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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... Comcast is saying that 5% of its customers aren't customers at all?
They did say ALL afterall.
I'm with Comcast and I don't see anXXXXnX XXong wXXX my serXXXe.
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?
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.'"
I would call throttling the hell out of my connection to be a degradation of my service so obviously they aren't supplying the best possible experience to ALL of their customer, possibly most but certainly not all.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
"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."
Does this include dropping packets, dropping connections, or what? Wasn't traffic shaping originally supposed to only *delay* some packets in favor of others?
Looks like they can call something "traffic shaping" and then do whatever they want with the traffic, including not meet any of their other commitments.
You can't send a takedown notice to an already printed newspaper.
packet shaping is not all that bad. I do not mind if my bandwidth limit is different for web surfing and for streaming media or anything else for that matter. I makes sure that I can connect to the sites that I would like and keeps me from killing all of the network traffic for my local group. I would still like an explanation as to why my Linux torrents are still being reset.
Sure, that's a good idea, and probably what a lot of ISP's do in practice. prioritise traffic.
It should be noted, however, that this is *not* what comcast is doing.
Comcast are deliberately cutting connections when a user attempts to seed bittorrent. Most users can still download, but they can no longer upload, without encrypting the tracker's traffic and individual connections. (I was able to get mine working again, after a fashion, once i setup a tunnel for the tracker (not all) traffic was able to go through)
This sucks for people trying to distribute stuff, like, say, linux ISO's, or their own music/media, etc.
I now use verizon as a direct result of these pathetic practices.
ash
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
All I know is that I'm a Comcast subscriber, and I can't play any games because I get huge lag spikes (and/or dropped packets) every few minutes, depending on the time of day. Specifically, it'll be consistently fine (e.g. 50 ms or so) and then drop every packet it sends in a several-second-long interval.
Now, I don't think this has anything to do with the RST packets. However, it's really pissing me off because I've had two techs out so far (plus one who failed to show up) and it's not fixed yet, so I'm going to use it as fuel for the "let's bitch about Comcast" fire anyway.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Are people really worried about 5 extra minutes? Or are people pissed off about packet forgery and actively breaking protocols?
Remember office environments a few years ago... with a T1 (ideally) or xDSL (better than ISDN)?
And you would track down the one or two users that consumed the entire pipe 24/7? And no matter where, there was always one or two of 'em?
Comcast oversold their capacity. They did not count on the number of subscribers who would exceed their ill-prepared estimates. Now they want to deny service to those subscribers... induce them to find another provider. They can do what they want, you can always choose to not do business with them.
Take their bait. Comcast is at best a reasonable solution to light users (or maybe people who swallow the entire Comcast pill-- VIOP + web hosting + email hosting, etc?). Get Fios if you can, or even a fast DSL. It is "better" access.
I. Prohibited Uses and Activities What uses and activities does Comcast prohibit? [...]
Conduct and information restrictions
.. Snip
09:F9:11:02 - 9D:74:E3:5B - D8:41:56:C5 - 63:56:88:C0
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.
# restrict, inhibit, interfere with, or otherwise disrupt or cause a performance degradation, regardless of intent, purpose or knowledge, to the Service or any Comcast (or Comcast supplier) host, server, backbone network, node or service, or otherwise cause a performance degradation to any Comcast (or Comcast supplier) facilities used to deliver the Service; So, if I generate any traffic that might lower the download speed of another, I'm in violation or if I run into a telecommunication pole, I'm in violation?
This and even more fun @ http://www6.comcast.net/terms/use/,the linked article
import system.cool.Sig;
On the other hand, running a mail server is against your terms of service, so Comcast isn't being that generous ... they can kill you off any time they want. They're just choosing not to for the moment. Me, I stopped using Comcast's SMTP and POP3 servers years ago. Even if they did block Port 25 I'd never notice it (maybe they have, for all I know.)
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Let's turn the parent post into a poll :). I'll vote first:
I'm not even a Comcast customer, and I'm EXTREMELY pissed off at them for actively breaking protocols. They sell Internet access, not "some of the Internet" access. I've had to deal with many, many friends and family member who were pissed off at their service. I get the feeling that they're trying to turn "OMG the pirating downloaders!!!" into some sort of blanket excuse for their technical issues.
New marketing slogan: "Comcast Internet Service: It's Craptastic!"
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
The sad truth is, in most cases, Comcast can do whatever they want and the customers are just stuck with their complaints. The reason is that there aren't any real choices. In my area, for broadband alternatives there is WOWWAY Broadband cable and AT&T DSL. I've used WOW's product, it was cheaper but the cable tv quality lacked and broadband speeds were not on par with what I was used to getting from Comcast. Everyone knows that DSL is not even in the same league as broadband cable, so AT&T is out of the question. What is needed is real competition. I, for one, am waiting for Verizon FIOS to be deployed. That's when I'll switch.
