching those identified are dropped by one level. This is exactly the same way the voip works, but in opposite manner so as voip packets have a higher routing priority than any of the other user traffic. This being said it leaves us with a packet routing priority from top to bottom of user generated traffic looking like: VOIP, Network/HTTP, P2P. Looking at this it's easy to see why some people would experience 'throttling' as it's being called. Unless you can figure out a way to bypass traffic being generated to or from a bunch of private (ie individual ip's not registered with DNS)then your out of luck. This does still leave newsgroups untouched however since the traffic is being routed through a registered server. One more thing. Many of the Comcast systems are implementing what they have termed 'Powerboost'. It doesn't cost anything and it's being done at the server/CMTS level. There is no way to sign up for it or anything. It's either on, off, or hasn't been implemented in your area yet. The rollout of this has been detemined by network capacity for whatever fiber node you're being fed out of. In my current location we've implemented it in appx 90% of our nodes on the downstream and 60% of the nodes on our upstream channels. What this does is allows a user trying to push through large files use of the unallocated bandwidth above and beyond their provisioning rate. Some people here are consistently seeing more than 20Mb/s downstream and 2.4Mb/s per second upstream (being provisioned for 6Mb downstream and 512k upstream). However the servers will not allow that rate to be sustained. It holds a small percentage of the bandwidth available for other demand and keeps the total usage under X% capacity or else it will suspend the additional bandwidth to that user. ****Take notice I didn't say it allows the user to make use of all or even most of the unallocated bandwidth, but just more than they are provisioned for. This is being tightly controlled and regulated to make sure capacity and network stability are maintained while allowing bursts of up to and over 20Mb's. I wouldn't expect to see the number much more than about 20/22 Mb's though depending on the market. Some of the higher capacity/speed markets are running more than the standard 6Mb we're running here in my market. Those people might see something a little more out of powerboost, but don't bet on it for now anyways. Hope this helps, but I don't think it will resolve any of your difficulties any more than just an understanding would do.
This has been pointed out here before. Neither Comcast nor any other ISP has common carrier status.
http://www.slyck.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=36623 this describes that no or almost no ISP's have Common Carrier Status.
Inane Comments are Generously Disregarded
Even though there is a "Looming Problem" with outgrowing bandwidth, it has been very obvious to me that some services are being very limited. When downloading my favorite distro, I did a test. I started 2 transfers of the CD ISO. One using Bit Torrent and the other using a simple download mirror. When the mirror transfer was completed, the Bit Torrent transfer was almost 1/3rd completed. From then on, I've just stuck with mirrors with one exception.
When SONY had the defective by design DVD's so I couldn't add Open Season to the kids Zen Video, I DL/ed the ISO. It took 4 days. Later with the Slashdot discussion and the recall of the defective disks, I ordered a replacement. When ordering they asked what player I had trouble with. I was up front with them. I told them I had trouble with Acid Rip on Linux so I couldn't play it on a Creative Zen Video. They sent me a replacement with no excuses. At least their database includes Acid rip and the Creative Zen Video.
The truth shall set you free!
As someone said on the linked site, selling a service without mentioning that it is severely restricted is fraud.
I only get 768K dsl at home. I pretty much only torrent legit traffic like Linux ISO's. I do it while I'm at work because I work for an ISP and even though they cap my downloads, I still get 1/MB per second.
At home I only get 90/K per second.
How many other people do their downloading at work because the pipe is bigger?
It used to be awesome at work when they didn't throttle bandwidth. I was getting up to 10/MB per second, depending on the site. I do feel better about them capping it though, because I don't want to take bandwidth from customers.
If this is against the agreement, sue them. If you agreed to them being able to arbitrarily filter or throttle your internet access, accept it or change the provider.
It is hard to imagine that this should be part of a legal and valid contract with an internet service provider, at least in my country, but if this is indeed the case, there should be plenty of competition to change to.
Certainly you don't really think the judge would be happy with such terms if you took an ISP to court for making a change such as:- or that you couldn't ever terminate contracts if the other party had actually managed to validly reserve and exercise the right to change their terms to your disadvantage.
Many jurisdictions have even explicitly outlawed the use of various "rip-off" clauses wielded against consumers.
