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Comcast's New Terms of Service Disclose Traffic Management
cremou brings us word that Comcast has changed its Terms of Service to include policies on traffic management. This comes after the FCC's recent decision to investigate Comcast's P2P throttling. The language in the updated Terms of Service, according to Ars Technica, mirrors the FCC's 2005 Internet Policy Statement[PDF].
"According to Section III of the revised ToS, Comcast 'uses reasonable network management practices that are consistent with industry standards.' The company points out that it is not alone in the practice, saying that 'all major' ISPs engage in some form of traffic shaping. Comcast does it to keep its subscribers from suffering the heartaches of 'spam, viruses, security attacks, network congestion, and other risks and degradations of service' and to 'deliver the best possible Internet experience to all of its customers.'"
So now forging TCP packets is called traffic shaping and is an industry standard. Yeah right, maybe for the Russian mafia.
Who is John Galt?
"Hey, in light of that whole FCC investigation thing, we just thought we should let you know that we're fucking you out of the service and bandwidth you've been paying for. No hard feelings, just clearing things up. It's alright, you can use your internet just as long as you don't use much of it; You know, like most of what you're entitled to in your service plan. Oh, and in case you were wondering, everybody does this, so that makes it cool, alright? Glad we could get this sorted out."
Yes, all the right buzz words to arguably be trying to protect the unwashed masses of people that believe whatever the government, fox news, or their ISP tell them. I'm personally sorry that we didn't listen to Mr Orwell's nightmarish vision of the future. It's upon us now.
By way of interpretation: We're going to blame the 5% percent of our customers who actually use the amount of bandwidth that they purchased. We know that if you had paid us only 50% of what we robb^H^H^H^H charge you, you would be happy with 1.5 Mbs download speed, but it sounds so much better if we promise you 3Mbs even though 90+ percent of you will never use it. This way we look like a super broadband provider to most of you, and to protect that false image, we're going to punish the few people who actually thought they were getting what they paid for.
It's not that we, Comcast, think our customers are fucking idiots, it's just that we know the damned good money we paid our congressional lobbyists is going to go a lot further than the whiney complaints of less than 5% of our consumer base.
So, we at Comcast want to assure you we are protecting you from the people who want to rob you of bandwidth so they can have the actual bandwidth that they paid for. By protecting you from these greedy bastards you can rest assured that we are doing all we can to keep your cash falling into our pockets every month. Thank you for being a Comcast customer.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
I have hated comcast for their customer service and service quality since I first subscribed to cable back in the very early 90s. Thank the gods for DirecTV introducing competition to this market of city and county sponsored monopolies.
Unfortunately, I recently moved back under comcast's umbrella and had no other options for internet within my budget. And now I'm suffering latencies as high as three seconds whenever I download a torrent. As soon as I stop torrent downloads, my latency returns to 25ms.
This is not traffic shaping. This is crap.
Shaping involves prioritizing and queing packets so that every process gets fed, regardless of what's running. You can also force downloads like BT, FTP, and even HTTP to take the slow path, moving icmp and ssh to the front of the line. This is quite easy with tc and other professional tools.
However, what comcastic seems to be doing is more akin to load leveling back in the days of mainframes. In those situations, you find that a user is hogging the resource and you would load level ALL of that users processes, regardless of function. As a result, if I'm downloading a torrent, my ssh sessions take 30 seconds to establish and keystroke confirmation lags three seconds behind my typing. Since I type about 60 words per minute, that's about three words or more behind my fingers. Wow.
Nice way to show your colors comcast. Once again, you are guaranteeing that:
1. as soon as I can, I'm dumping you.
2. I'm already telling EVERYONE to avoid you
3. I will go out of my way to starve you of customers
4. I will seek out and endorse your competitors
Good luck. May you soon die a well deserved and early death.
These opinions guaranteed or your money back.
I'd like to know where this "competition" is. Comcast is the only broadband provider for my residence.
...when they turned off the torrents For I was not a torrent user...