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.'"

Comments

Failure of the natural monopoly

[markov_chain]

In the end, it looks like it will take separate physical plants to stir up some real competition. These people should switch to FIOS when it gets rolled out.

Re:Failure of the natural monopoly

[JCSoRocks]

FiOS is available in some areas now. It got put in my old neighborhood right before I moved, so sad. My friend has it though and he claims it's faster than cable. I don't have any numbers but, what the heck even if it's just a little slower, anything's better than comcast...

Re:Failure of the natural monopoly

[networkBoy]

He's trying to say Tux Racer isn't a game...

Well, whatever.

[croddy]

Well, whatever. It's not like their throttling has affec@G#TG%2yv24*SA$FNO CARRIER

Re:Well, whatever.

[operagost]

I have only one thing to say to that:

+++

fortunately

[syrinx]

Fortunately, after reading the scathing criticism, Comcast executives were able to comfort themselves with their huge sacks of money.

As for myself, I plan to dump Comcast right away and switch to... oh wait, Comcast is my only option for Internet access. Well.

Perhaps I'll go dig out the ol' 2400 baud modem, maybe I can find a BBS to call.

Re:fortunately

[KublaiKhan]

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.

Re:fortunately

[timmarhy]

there is a solution - have the government force comcast to give 3rd parties access to their lines, for a rental fee. this will no doubt have in the same position we in australia have though, a company desperately trying to hang onto it's monopoly, though it has had limited success after many court battles.

old monopolies don't die, they just find new ways to rip you off.

Re:fortunately

[MBCook]

Thanks to the 100M cable limit, Ethernet can't be used easily for that without going to fiber optic or something else... so much for the easy cost.

I'm trapped with Comcast too. AT&T says they are deploying U-Verse near me (they've been doing the digging) but I expect it will be at least 1 year or two late. I can't wait to move off.

There are a few options. You can use WiFi links over long distances with better antennas and a good line of sight... but this requires the other person to be able to get something like DSL etc. WiMax will fix this in decent sized areas, since it can cover a larger area than WiFi by a large margin. Too bad it's not available yet and will end up really expensive (you didn't expect Sprint to go cheap, did you?). You could use a 3G cellular modem... no... wait.. those are expensive and slow (compared to cable). Then there is white space internet which is only just starting to get tested by the FCC on an experimental basis. Powerlines don't seem to work well (big wires work like antennas? No!). Satellite is too slow (latency) and expensive.

So if you are stuck on Cable, like me, enjoy. You'll be there for quite a while.

Re:fortunately

[stormguard2099]

So if you are stuck on Cable, like me, On behalf of everyone who is stuck on dialup without the option of dsl or cable I would just like to say I hope your cable wraps around your throat and chokes the life out of you. have a nice day :)
disclaimer: this post was made out of jest. Any offense taken from it will be ignored.

How to view submitted complaints

[verbalcontract]

Go to this page and put "07-52" into the "Proceeding" field.

Comments are in PDF form, so turn off "View in Browser" in Acrobat.

Here we come Verizon

[Bryansix]

You it's really bad when you have to flee TO Verizon. Trust me, these people are horribly incompetent and have horrible customer service. Nevermind that their various departments just cannot talk to each other. If you have phone service and Internet through them good luck getting either taken care of even though they are on the same damn bill. Still moving to Verizon might actually be the only option left (shudders).

Re:Here we come Verizon

[fred911]

"these people are horribly incompetent and have horrible customer service"

Say what you will, but they are the ONLY ISP who didn't roll over and provide their customers info to the RIAA. Theyd
fought for their customers right of privacy to the Supreme court and PREVAILED.

  In this day and age... that means something.

Re:Here we come Verizon

[Nicholas Evans]

They rolled over for the NSA. They fought when it was convenient for them. Being inconsistent means nothing.

Re:Here we come Verizon

[Johnny5000]

it's really bad when you have to flee TO Verizon.

I saw some billboards around here (put up by Comcast) that said
"Three words: We're Not Verizon"

Which I thought was a funny ad campaign, since in my experience, they're so much worse than Verizon.

I mean, Verizon sucks too, but at least they're not Comcast.