Here's the thing:
- You folks want common carrier status
- You want subsidies from taxpayers instead of spending your own money on infrastructure
- You advertise your services as always on and unlimited
And yet, when customers actually take you up on that offer you want to reneg after the fact.
When you advertise a service, accept payment for it, and refuse to deliver on it, that, my friend, is called fraud. Considering that you mail bills to your customers charging them for unlimited services, isn't each and every statement you mail one count of mail fraud? Isn't that what took down several mafia families, if the reference in The Firm is to be believed?
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
Under prohibited activities, you find:
Also:
Furthermore, they are free to define any other activities as "prohibited" any time they like.
Your logic is poor. Downloading movies and music isn't the problem (illegal copyright violations notwithstanding). The means being used (P2P) is the problem. So sorry but you fail the "false advertising" test. Now if the complainers want to get off their butts and develop a protocol that actually respect peoples resources instead of consuming them in an orgy of ME!, ME!, ME!, It's all about ME!
"Be proactive... and change the system."
Now if you could only apply that willpower to changing the speed of light.
Isn't this basically what AOL did? When they first started out, they could cope with the demand. But once they were really popular, their tubes weren't fat enough to handle all the people calling in?
"In any case, I think the solution is simply to go to volume based pricing. And, in fact, I think it would be good if ISPs were regulated and forced to offer transparent, volume-based pricing. That way, you can run all the P2P software you like and pay for the bandwidth, rather than have low-volume users like me subsidize you."
I noticed you left out, "getting their own dedicated line". Why? It would make everyone happy. The mass up/down loaders can do whatever they want with their "unlimited"* connections, and the rest of us don't have to put up with their actions and the consequences. A win, win unless one is looking for "all you can eat" at Wal-mart prices, then there's a problem, and I can't think on how one is going to solve that.
*Let's pretend that the laws of physics don't exist and therefore there can be an "unlimited" connection in any "self-rationalization" sense one can conceive of.
"Thank you, Mr. Senator!!"
Comment removed based on user account deletion
My torrents work just as well as they always have.
It's always worked for Microsoft [insert uproarious laughter here]
Seriously though, this isn't TOO dissimilar from what happened several years ago when ISP's started blocking their subscribers from running their own base protocol servers. Most block ftp servers, some block web servers, and I've yet to sign up an ISP that doesn't get hinky with running a mail server. In point of fact, I'm signed up to Cox cable right now, and I am constantly working around the ftp server limitation. Nobody could call fraud, because nobody asked the questions about what features where disabled...
As some may remember, the prime reason given by many o' ISP was that they didn't want people running public sites that would swallow up all of their bandwidth. To me, this feels like the same argument all over again, but with two significant differences: The scale is dramatically increased (more bandwidth to go around, but way more content), and this time the users aren't tech-savvy and relatively educated computer users, instead they are average people with only enough knowledge to be angry that they can't use bittorrent to get the new Daughtry album.
Unfortunately, this could be more than an issue of bandwidth concern, as many ISPs are still getting constant batteries of requests for customer information and no doubt they are looking for a way to remove that hassles.
- Nobody would know what RTFA meant if it didn't need to be said all the time
I haven't noticed any substantial reduction in Comcast's download rates (I have the 8 mbit/sec tier, speed which I rarely achieve anyway) but then again I'm fortunate enough to live in a broadband-competitive area. I can call up SBC, Covad, or a number of other providers and get service, so maybe Comcast figures it's a bad idea to squeeze people around here too much. If Comcast were my only available provider, I understand it could be very different.
Of course, when all the ISPs are pulling this stunt, it wont matter. But I suspect they'll have a lot fewer customers. There's a reason downloading is such a big part of network traffic: it's what people want. Times have changed, technology has changed, we can do more with it now, and email and Web browsing are only a part of modern online activities. Smart businesses that are in a truly competitive situation find ways to give customers what they want and need, and still manage to make a profit. Take away that incentive, that pressure to garner and keep customers, and crap like this is what happens.
I can get my email and browse the Web on a $5/month dial-up connection. I pay Comcast a pretty penny because I want to send lots of packets from here to there quickly. Take that away from me and they are no longer worth $75 each month (it's arguable whether they are now.) I've been considering dropping Comcast's asymmetric crap and going with a straight 1.5 mbit/sec DSL connection.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Your paying for CABLE INTERNET service. Not the internet.
