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P2P Fans Pound Comcast In FCC Comments
Not Comcastic writes "Two weeks after officially opening proceedings on Comcast's BitTorrent throttling, angry users are bombarding the FCC with comments critical of the cable provider's practices. 'On numerous occasions, my access to legal BitTorrent files was cut off by Comcast,' a systems administrator based in Indianapolis wrote to the FCC shortly after the proceeding began. 'During this period, I managed to troubleshoot all other possible causes of this issue, and it was my conclusion (speaking as a competent IT administrator) that this could only be occurring due to direct action at the ISP (Comcast) level.' Another commenter writes 'I have experienced this throttling of bandwidth in sharing open-source software, e.g. Knoppix and Open Office. Also I see considerable differences in speed ftp sessions vs. html. They are obviously limiting speed in ftp as well.'"
I vaguely recall reading something a while back about using 802.11 routers in order to create a wireless internet, and routing traffic wirelessly from one to another to go from places where no broadband is available to places where it was.
Perhaps it's about time to get some real ethernet going over a large area.
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree
For example, my local cable ISP has marked ALL encrypted traffic as having a lower priority over non-encrypted content in their "war on P2P filesharing" (this means, amongst other obvious drawbacks, downgraded performance using ssh and sftp) reference. I am not sure on the specifics or legality of this kind of "filtering" but it would seem that nobody has made such a big fuss yet up here. Their practice is grey-zone at best I would think and it will be interesting to see what happens with the issue.
This might be a little off-topic, but the common wisdom is that Comcast and other cable companies have monopolies on providing high-speed internet access in many areas. I realize they have competition from DirectTV (Satellite TV) and Broadcast Television for providing varying quality in Cable/TV entertainment, and that there is up-and-coming competition from Verizon to provide high-speed internet.
Is there any way to extend the "Public Broadcast TV" metaphor into the internet space? I could live with whatever downstream connection is required to watch YouTube videos... and upload streams that would pale in comparison to anybody running P2P services. Seriously, though, "light" internet users like me to subsidizing it for everybody else.
As for as throttling, Comcast is behaving unethically by stopping legitimate uses of P2P networks (sharing F/OSS distributions) and they should be heavily fined (I'm going to pull a RIAA-style gross sum of money from my ass), how about $500,000 per unethical P2P blockage? So divide the number of FCC complains in half, and then add the words "Millions" after it, and hand Comcast the bill.
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Although FCC comments are all well and good, talking to Comcast's CSR (customer service reps) will have more impact. If every balky P2P connection results in a $5-$10 in call-center time, then Comcast will think differently about it's filtering policy.
The key to solving this is to make unfettered P2P connections the least cost option for Comcast. That means increasing the costs of not providing those connections. FCC fines might do it (assuming the FCC acts), but high customer service cost certainly will.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
I've got mod points, and I was going to moderate in this thread, and then I saw this and needed to reply.
:80/tcp has been horrendous. Most pages take a good 10-30 seconds to connect to the server, and never mind the number of pictures that can be on some sites.
I've got Comcast at home, and lately anything over
I grabbed my laptop, hit the OpenVPN button to my server in a datacenter in Atlanta, and surprise! The pages loaded instantly.
Between P2P throttling and general crappy service, I sincerely hope that this suit changes things for the better.
In the US, this is how AT&T got broken, and POTS is now better and cheaper than before. (Yes, VOIP may be even better and cheaper, but the telephone benefits predated that.)
Your ad here. Ask me how!
I am not serviced by comcast but by NTC communications in blacksburg, va. the worst thing here is that if I try to use bit torrent or some other p2p application, all my web traffic is stopped (yes STOPPED) as long as I let p2p application run. Then, when I close bit torrent, it take few minutes for normal web access to resume. this is really frustrating. I usually VPN to my school and access every thing from there then.
I occasionally consult for a wireless ISP, and we've become friends. In order for him to avoid ppl saturating his network, he's implemented a burst feature. Shaw (here in Alberta, anyway) has something similar. So a constant stream might yield15 kb/s, whereas web surfing seems fast. That's because the network will burst (in Shaw's case) up to 25 MB/s. Let that baby stream though, regardless if it's FTP, .torrent, HTTP, and it'll slow down to 50 kb/s or so.
I seriously doubt Comcast (although I don't know anything about them) is identifying and throttling any particular protocol or P2P stream...they've just done what Shaw, and my friend has; I'd bet.
Just a note (perhaps you know this, but others may not), but the reason VPN works and SSH tunnels don't is because Sandvine targets long-lived TCP connections. By default, OpenVPN tunnels over UDP; the control messages for session handling is done by OpenVPN and is unreadable by intermediaries. With SSH tunnels, they can't read your data, but they can forge TCP control messages, which isn't encrypted.
Ironically, Comcast may be really hurting themselves in the long run; if it gets bad enough, P2P software writers will switch to UDP, and manually do the in-order/reliable delivery stuff themselves. TCP has a lot of fancy congestion control, and I doubt that the P2P writers will bother with it...
I recently tried to FTP upload a home movie to my web site so my family could download it. I noticed my FTP speeds were incredibly slow - slower than dial-up speeds and I have a 6MB/384K cable connection.