Re:Here we come Verizon

[erroneus]

Were you not paying attention when Qwest actually stood up and refused because they read what the law says?

Re:Here we come Verizon

[meringuoid]

They rolled over for the NSA. They fought when it was convenient for them. Being inconsistent means nothing.

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.

Re:Here we come Verizon

[Cardcaptor_RLH85]

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.

Re:Here we come Verizon

[Mister Whirly]

"let's compare national security, and rolling over to a government agency, as required by law"

The phone companies didn't have to turn over anything "as required by law". The government made a request, and all the others gave them what they wanted when it WASN'T required by law. It wasn't a legal demand, because the government didn't have the legal right. Qwest basically said "show us the warrant and you can have any of the information it specifies". Seeing there never was any warrants, nothing was turned over by Qwest.

Re:Here we come Verizon

[nuzak]

> 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.

Re:Here we come Verizon

[TheLinuxSRC]

(Unless I'm mistaken and contractions are considered a single word even though it is made up of two words.)

Please turn in your grammar-nazi badge at the door.

In traditional grammar, a contraction is the formation of a new word from one or more individual words. -- This is the very first sentence in the referenced article by the way.

Re:Here we come Verizon

[erroneus]

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.

Re:Here we come Verizon

[Shakrai]

Most of us, in practice, aren't worried about the NSA other than in the abstract. We're not organising political protests or anything.

The mere fact that you can state you "aren't worried about the NSA" and in the same paragraph say "we're not organizing political protests or anything" is pretty depressing. And I don't know which part is worse -- thinking that you might actually have a reason to fear the NSA because of political protects (First Amendment, what??) or me being cynical enough to understand why you would draw that conclusion.

How far we have fallen.

Re:Here we come Verizon

[superpulpsicle]

Shoot me for wasting 1 minute of my life reading this grammar nazi debate.

Re:u didnt share that HBO show?

[timmarhy]

open your eyes, everything uses torrents these days, game demo's/patches for everything and they are as big as a gig each.

Re:Trading one monopoly for another?

[denis-The-menace]

I heard that when you switch to FIOS they remove your POTS lines.

Also, from what I'm guessing, it you don't like your ISP providing the FIOS connection, you cannot get another ISP that can use that FIOS connection.

IOW: you are just locking yourself into another monopoly.

Some Canadian ISPs are going a step further

[sdjc]

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.

Re:Some Canadian ISPs are going a step further

[ashridah]

That's curious. How are they defining 'encrypted'? Particular known ports? Content that clearly isn't to a "known port that isn't encrypted"? I can imagine that the former is relatively easy to bypass (nonstandard ports, port redirectors, etc), and the latter being a major issue for gaming of any description...

Does this apply to HTTP over SSL connections?
Of course, they simply cannot tell the difference between HTTP over SSL and... well, anything else over "SSL"...
And, of course, one could just run, say, bittorrent on port 80.... :)

ash

Re:u didnt share that HBO show?

[JCSoRocks]

I don't play WoW, so someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that it uses Torrents for updates and patching. GP is pretty naive to assume that just because you've had to use a torrent it means you're a big pirate. It's a legitimate way of moving huge files around the 'net. That's like saying all truck drivers are smugglers just because a few people use semi-trucks to smuggle drugs into the country.

Make it Public

[RobBebop]

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.

Re:Make it Public

[ClamIAm]

Is there any way to extend the "Public Broadcast TV" metaphor into the internet space?

Well, there is a way to extend the "public infrastructure" metaphor into Internet service. UTOPIA is (what looks to be) an awesome project that's been rolled out in Utah. It's a fiber-to-the-premises network. The fiber is publicly owned, over which providers then sell services (Internet, phone, etc).

To me this looks like an absolutely genius plan. Service providers get free infrastructure (i.e. a bigger market to sell to), and the public gets real competition. Obviously it could get corrupted, but the concept is ace.

There are some towns up on the iron range (Minnesota) that are debating whether to build a similar network.

FCC vs. CSR

[G4from128k]

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.

Re:FCC vs. CSR

[sdjc]

Yes, but the personal trauma caused by having to be put on hold until you take up their valuable time on the line is beyond my threshold for pain!