They own you and can do what the hell they please.
This is whay you get when you are against muni broadband.
They could stop giving in without a full court order.
I have actually suspected Qwest of throttling WoW and the Wow patch downloader (which is torrent based), I just have no clue how I'd go about proving it.
I have Speakeasy and I'm also in the Puget Sound area. Once we decide whether we're moving or not (and whatever the result of that decision - depends on whether any rent increase is reasonable, i.e. <=5%) , I'm dropping Worst Buy and switching to Zhonka. They're based in Olympia and the only negative thing about them is that they use the Qwest racket, but I can just about live with that.
I've had Charter in Massachusetts for a couple years now, and BitTorrent has always been throttled. BitTorrent downloads take forever to download, if at all. I've tested this by connecting to the same trackers with the same client on my old work's Verizon 1.5Mb DSL (I'm running 6Mb Charter at home) and the downloads were exponentially faster on Verizon.
It sucks because WoW updates and several of Microsoft's large downloads are sent via BitTorrent. I have to hunt and seek every time I want to update a new WoW installation.
I'm not sure this is the same. The TOS agreements of ever ISP I have had on a residential line said I couldn't run servers from my connection. They have been relaxed in enforcement but I had to switch to a commercial service once when they started blocking port 25 and my mail servers went down.
I guess this would depend on whether they are doing it for every customer commercial and residential or not. I agree it is a foul deed but they might have their asses covered it they can claim seeding as a server.
They don't throttle anything and their infrastructure is built to be upgraded indefinitely. People have reported downloading terabytes of data and haven't even received a letter. This just might be for now because they don't want negative PR, but they haven't capped me once even after I switched from Comcast to Verizon DSL.
Imagine your voice phone provider listening for forbidden topics of conversation, and then inserting "Oh, gotta go, the repairman's at the door" and hanging up. How long would that last?
Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.
The reason why I say this is that dial-up( I just cancelled my service and went broadband recently) has dynamic ip's that change everytime you connect. However, you're going to be hard pressed to download anything quick over a meg. The wait time is god-awful, LOL! On the positive note, the RIAA/MPAA snoopers hound dogs won't be able to track your activiies back to you. Now, if you combine this with a TOR onion proxy/router whatever; then I think you'd be virtually undetectable.
Oh you poor, poor Americans.
Meanwhile I'm happily seeding away, as I have been for the last week, on my 100mbit connection, one that's available in any major city and comes at a reasonable $45/month. No shaping, no port-blocking and no nonsense.
Move to Sweden, anyone?
yah really technically anyhting that sends data out of your local box is a server
ok so dont have me send packets of data to the isp yah know that secret shit they monitor.
Don't have any web browsers send back data to handshake the connections and what do you have a useless piece a junk not able to do anything , and what about learning , if you goto college back when i was htere i learned more by setting up servers here localy and played ( i wasn't adverting it so no traffic just to see it work and have a very few people test it.
AND why should we not be allowed to run servers according to that wired article they already spy on the traffic?( google illegal wiretapping document the fbi wanted wired to take down.)
AND its like this a 100MB server costs me about 200$ CAN for a terabyte a space
they want to charge me 40$ a month for 30GB ( 30 times 33 = 990 GB ; 40 times 33 =1320$)
so let it go forth its ok for business to get the wicked deal but home users SCREW YOU.
Why the hell not?
I have noticed that when I FTP several files for network-based backup (mput *), the small ones have great upload throughput, but the big ones are terrible. I assume they try to degrade any large 'batch' uploads. Does anybody have a different experience?
Network Neutrality refers to not discriminating for or against traffic based on source or destination. This is one of the most basic premises of the Internet; The middle of it just routes data to it's destination.
Packet shaping refers to discriminating for/against traffic based on traffic type. It has positive uses, such as to give interactive traffic priority (audio/video > games > web > p2p). What we're seeing here is Comcast throttling p2p because people are using the shitload of bandwidth they sold (but don't have).
100mb/1 terabyte BW = 200$ /month //5megabit 30gb=40$ CAN
that means they are charging per 100mb home use 1320$can/month
or 1120$ extra do do nothing then browse the internet?