And what does this have to do with bandwidth? you pay comcast for the bandwidth not the content. It is not their business what your traffic is. They just use that as an excuse. Let the RIAA run after the 'pirates'
A couple of things that may have escaped your attention:
One, it's not the ISPs business to determine what is or is not acceptable traffic. That's a moral/legal judgment that they have no authority to make, are not equipped to make, and could not under any conditions be trusted to make. I don't pay them to monitor my communications and tell me what is right and what is wrong. Let the copyright holder go after me if he or she really believes that I've infringed upon any of their legal rights.
Two, owning up to copyright infringement may or may not be the right thing to do from an ethical perspective, but it's the exact wrong thing to do if you don't want to end up penniless. Keep firmly in mind that the media companies (not all, just the majors that are funding the likes of the RIAA) have no interest whatsoever in redress of grievance. They have no concern with such niceties as "right" and "wrong", as most of us understand the terms. They want deterrence. That means they need to destroy as many people as they can before they're stopped, because that's what they've determined is their best course of action.
Go check out this blog if you want to learn more about what's really going on, and why the infringers are not the real evil here.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Here's some facts for you from a comcast insider. well a past comcast insider.
The techs dont know squat. They typically tell you what you want to hear if they can get online, lag is a non issue they will not fix. The Lag at comcast is huge, as well as the Jitter. It's gotten worse over the past 2 years because of the equipment they install. Most people have voip quality issues because of the sniffer they have installed in every 2nd point OTN that all traffic goes through.
Also your modem is set to cache a large chunk fo your traffic before sending. this plays HELL with games and Voip as well.
If you want to do anything but surf the internet and email, Comcast will suck for you. and it's gonna get worse. They want to oversell the connectivity even further. they already are at a 13 to 1 ratio and want to push it to a 15 to 1. Stable is 10 to 1.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
last straw indeed! i bet they're pilin' up the frags now!
- I'd prefer not to.
is did Comcast inform every customer in writing that they were changing the ToS/AUP?
A previous discussion and reference
http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/07/07/29/1747205.shtml
seems to imply that's a no-no and a breach of contract if they did not.
Enlightenment? It's just a flush in the pan.
Comcast's policies on traffic shaping are fine. There's nothing wrong with what they SAY they are doing. There is nothing wrong with prioritizing traffic based on traffic type (as long as it doesn't differentiate by source). Indeed, running a network without this type of traffic shaping would be foolish. However, this is NOT what Comcast is doing to bittorrent connections. They are actively disrupting them by doing a man-in-the-middle attack and impersonating one of the parties in the connection. This is not only immoral, but also probably illegal.
That's not exactly what they're doing, either. They might be able to justify dropping certain connections in favor of the collective good. What they're actually doing is impersonating the system your software is in communication with, and sending a reset.
In any normal sense of the word this is fraud. In any normal sense of the phrase this is not traffic shaping.
I'm not an expert on these matters, but I don't see any reason for an ISP to send fraudulent resets instead of using normal traffic shaping techniques other than an attempt to conceal what they are doing. Detecting this behavior requires simultaneous monitoring of both ends of the communication.
-Peter
PS: I'm posting this on Comcast. I can't understand why they don't offer a service package they feel is fair instead of subverting our agreement.
Yeah, I'm on verizon and loving it. Not sure what the issue is here- everybody here asserts that if you really had to you could revert back to DSL like it's something bad. My verizon dsl is 3 mbps, and comcast in the area is 4 mbps. My work has comcast and it's far slower than my home DSL connection. So I'm not sure why people ignore the obvious..
Belief? Hope? Preference?The Existential Vortex
"Hi, I'm Angela, how may I help you today?"
"Hi Angela. I was looking through the terms of service and wanted to make sure I am not in violation of my agreement. Is it true that I'm not allowed to view or download pornographic material?"
"Uhmm..."
"I have downloaded a LOT of porn through the Comcast service. Everything is legal-- everyone over 18, and amateur material only rather than pirated commercial material. I prefer the amateur work anyway, it's more real, you know? Have you viewed or published anything pornographic using Comcast service? I'd feel a little more comfortable if I knew I was in good company. Also, do you want to trade?"
You're telling me you can't get Speakeasy service anywhere in Atlanta? You're badly in need of reeducation. I'm posting from Connecticut (stationed up here in the Navy), but I entered my dad's address and phone number in Lawrenceville, GA (out in the sticks, right?) and he could get Speakeasy service. So then I looked up some random guy named John Smith on whitepages.com who lives in Decatur (most assuredly inside metro Atlanta), and he could get Speakeasy service. I guess I could go on, but why waste my time? I personally know people who use their service in Atlanta, along with a few business customers. You're just wrong.
