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FCC To investigate Comcast Bittorrent Meddling
An anonymous reader writes "FCC Chairman Kevin Martin said Tuesday that the commission will investigate complaints that Comcast actively interferes with Internet traffic as its subscribers try to share files online. A coalition of consumer groups and legal scholars asked the agency in November to stop Comcast from discriminating against certain types of data and to fine Comcast $195,000 for every affected subscriber. While known for months in tech circles, the issue wasn't given broad attention until an Associated Press report last year, in which reporters tested and verified the data blocking."
Can you seed? Sandvine doesn't limit your downloading, it prevents seeding (though that in turn can slow your downloads down). If you notice all your peers dropping to zero after your download is finished on an otherwise popular torrent, you're being affected.
Rogers Cable has been doing this here for sometime. After people found that encrypted proxies could get around their blocking, they began to block all VPNs. Since that time, their policy has essentially been that only HTTP traffic is guaranteed to be highspeed. Ever since they decided to be a phone company with IP phones over cable, the quality of their internet service has suffered badly.
If Canada had the power to fine Rogers in amounts like Comcast is being threatened with, that would be a mighty big stick in the hands of the gov't and consumers. Unfortunately, we don't have anything like this as AFAIK so bandwidth throttling is practiced by most of the big ISPs
Are you encrypting your BT traffic? If so then Comcast thinks it is just normal traffic like HTTP/FTP and will let it go.
There is no "disagree" moderation, and troll, flamebait and overrated are not valid substitutes
I believe Time Warner does this as well. Before they purchased Adelphia, I could use BitTorrent just fine. A month after their take over, it started. HTTP and FTP downloads were fine, bittorrent downloads would start fast and within several seconds slow down to less than dial up speed.
CDE open sourced! https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/
I hope they fine them out the ass. I use a small ISP called NTC (a part of Shentel), and they do the same thing, using an intelligent sniffing system to determine if P2P traffic is taking place and to slow it to a crawl. NTC has a monopoly on the student housing in the area, and thus get away with charging $25 per mo. per person in each apartment, disallowing routers and requiring occasional logins on an https site, and delivering ~5KB/s download for any torrent. (Usual speeds are between 100 and 150 KB/s for normal TCP connections.)
The difference is Comcast is huge, and no one cares if little NTC intentionally cripples its over-priced service and is the only available connection in all dorms, and comes pre-wired in all off-campus housing up to a few miles away.
Bush picks the people who work at the top of many government organizations, and they pick the people below. It has little to do with congress, and that's why it still gets (appropriately) blamed on Republicans.
If we have a democratic president, we'll start blaming (and whip out our brooms) him and the democrats if these shenanigans continue.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
I am house sitting using a Comcast connection and the only seeding I can do is if it is encrypted. Somewhat related, I have Verizon DSL at home and I have noticed a increased of forged reset packets while on bit-torrent over the last few months; though I think Azureus ignores most of them. I want to know-- why aren't other ISP's getting reports on their similar habits?
>>Upload traffic is just as demanding as download traffic to a server.
when thinking ISP you need to think last mile. an last mile traffic has been for a very long time pull traffic ( while a web site is push ). P2P has upset the apple cart ( and has become a big thorn, leading to net neutrality issues ).
Peering agreements for a long time have been rather stale, last mile pays a percentage and web site host pay a percentage. Peering locations pushed and pulled rather balanced ( if it's off then someone had to pay), P2P tosses all those agreements right out the window, all of a sudden, a last mile location become a push, and web host are flat, peering gets out of billing sync, All the last mile ISP's have a right to be nervous, they really don't know what there push traffic is going to look like and they are worried about the bills.
Personally, I think that, throttling is a great idea. I also think local server's that act as a torrent data relay site should be created ( that's why we have web cache's ) to cover a large percentage of the "legal" file trading and software updates. we need someway for daytime business needs and night time file sharing.
if you see me, smile and say hello.
I'm not sure what's been done about this particular issue, but let's not act as if the Republicans haven't played their part in our current government being stagnant. With a year left to go, the Republicans already have the most filibusters in the history of the US, and they blantantly admit that they're blocking votes on stuff to make the democrats look bad. Here's a quote from Trent Lott (the guy who was all about how unfair it was for the Democrats to not give an "up or down" vote for Gonzales): "The strategy of being obstructionist can work or fail. So far it's working for us. The Democrats are the ones taking the blame for not getting anything done."
They even introduce bills and when it gets to the floor, they block it:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/12/washington/12cong.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin
The Democrats "taking back congress" isn't as succinct as you insinuate.