WTF
Strange, I have DL~800GB and UL ~1.1TB on comcast and never had my traffic slowed. THe only thing i can think of is my firewall blocking. I use gshield gentoo hardened blocking all unsolicited traffic. I see tons of drops on my bittorrent port, some UDP, which is all blocked, and others TCP RST packets. Since all are blocked, my client never receives them and continues traffic unblocked. I dunno, ive never been throttled but if i was, i would probably simply change my BT port. Simplist things first friends...
Where are these? I have never seen MS mention their official files via BT. I am not referring to pirated files either.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Yes -
Telcos and cable co's are government granted monopolies. Thus there is very limited competition (if any at all), and ISPs really DON'T operate in the free market unfortunately.
Libertas in infinitum
I have Comcast, and Bittorrent connections have been acting strangely for the last several months. The speed slowly ramps up to a good rate, then suddenly drops to almost nothing, and starts slowly ramping up over and over again. The same thing has been happening at my friend's house, who also uses Comcast.
Or maybe my cheap router is just dropping packets under the heavier than normal load.
It's not 100Mb=1 terabyte. 100Mb = 12.5MB as in 12.5 Megabytes. 100MB = 1GB 100GB = 1TB or 1 Terabyte.
I just signed up for Comcast Internet as a Business Class Customer for an 8mb connection with 5 IP's. And it seems that Comcast would really piss some business customers off by damaging BitTorrent access as there are some businesses that have been using BitTorrent to store large diskimages as a means of low cost backup redundancy.
So if this is the case for Business Class as well, I could definitely see a backlash against Comcast for such an action.
I would lke to say that I was utterly impressed that Comcast haad my data line up and running within 24 hours of my initial phone call to sails.
That is the fastest service installation I have ever seen. So it sucks to read something like this so soon after my install. But I guess any large ISP will make bad decisions from time to time, however, those decisions usually target residential customers.
Then they have to define "servers". A bittorrent client could be considered a server as much as a client.
They have for a long while now, and I work with the guy who deployed it. (not at Rogers anymore) I asked him how it was done one day.
:)
They're done by wire-speed layer 7 analyzers sitting at each node on the fibre trunk. There's a very small but common pattern present in the encryption handshakes of all Torrent clients. (and unencrypted is, of course, very easy to spot) He mentioned something common in the encryption key is how it spots it, but my memory is fuzzy so don't quote me on that.
If the analyzer sees that pattern it automatically throttles your entire connection until it stops seeing the pattern for a while. That's right - whole connection, not just torrents. There are indeed a small number of false positives with this - as well as some torrent connections that don't get throttled - however to Rogers, it was a wash and they didn't care. The accuracy was more than good enough.
At any time of the day, torrents were eating 2x as much bandwidth as all their regular traffic combined and it was saturating the network. They decided to deal with it by throttling. I don't agree (and thankfully, neither does my present ISP TekSavvy) I was told that torrents are presently throttled to eat half that traffic on average.
I suspect that this IS mentioned in the agreement, but that most people are fools and skip reading it.
-- Ravensfire
"But we decide which is right, and which is an illusion"
T1 is fucking ghetto, 1970s technology used for no other reason as to keep prices high and margins easy to hide ... it's an archaic and wasteful use of cable. Decades worth of improvements in signal processing has gone into DSL (and cable for that matter). Providing guaranteed bandwidth of the DSL connection is hardly rocket science either. The only reason T1s are more reliable is because DSL gets the shaft in maintenance.
PS. if you charge 700$ for a T1 your customers are getting screwed.
The reason is that if even if you have blocklists( and you can't trust who ever made them unless you did yourself) you can still be detected. It very simple. All an investigator has to do is launch a popular torrent program that lists the amount of seeders and leechers on a download; do either a responsive trace on that ip back to it's ISP; and add it to a collection of others in a warning letter to your ISP. The ISP;if threatened enough, will use that information and do further monitoring to detect and verify the target if need be. No one is safe. Your best bet is too stay away from popular downloads(easier said than done) or use a TOR proxy or do both to add extra "bounce" to your tracepath. If they really want you; they'll get you. It's just less work for them to go after easier marks. So try not to be an easy mark! Good luck and happy downloading.
Easy way to find out. Download wireshark -> http://www.wireshark.org/
Run a capture on the ip of one of the hosts you're trying to send to.
