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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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
...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.
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.
well i live in britain and most ISPs do this. The only mainstream one i know of that doesnt is AOL who ironically are the best ISP in the UK in my opinion (for broadband anyway, and yes i feel dirty for saying it).
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
...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
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!
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
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.
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.
Evidently you've never heard of the "fair usage guidelines" which are mentioned in pretty much every broadband contract, yet aren't actually available to read if you want to see whether your usage is 'fair'. Personally I would say 'fair usage' would mean not exceeding the bandwidth I am paying for, whereas my ISP seems to think differently based on the emails I have received from them about getting put on a list of 'high usage users' and subsequently being put into a pool of other 'high usage' customers who have to share the same bandwidth during peak hours, causing daytime browsing to crawl (I just end up running MLDonkey at night for the distro ISOs I download, since I make sure my local Free Software User Group always has the latest releases of any popular distro available to burn)
(I live in the United "CCTV Land" Kindom BTW)
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.
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
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
As someone said on the linked site, selling a service without mentioning that it is severely restricted is fraud.
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
They could stop giving in without a full court order.
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 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