I've noticed that my P2P traffic seems to upload OK but downloads very slowly.
And I don't know where the problem is.
Knology, my ISP, claims they don't throttle. But how do I know someone somewhere along the way isn't throttling?
Even if I bothered to dig into the problem, I'm sure all I would get for my troubles would be a lot of finger pointing.
The bottom line is, if the internet quits working the way I want to use it, I'll quit paying for it, because it will have become useless to me.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
Oh, but it does. If you're worried about the NSA, you're... well, stuffed, really. Encrypt everything you can, and check for hardware keyloggers on the cable every morning before you log on.
Most of us, in practice, aren't worried about the NSA other than in the abstract. We're not organising political protests or anything. We're doing nothing to attract their attention. But we are worried about the MAFIAA, because a lot of us are... well, we are doing things to attract their attention. Gigabytes of things. Daily. An ISP that will stand up for its customers against those guys is golden.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
I know that this will sound like one of those 'friend of a friend' things but, I must agree about that "...their various departments just cannot talk to each other." statement. A friend of mine had a $2500 unpaid (to this day) cellular bill to Verizon from when he was just out of High School and a few years later he moved to another state and started to work for Verizon's FiOS tech support. About half a year later he left the job but, the fact that they never put two-and-two together to figure out that he was the same guy with the same SSN that owed them money is something we joke about to this day.
> as required by law
Actually, they were required by law to tell the NSA to go fuck themselves and get a FISA warrant. I mean, FISA is a rubberstamp secret court, but at least it keeps a trail and is there to prevent exactly the same sort of dragnet that they installed in the first place.
Is it really a Democrat or Republican thing whether the word of the Executive is law? Last I looked, martial law was not in effect.
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
Yes, WoW does use Bittorrent for it's updates. I'd be rather unhappy if it were to be further restricted.
I was quoted in the Ars Technica article. Here is the text of my FCC comment.
Dear Commissioners,
As a longtime customer of the Comcast Corporation (CMCSA) I feel it is necessary for me to provide you with my views and opinions regarding their use of throttling bandwidth for point to point (P2P) users that access their network.
File sharing is a gray area with regards to the law. It can be used for not only illegal purposes, such as the sharing of copyrighted material like music and movies, but for sharing of information that is perfectly legal such as software updates, free operating system distribution, free movie and movie preview distribution plus free music distribution. I will cite examples of each accordingly.
The most widely publicized use of P2P file sharing is illegal music and movie distribution. As this review for comment does not touch upon the legal issues surrounding the data being shared I shall focus my attentions to those legal methods that are affected.
Blizzard Entertainment, a wholly owned subsidiary of Vivendi Games (Euronext: VIV), uses the Bittorrent P2P file sharing protocol to distribute updates and patches to the players of the very popular Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) World of Warcraft. If their data is interrupted for any reason, even for a short time, then thousands, perhaps even millions, of users will be unable to play their game. This will directly cut into their profit margin.
The Linux operating system is a freely available alternative to both Microsoft Windows and the Apple Mac OS. As the Linux operating system is free they rely solely on donations of both time and money from people across the planet. That money, however, is not unlimited. To reduce the high cost of bandwidth they use the Bittorrent protocol for much of their software distribution. Interrupting their distribution channel would only benefit Microsoft, an already proven monopoly. To help ensure competition I feel that Bittorrent should not be interrupted.
To give but one example of free video entertainment you may want to look at the TV Guide 2007 Online Video Award winner Star Trek New Voyages. They are a very high quality non-profit production that was able to beat out contenders such as the 4400 and Battlestar Galactica. Their preferred method of distribution is bittorrent as they have a very limited bandwidth.
Many movies distribute their previews via bittorrent. This would damage not only their advertising structure but limit the consumer to one method of retrieval.
To see that Bittorrent and the movie industry, music industry and gaming industry are working TOGETHER and that they are seeking to create a strategic partnership please view the following URL for more information:
http://www.bittorrent.com/about/press/bittorrent-inc-launches-the-bittorrent-entertainment-network
Of course now that you know that Bittorrent is a popular, legal, and economically feasible method of content distribution let me explain a little bit of how it works.
Let us say that the makers of Star Trek New Voyages come out with a new episode. They have a few options at their disposal. One of them is to create a simple link to a file and have everyone who is interested in the file download it from one single location. The downside to this is that the single location will be paying a fortune to accommodate the high volumes of traffic.
The other option is Bittorrent. By having people connect to what is referred to as a "tracker" they can find out who else is downloading the same file and start taking pieces from multiple different users. Essentially everyone is
"Giving money and power to governments is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys." - P.J. O'Rourke
Absolutely! One thing we're missing in today's society that we seem to admire most is integrity and courage to do what is right and lawful even [especially] under threat of retaliation! We've heard of many journalists being put in jail for not violating their ethics and principles. Many people find that extremely courageous while others think it's stupid. That's part of the difference in long-term thinking versus short-term and it has become our national bad-habit to go for the short-term gains and giving up our long-earned legacy.
...just not a very good implementation...