So, for example, if you're trying to the address 66.41.193.0, click Capture -> Interfaces -> Prepare button on the network interface you're using, then type in the filter field "host 66.41.193.0" (w/o quotes) then click start.
Watch your p2p client until it disconnects, then switch back to Wireshark. The last few packets should show [RST] if it's comcast being comcastic and hindering your bittorrent.
The final test is to go to www.dnsstuff.com (Or use the program SamSpade) and plugin the ip address to see if it's inside or outside of Comcast.
Hi All,
It's kinda neat to see something that I started show up on Slashdot!
At the bottom of the original TorrentFreak article is a link to my post http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r18323368-Comcast- is-using-Sandvine-to-manage-P2P-Connections on DSLReports.
I encourage you to read my original post and, if you can take it, the pages that follow. It explains exactly what is going on, and on page 7 or so of that topic, I try to clear up some misconceptions left by the TorrentFreak article. Uploading isn't impossible, but it clearly is being "managed" -- probably to reduce the cost or load on their network.
Go Slashdot! This is exactly the right crowd to view this issue and understand what is happening!
-Robb (funchords)
This is the ultimate in hypocrisy. Why is it that big businesses constantly bitch and moan about denial of service, and then turn around and deny service to their customers?
I've heard again and again that encryption & randomizing the port will get around this. From my experience this is not true. The encryption only hides *what* you are transferring, it doesn't (and can't) hide where or how. Bittorrent is a very unique protocol and it is very easy to identify a user, even without real packet inspection. The only thing to get around this is rent a host somewhere that allows bittorrent. Run bittorrent from there and transfer completed items back through ssh, scp, sftp or whatever.
Other than that, your options are very limited. It would be my guess that Comcast uses a layer2 packet shaper, which has the ability to determine the actual content of an unencrypted packet regardless of port, and the ability to determine the type of traffic regardless of port or content. This has been quite common for years. Chances are you are just going to have to live without torrent, or switch to a provider that doesn't throttle torrent activity.
I tried to get around this before on a different ISP, you really can't. I ran fragroute, which chops up your packets randomly so for sure no one can tell what is in them, and hopefully enough to throw off the signature. No dice. I tried a variant of the IP tables rule above (which I think is wrong BTW), no improvement. I ran traffic over TOR (definitely abuse, sorry TOR people, I've mended my ways) and it didn't help, since my ISP could still tell what type of traffic it was, if not what is in it or where it is going. Encrypting traffic and running it over a port that normally has encrypted traffic (ie 443 for SSL, or 22 for ssh) didn't work either.
But as an IT guy, I'd have to guess that the growing trend to throttle connections is most likely a QoS issue. While bt users may not intend to suck up all of the bandwidth their ISP has, bittorrent is notorious for eating up the band. This probably matters to Comcast more and more now that they have their own VoIP & IPTV--too many people on bittorrent and their other services may suffer (this isn't our fault, but it doesn't mean they won't make us pay for it). In addition, bittorrent unfortunately has a rather poorly designed protocol (for packet efficiency that is, it is great for moving around lots of the same bits). Bittorrent has the problem of opening a lot of connections (the larger the torrent storm, the more connections). While each of these connections to other seeders/leechers may only be passing small amounts of information, they tend to take up a lot of the routers memory (especially for very slow connections that stay open even though they don't pass much if not any information). This kills a router. You might not ever notice it at your own home, but having a lot of people on torrents can drop a router fast, and thus reduce the speeds available for all of the other users using your ISP. Kind of like a DOS attack on a router. It is scummy for them to do this, but I thought you guys might want to know the other reasons for throttling this type of bandwidth.
PS - It also seems like they've been throttling Vonage for sometime now. Pigs!
What angers me the most here, and ought to be the most illegal part of all here, is that they are forging packets from ME! Nobody has the right to forge traffic as if I sent it!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=1+GB+in+MB&bt nG=Search
You had it partially right, 100Mb = 12.5MB, or thereabouts. However, 100MB (Megabytes) != 1GB (Gigabyte), even 1000MB != 1GB.
MB is Megabytes and Mb is Megabits. You may be thinking of 1000Mb (Megabits) = 1Gb (Gigabit) which is true in most networking settings.
*Typically storage size is measured in 2^n increments, meaning that it is a factor of 1024 for storage.