Re:Bit Torrent has been hijacked by thieves

[schnikies79]

If ISP's didn't oversell bandwidth you would be paying $300/month for internet access.

Overselling isn't the problem. Way, way overselling is. Some things can be oversold without a problem, including bandwidth.

Re:Industry move

[ScytheBlade1]

I've got mod points, and I was going to moderate in this thread, and then I saw this and needed to reply.

I've got Comcast at home, and lately anything over :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 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.

Re:Industry move

[Tassach]

I'm on Comcast, and I upload pictures to my photography website via SCP. The uploads get throttled after the first couple of MB. Encryption makes no difference to what they're doing. They don't need to know what's in the packets to decide whether or not to throttle them -- they can make that decision based on what's in the header.

MOD PARENT UP

[Actually, I do RTFA]

there is a solution - have the government force comcast to give 3rd parties access to their lines, for a rental fee

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.)

Re:Industry move

[morgan_greywolf]

Probably most do, I know of the people I work with more then half do. How so?

• Most Web hosts don't allow unlimited outgoing access anymore.
• Work servers are, of course, monitored. Unless you're the only admin... :)
• Shell account providers, even ones that cost money, are becoming few and far between.
• Most of us can't afford a coloc server.

Giant wake-up call for Comcast?

[Duncan Blackthorne]

Can't stop the signal, Mal. ;-)

Only a problem when it is unknown

[SplatMan_DK]

Throttling is IMHO only a problem when the customer doesn't know about it.

I have specifically chosen an ISP who promise they don't use any kind of throttling. On the other hand I did'nt go with the cheapest ISP I could find. My ISP has a "true flatrate" policy. No maximum usage and no throttling. The price is accordingly a little higher.

Most of my family does not use P2P in any way, and rarely download anything at all. For them, a low price is more important. And lets face it: this kind of bandwidth throttling was only invented because 5% of the customers consume 90% of the ISPs backbone resources. If this wasn't an issue, nobody would have invented the damn thing.

I don't think throttling should be illegal. It should only be illegal to use throttling and not tell customers about it. Throttling keeps the price down for ISPs, and they should be perfectly allowed to implemented - as long as all their customers are aware of it. In that way, if you don't want an ISP/product with throttling you can simply choose another ISP/product.

Bandwidth costs money. Free competition dictates that all ISPs will be seeking ways to lower their costs and in that way offer the consumers lower prices. This is a good thing, as long as customers know what they are buying.

Therefore: Allow throttling, but force ISPs to clearly state which products are subject to throttling. In that way, customers can buy the product they find suitable for their needs, and the "heavy users" can pay a higher price for their actual usage.

It is no different than your (cell)phone bill: if you call people 24/7, of if you buy a true flatrate product, it will cost more than just calling your mom for 5 minutes twice a month. Just as it should.

- Jesper

Re:Trading one monopoly for another?

[cdrudge]

They typically convert your copper POTS line to a fiber based one. From the point of view of your telephone service, there is no difference. You can't have DSL over it though. You can however request that they leave your copper phone line alone if you desire DSL from an CLEC. There is no sunset date for existing Verizon copper but one day eventually Verizon wants will turn off all copper and at that point you will be SOL.

Not only comcast

[warrior_s]

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.

Re:u didnt share that HBO show?

[DCTooTall]

Well with the Warcraft updates, Blizz DOES have a server which you can download from. If you are behind a firewall the blizz client will sometimes connect to their own server to download the content from, it's just slow as hell. The nice thing is that with the supposed 10mil customers they now have, it makes it a lot quicker to get EVERYBODY patched then it would be if everybody was having to connect to the same choke-point to download the latest 300meg patch to be able to connect to the server.


You can also download the patches from other 3rd party websites. The link if I recall is located within their support site.

Re:u didnt share that HBO show?

[ProteusQ]

You're right! In order to stop this smuggling, I move that all truck traffic must observe a maximum speed of 45 mph.

There! That'll fix it.

ISP's aren't throttling...they're adding burst

[__aamisb9940]

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.

Re:So about that witch hunt...

[Andy Dodd]

That's false. There are numerous (Wireshark-confirmed) reports of RST injection happening on ANY TCP stream with a signficant amount of upstream bandwidth for more than a very short period of time.

