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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?"
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?
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.
But that would mean modifying all your routers -- which is [relatively] difficult for a large network. This solution is just an extra box plugged in at an appropriate point...
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.
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.
What ISP? There aren't any other ISPs other than Comcast in many areas of the US. In some areas, the only alternatives also do the same bullshit, so there's nothing you can do.
'Yes, firefox is indeed greater than women. Can women block pops up for you? No. Can Firefox show you naked women? Yes.'
That would just encourage people to share or re-sell connections.
I buy a connection, assuming it's going to be maxxed out at 2000GB/month. I pay $600. I then provide my 4 neighbors a 500GB connection, for a rate of $400 each. (Note, this is a 20% discount off them buying direct from the ISP at $500!). I make $2000, I pay $600. Profit!
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.
This should have ended the discussion altogether (don't know if someone mentionned it before the parent though). For residential service, most ISPs say "No server". Of course, server is an overly broad term thats up to interpretation, but in this case it is used correctly I feel. Complain when they start throttling Youtube downloads or something.
ABEND 322
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
ISPs in the UK are starting to moan about having to carry traffic too, even going so far as to suggest the BBC should pay them. So I don't think Europe is immune to profiteering by reducing the service standards so you can get by on a lesser investment. Same as Thames water loses more water than most, imposes hosepipe bans and yet provides bigger profits.
My hope is that this won't mean the end of bittorrent but of Comcast. If enough people switch quickly enough before other ISPs do the same thing the market might get the message you want.
you don't. drill a hole, don't fuck it up, and patch it when you leave. or, if it's a house, put wall plates in the wall. if your landlord asks about it, say your ISP installed it. just make sure you can do a professional job, or get someone that does (cable/telephone companies tend not to ask if you are renting if its a house and you don't live in a neighborhood thats frequently rented out, i.e. college town).
i have ran 100+ ft of cat5 through holes in my rented house before (ghetto method) and, most recently, left wall plates in my basement for future tenants/owners. as long as your walls look normal when you move out, you won't get charged. YMMV
This draws fairly interesting parallels with Tiscali and TalkTalk complaining about the Beeb's iPlayer here in the UK.
They sold internet connections at lower than cost of the bandwidth, betting on the customers not using anywhere near their bandwidth entitlement. Then the BBC produced iPlayer, which is encouraging people to use up more of their bandwidth and thus causing the ISPs to make a loss. So the ISPs are demanding that the BBC pay them to cover the shortfall.
To cut a long story short: the ISPs underpriced their connections and advertised them as "unlimited", were caught out when people actually tried to use what they had paid for and are now demanding that a third party bail them out of their mess. I certainly hope the BBC tell them to go screw themselves - I'm not going to be happy if part of my licence fee goes to propping up idiot ISPs who can't deliver on their commitments.
http://blog.nexusuk.org
They could stop giving in without a full court order.
"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
the trouble is of course that the providers marketing departments want to advertise unlimited but the bean counters know that a certain percentage of users will use far more traffic than most and therefore will be a loss rather than a profit.
The obvious result is psuedo-unlimited services where there are no hard caps but they do everything in thier power to shaft heavy users who live in areas of high demand.
Not only do high traffic users lose out, but in order to maintain a flat-rate across all users they have to either:
1. charge stupidly high prices
or
2. massively oversubscribe the network
If they do (1) then the low traffic users end up paying buckets of cash to subsidise the higher traffic users. If they do (2) then the network pretty much sucks for everyone.
The answer is pretty simple - go switch to an ISP that has a sensible business model who is honest with it's customers, rather than one that's clearly run by a moronic marketting department who believe that misleading the customer is a Good Thing.
http://blog.nexusuk.org