*Measuring in bits instead of bytes is typically done when measuring transfers, where the base ten system is used. Hence the 1000 factor instead of the 1024 factor. The same is true for 100 GB != 1 TB
If knowing is half the battle, what is the other half?
The internet should be free of access. It should be considered like a cultural thing. Like having access to books in a library. We should do mesh networking, we would have problems with ISP.
What about using IPsec or PPTP instead? I doubt the providers would risk angering their VPN-using telecommuting customers by toying with VPN filters.
You can't charge someone for something that they have no control over. Nowadays, you have pop up ads that may or may not contain sounds or even video. While "unlimited" bandwidth may make this a non-issue, if you are being charged for that traffic when it was not requested, there is no way that will hold up in court.
You can't charge someone for getting credit card offers in their P.O. Box, just like you can't charge people for having ads dropped on their doorstep or their windshield wipers.
If this does come to pass and someone does take this issue to court, it will be troublesome for the ISP to prove it was solicited content. The excuse of "I didn't want that, I just wanted the news article text." or "I was just checking my email to see if my grandma wrote me when I got an email about a child in Rowanda that wanted my money".
It would cost more to keep track of that than it would be worth, they should just start being honest about how much bandwidth they are selling you, and they should start upgrading their poorly aging infrastructure.
*On a technical level I understand that your machine does request packets to be delivered, but the user does not technically approve that request. For example, if the page you are loading is on a different server from the server containing the ads, you technically never approved that the ads on the other server be loaded, you merely requested information from the original site.
If knowing is half the battle, what is the other half?
I think Speakeasy uses/contracts with Covad -- at least they used to when my DSL was installed. The "Best Buy" deal has me a bit worried as well. They actually had technically competent people to handle problems at Speakeasy that didn't pretend to know it all or talk down to you. I keep fearing that Best-Buy will replace the good support folks with "Porn^wGeek Squad". Ug. Runs about 3-4 times what Comcast does, but I don't have to worry about bandwidth caps (Speakeasy actually encourages people to sell their unused bandwidth to neighbors; they'll optionally handle billing) or selective traffic shaping...at least I didn't before BB took over. Nothing has changed that I know of, but past experience is no predictor of future actions by BB.
Thanks, Cableguy411 --
Although I know many disagree, the prioritization scheme you outlined makes sense to me (I wrote the original article on DSLReports that started this mess). What I wrote about was the RST packets that I think are being forged at the comcast.net boundaries (to neighboring networks or the "backbone").
Do you have any information on that?
I'm downloading right now over Comcast from a bittorrent on Pirate Bay. The content is open, so no copyright problems, and I'm up to 360 kB/s. I'm not seeding yet, but I don't know if that's just a lack of demand right now.
I use torrents and i have not noticed any drop in seeding speed whatsoever on my comcast connection.
I have to cap it at 30k otherwise my modem will fail to send the signals necessary to maintain the overall connection.
Maybe that's what's happening to these people?
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
Back in the day when bit torrent was still new, many clients just sucked, it would kill my internet connection or otherwise slow my computer's packet receipt. as it improved they moderated the clients' "aggression" to fix this problem Additionally, comcast instituted newer more stable modem protocols which were bit torrent FRIENDLY. (I immediately noticed i no longer had to "babysit" my modem when running a torrent). I honestly think it's just a problem with a popular client like utorrent, and since so many people use it they assume it's the isp or something. I honestly think it's fearmongering and jumping to conclusions, and utorrent will silently get updated and no longer have this problem.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
Now the MAFIAA can't sue Comcast customers for distributing copyrighted works over bittorrent.
It's better than PeerGuardian!
This sounds very similar to a utility called tcpkill: http://www.groar.org/trad/dsniff/dsniff-2.4/englis h-txt/tcpkill.8.txt
You were sold access to all of the Internet right? If it isn't all there, you were sold a lemon. File!
Oh dear, doesn't discriminate between legitimate and infringing traffic? How about this...they pay the salaries, benefits, taxes, etc. for a bunch of guys to monitor all the torrents on the web (the majority of which, I can assure you are infringing) and enter that into the system so that the legitimate bittorrent stuff goes through properly?
