Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
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.
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.
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...