Maybe you can't get it at your specific address, but to try to claim the entire metro Atlanta market is devoid of Speakeasy coverage is absurd. Got another reply? I'm sure you could make a bigger ass out of yourself if you try a little harder.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
I think this refers only to their "residential" service. I'm on a business account, and haven't really had many issues with them except for some technical issues (orders not being put in and adding static ip's for a couple of examples).
This isn't to say "buy a higher tier service, or suck it," but perhaps comcast should just put hard speed caps in place and only advertise up to that speed, and not outrageous speed 'but only for what we approve.' Not only that, but where are a lot of their problems happening? Is it on the nodes in local areas or is it in their back end connection to the whole of the internet. I don't know much about the super technical workings of TCP/IP but isn't there a way that they could route p2p traffic between their customers inside their network and infrastructure without jamming up traffic to external sources with little to no impact to other services?
One thing I'd like to know is, how are Comcast and other cable ISPs connected to the internet? Are they all networked together through a cable system with endpoints at telcos?
$40 doesn't buy you a guarenteed 6 mbit connection 24/7. If you have a problem with the way they sell their bandwidth, send them a complaint to lower their cap so you can't burst to higher speeds. If you want a legit 6 mbits per second 24/7 for yourself, go buy 1/8th of a T3. Just one problem: splitting a T3 8 ways is gonna cost QUITE A BIT MORE than $40 a month.
What comcast is doing is screwed up (the exact way they're killing bittorrent traffic) but the only reason they can sell you a "6mbit connection" for $40-$50 a month under the current system is the assumption that you're, like most web browsers, not using it more than about 10% of the time. They could charge less, but that wouldn't fund their system upgrades without everybody in their company taking a pay cut (whether their CEO deserves to make however much he does or not is a whole different story).
So the options are: Complain until they price the service for 24/7 operation, complain until they lower the quality of the service to what they can afford to sell for $40 a month and guarentee 24/7 bandwidth, or just accept that $40 a month doesn't get you a guarenteed 1900 gigabytes of traffic per month. Yes, 1.9 terabytes. There is a reason (a multitude of reasons actually) why 45 mbits on a T3 line costs a LOT MORE than $300 when 6 mbits on a cable line costs "only $40-$50." Yes, comcast sucks. No, broadband providers can't realistically be expected to cater to the Homer Simpsons sort that would sue an all you can eat buffet for kicking him out after consuming every bit of food in the establishment. You're paying for a connection that is unlimited with connection time, but its NATURALLY limited with respect to data speed/total data transferrable in a month/number of customers sharing your coax loop.
You know they have every right to do this but it is surely already biting them in the ass. In most markets they do have DSL as competition so if they oversell too much they ought to expect to lose customers.
What I don't really understand is what advantage they see to this practice. I have no idea how oversold Cox is but I have very little trouble with my cable modem. Then again, I do mostly do web surfing and e-mail but anytime I've used iChat AV or Skype it has worked flawlessly as well. When my brother has visited he has had no trouble gaming. So based on my own purely anecdotal observations I imagine that Cox is not overselling beyond a reasonable limit. They're private so I don't know what their financials look like but I imagine they wouldn't be doing continual network upgrades if they were losing money.
So what I really don't get is this whole fuck the customer attitude. As with any business, your customers are your revenue stream. Do not piss them off. Seriously. It may not bite you immediately but it will bite you eventually. Comcast's rates are already higher than average from what I've seen (e.g. $60 instead of $45) and they seem to be the most aggressive at overselling. To what end? How much money are you really going to save overselling 15 to 1 vs. 13 to 1 or 10 to 1? How much do you value your reputation as an internet provider that works without constant trouble? It's difficult of course to put a number on that but it's not impossible. Perhaps they actually have to see customers moving away in droves to really understand the revenue hit? But by then it will be too late, their reputation as a decent ISP will be well tarnished and they'll have trouble getting new customers.
...when they turned off the torrents For I was not a torrent user...
At Starbucks: "I'd like a grande latte". "here you go". "uhm, why is it in a thimble?" "what? You actually want a grande sized drink? You're ruining it for everybody else, you thief!"
.... On second thought, bad example.
At Arco: "I got charged for a full tank of gas, but it only filled up half way." "You want a full tank? You're ruining it for everybody else, you thief!"
At the record store
At H.R. at the office, "How come I only got half my pay?" "You want a full paycheck? You're ruining it for everybody else, you thief!"
In other words, in what other industry are you treated like a thief when you expect what you pay for?
-- Will program for bandwidth
If you download over a MB a day, they come to your house and hit you with a bat.
From Comcast's FAQ
Do you block access to peer-to-peer applications like BitTorrent?
No. We do not block access to any Web site or applications, including BitTorrent. Our customers use the Internet for downloading and uploading files, watching movies and videos, streaming music, sharing digital photos, accessing numerous peer-to-peer sites, VOIP applications like Vonage, and thousands of other applications online.