In Australia, this has been a massive problem for ever. The early days of broadband Internet saw you paying something like $60 / month for 300MB (yes, MB) of data. After that you got billed extra. 20 cents a megabyte, or something ridiculous like that.
:) finding it somewhat entertaining that you guys are going backwards :) You'll want to make sure your ISP has a decent local mirroring service (a couple TB of Linux ISOs, gaming files, etc).
That was years ago. Eventually we got 3GB a month as the "standard", and then once more and more DSL ISPs started kicking around and offering competing plans, we're not at 10GB.
Now the common practice is to offer (X)MB a month, and then when you exceed that you get bandwidth-throttled down so you can't smash your link any more. Seems to work fairly well, especially now as most of the plans are quite high - but we're still seeing ISPs having to regularly change their prices, bandwidth limits, etc as they adjust to the sheer increase in traffic as more and more people a) get online and b) discover they can download stuff for free.
Bandwidth has always been a limited commodity over here - lots of the stuff Aussies want isn't in Australia. So we've always had these restrictions and have jealously looked at the US and other countries as you guys have downloaded hundreds of gigs a month on your much faster connections.
So, now, we are (or at least, I am
It appears to an outside observer that they are already trying to sell something they don't have (a certain amount of bandwith) so presumably that is not something which bothers them?
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
You may have to pay (for the moment! ULL coming soon! Maybe!) the Telstra Tax (min $20 a month atm), but you get to choose from over a hundred DSL providers.
:)
http://www.whirlpool.net.au/ has a list of them
You have a sick, twisted mind. Please subscribe me to your newsletter.
Blizzard, which has already been pointed out as "bad" for things like their actions against Bnetd (Battle.net "emulation" server) could come to help here...
As far as I know (it may have changed since then), their World of Warcraft client updater uses Bittorrent to download the big updates... and WoW weights several million people around the world...
By banning Bit Torrent, they will prevent people from updating their WoW client and to connect to the game itself... And blizzard has the $$$ to weight in the balance and make Bitorrent restored...
There's one element in this "why don't you..." discussions that's not being addressed. If people are willing to go to extremes to avoid any kind of limits? What makes people think they're going to start behaving honestly when these suggestions are implemented? Volume-pricing? What's to stop someone from tricking the system into falsifying the readings? People do it with electric meters. Charge per a movie? People trick cable systems into either someone else paying the bill, or simply not registering the purchase. None of these suggestions are going to make an honest person out of someone who believes they have more to gain by being dishonest.
Yeah, I wasn't really thinking too well that day. I knew the 1024 because of base 2/binary incremental storage. That's what I get for trying to do math in my head after working nearly 30hrs straight. Being on call sucks, till you see the paycheck! LOL!
Uh, metered access.... We've been there and I say I don't want it back.
When our ISPs first introduced so-called unlimited plans in 2003, all of them carried bandwidth caps. The common attitude between internet providers was to treat heavy users as 'greedy barbarians', 'ruining internet access for everybody', 'unlike those civilized first-world honest citizens'. Today in Moscow few remaining "cappers" are unpopular choice, due to natural selection they have nearly died out. Average good offers are around $25 for 3/3 Mbps and $50 for 8/8 Mbps fully unrestricted access. They are up/down symmetric which is nice for BT seeding, users may run http or ftp (or any other, except maybe email) servers off their PCs if they wish so. Stats show that my total upload over rolling last year exceeds 19 (nineteen) Terabytes and my ISP is perfectly fine with that. Speeds get upgraded ~30% each 3 months. Sure, Swedes have their 100/100 pipes and we envy them, but reading about US situation makes me uncomfortable - are you really okay to tolerate that kind of abuse?
Users eating too much traffic? Upgrade your uplinks and deliver the promise or whine, throttle and go out of business. At least here it works this way and we are satisfied.
Comcast doesn't seem to discriminate between legitimate and infringing torrent traffic, and most of the BitTorrent encryption techniques in use today aren't helping. If more ISPs adopt their strategy, could this mean the end of BitTorrent?"
Personally I don't think it does because someone will come around with a solution to their "solution". Always happens.
I'm stunned this is the solution Comcast selected rather than invest in their infrastructure. I guess I shouldn't be surprised after having received (drum roll please) "The Call". Such a large company with a myopic vision of the future.