For example, there's a well documented incident where Comcast's RST injection is killing Lotus Notes sessions where moderate sized (>1MB) attachments are sent.

Re:Industry move

[Sangui5]

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...

my favorite from the random list:

[Cap'n.Brownbeard]

Comcast's forgery of packets, which was applied without regard to system utilization,was targeted to specific applications, wasn't disclosed, and altered customer communications, isn't acceptable under any circumstance.

If an internet service provider restricts bandwidth, even during peak usage, to specific applications or even to usage in general, in such a way that a consumer's bandwidth falls below FCC's definition of broadband, then the provider's service offering can no longer be considered broadband. If you choose not to take steps to put an end to the forgery employed by Comcast, or restrict forms of network management that limit transmission speed to something beneath broadband levels, then you must remove their service from your reports on broadband coverage, because at that point, their service can't be considered broadband.

A little more info.

[kramulous]

I'm trying to understand the logic here. You want high-speed internet so bad you'd have the government force somebody to rent their property to others?
It was a previous government that paid for the entire infrastructure that this company now has the monopoly over. Then along comes another government that likes to make the books look good (but as usual, are much worse) and sells the government owned infrastructure at a price that is ridiculously undervalued because an end of financial year is approaching and they want to hid the cost of military action and make it look as they are financially responsible. The fire sale is made with little consideration of the implications. I'll let you join the dots from there.

Forgery, not throttling

[Sloppy]

Strawman, but not your fault: I just realized the article summary makes the same mistake.

This isn't about throttling. Some people bitch about throttling, but what Comcast has been doing goes far beyond that. It's the RST packet forgery that has people super-pissed.

I see that you support throttling (if done openly and exposed to market forces), and your arguments seem reasonable. But what do you think of packet forgery?

Re:Industry move

[sith]

While I'm not a pro-comcast person or anything, what you're seeing is disclosed - it's the 'powerBoost' feature which gives you a bucket of really fast bits up/down stream, after which you throttle down to the speed you've purchased (8/1 or 6/384k or whatever).

So, I can get like 3mbit upstream for a bit, but then it scales back to 1mbit/sec. If I stop the transfer and wait a bit, then start again, I'll get the fast speed again for a little bit. Same is true on downstream - I'll get ~24mbit/sec down for a bit, then it'll throttle back to the 8mbit I pay for.

Is the Internet becoming useless?

[maillemaker]

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.

Re:Industry move

[Mister Whirly]

"and it wasn't clogged with porn and javascript? "

*sigh* I know. Wasn't it a magical time when the internet was ALL porn and NO javascript??

That's the stupidest thing I ever heard.

[Anonymous Coward]

That is a terrible idea. Your analogy falls flat when you realize that the Internet isn't a truck. It's a series of tubes.

Re:u didnt share that HBO show?

[Talinom]

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

Re:Trading one monopoly for another?

[Shakrai]

Your phone service travels over fiber instead of copper. Isn't that better?

Not if the power goes out and your FiOS backup battery dies....... at least POTS on copper is line powered.

Re:Industry move

[morgan_greywolf]

The point was -- what do you do if your ISP blocks BitTorrent? ssh out and do port forwarding, right? Except if your ISP blocks BitTorrent, sshing to another server set up on the same ISP doesn't really help you.

I'll color you wrong, thank you.

[Spy der Mann]

.. but seriously? Bittorrent is a horrendous resource hog. I'm /glad/ comcast is throttling it, because a significant number of paying customers don't want to watch their connectivity slow to a crawl

So, you prefer them watching their connectivity slow to a crawl because of the hundreds of thousands of YOUTUBE users. Oh guess what. If you have a favorite youtube video, there's no easy way to download it. You need to re-download it again and again and again.

Want to download your favorite videos? Download them via bittorrent ONCE (and in high quality for that matter).

I'm sorry, but your resource hog argument is simply a lot of bullshit. You give no statistics, no studies, no data. It's just your opinion.

Re:Industry move

[MadUndergrad]

What, you get what you pay for? Lucky bastard. I usually don't get more than 30KBps out of the 6Mbps I pay for. Tops maybe I'll dl at 120KBps, but that's in the dead of night only.