It's time for a change. I'm hoping people will contact local Government and demand Fiber to the home solutions. This way when a company does crap like this you simply select another vendor. Easy enough today for any other product or service. Nearly impossible except for very select area's in the US.
Has Comcast disconnected your Internet account? Same here. You can read about it at http://comcastissue.blogspot.com
I don't understand this whole fracas over oversold bandwidth because this is exactly how Telstra in NZ works. You pay a monthly fee for a bandwidth + transfer package. If you transfer more than your monthly limit (1GB, 5G, 10GB) you get billed another.
Simple, convenient, puts the responsibility for not flooding the pipes onto the user, no content filtering. What part of this is hard?
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
"I have a family of four, and when each of us want to experience the rich content we were promised (like VOIP, online productivity applications, video-on-demand, and streaming music), you're going to call us bandwidth hogs?"
? Is this a trick question or something?
Yes, you're bandwidth hogs. The cable doesn't care what kind of content you're downloading, just how big it is. Deal with reality, and pay for how much you use, and this won't be a problem.
Do you expect your car to take you places without paying for petrol? Why expect that Internet bits should be magically free? Unregulated, yes definitely, but there's a cost to move those bits and that's what you should be charged for.
Asking for infinite data transfer on finite capacity media is like getting a car 'with free lifetime supply of petrol' built in for a fixed monthly rental and wondering why it comes with a restrictive contract that specifies that you can't drive it interstate.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
Everyone,
I wrote a guide for Comcast users on how to test whether, and how much, you are being affected by this problem.
Please visit this page ahref=http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r18901881-%2 318901881rel=url2html-4193http://www.dslreports.co m/forum/r18901881-#18901881>
The page explains how to test for it manually, and also gives you a Windows XP batch file that can automate the testing.
Everyone,
I wrote a guide for Comcast users on how to test whether, and how much, you are being affected by this problem.
Please visit this page http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r18901881-#1890188 1
The page explains how to test for it manually, and also gives you a Windows XP batch file that can automate the testing.
I agree. This seems to be exactly what the Net Neutrality laws were put in place to prevent. ISPs cannot restrict access to particular applications. It is crucial that this kind of thing happens. We can't have Comcast restricting who ever they they want to. If BitTorrent or BitTorrent's users are breaking the law, that should be decided in the courts, not by Comcast. And if Comcast is restricting an application's use, it seems to me to be a violation (at least in principle) of the Net Neutrality laws.
What Net Neutrality laws? Also, if you require free access to all applications, what happens when an ISP blocks access to a port that is used primarily spread virii or spam? Or if the ISP tries to shut don a botnet?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_neutrality_in _the_US is what I found with a cursory glance to the US state of Net Neutrality. I guess there is currently no law to restrict such behavior, but there have been some proposed. I think that ISPs are attempting to keep things neutral until the debate has been finalized. From a legal standpoint, I would think there is going to have to be some allowing (perhaps requiring) of ISPs to restrict illegal activities on their networks, or who would enforce those laws? On the other hand, an internet where sites that compete with my ISP for certain services is restricted or a site that criticizes my ISP or its parent or affiliate is censored would be a real shame indeed.
Not the case. As soon as you get a DMCA notice, you must comply (we don't give out customer information where I work, we only notify the subscriber to cease and desist) or you lose your safe harbor. That's the crappy part about the DMCA, it's essentially as good as a court order without the hassle of getting one, which is why the **AA abuses it so much.
Whenever I am downloading a torrent, the torrent runs just fine (up to around 650K/s), but they kill my browsing experience. Suddenly the ping command registers pings to well know severs (google, apple, microsoft, yahoo) in excess of 1500 milliseconds - to be contrasted against my normal 55 milliseconds.
The instant I hit the pause button on that torrent, blam! My pings go back to 55ms, and my browser loads pages perfectly. So my question is this: Why in hell would Comcast kill my browsing experience when I am torrenting? The torrent is pulling far more bandwidth than my browsing, and they don't mess with that at all! Maybe they are incorrectly sending TCP resets down the wrong stream?
I am not a heavy torrent user, so it doesn't bother me most of the time - but WOW, OpenOffice, Blizzard trailers, and a whole lot of smaller open-source projects use bittorent as their primary download medium. I probably wouldn't mind slow torrents as much as I mind having my browser fragged!
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