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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.'"
As long as you're only sending email - you'll have a great comcast experience.
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.
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'm sure glad I'm not one of their customers. If their moves piss off enough of their customers, they'll either (1) start getting crushed with support issues related to customers frustrated with their service, or (2) start losing customers to ISPs who don't screw with their customers connections constantly. I've seen and heard enough negative PR about Comcast that I actively engage in the practice of telling people to avoid their service at all costs.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
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;
So does one, so will another. If you think the other cable companies won't follow suit eventually, you're dreaming.
-mrxak
Onions Will Kill You
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.
No, you won't. They block port 25, forcing you to use them for mail relays. This affects those who don't want Comcast to see their mails, and where the recipient can't receive encrypted email but is behind a mail server that supports TLS, so the emails will be sent encrypted over the internet. That won't work -- Comcast forces you to relay through them, and they get to copy and read your outgoing mail (and hand it over to who knows).
Now that your ISPs have started going down this route there isn't much you'll be able to do. When this happened in Australia around 2000-01 a single user of one of the ISPs that lead the charge towards download limits and limited speeds started a small site, as the industry fell into worse condition (from the consumers point of view) that site basically turned into the independent industry watchdog. www.whirlpool.net.au became a very important staging ground for consumers to fight back, even if that meant mass organised exodus from misbehaving companies. Hopefully for your internet use sake some thing similar pops up in the US and gets wide attention.
Of course there is at least one up side to this all and that is once you have defined download limits you the consumer are directly paying for x amount of bandwidth. Opponents to net neutrality find their arguments fail completely because people en mass start to understand that it means they'd be paying for the same bandwidth twice. So far in Australia any attempts to start the debate on net neutrality have fallen on deaf ears and even out rage.
I ate your fish.
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.
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.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
As they should. 587/TCP Port has been set up for SMTP Submission which is open on Comcast network. Port 25 is basically now reserved for Server to Server transmission.
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
I'd like to know where this "competition" is. Comcast is the only broadband provider for my residence.
"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?"
Apart from the fact whirlpool is a troll platform more than a consumer watchdog now. You raise an issue on the forums and fanboys troll you to no end.
Either way, it's a shit site for fighting back. The only avenue of dispute is, AND ALWAYS WILL BE, the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman. I have, over the past 12 months, lodged a total of 3 complaints with the TIO. 2 of them didn't even make it to Level 1 complaint before the ISP changed their policy/dropped charges. The 3rd case is currently at Level 3, which is the final level before the case is refered to the Austrlian Communications & Media Authority. Once it reaches them, fines & possible revoking of communications lisence/trading rights can ensue.
All my complaints on whirlpool.net.au have done is serve to fuel trolling, not serve to be an open forum where you can stage a consumer "fight back". So yes, stop smoking crack and get with the real world, Australia has VERY strict laws with regards to communication - it's just ISPs & Telcos decide to try and blindside customers with illegitimate T&Cs.
I'm not complaining, though. As far as I can tell, none of my bittorrent traffic is being throttled (though I impose a restriction on the upload rate myself--a modest 35 KiB/s--, else the link gets saturated and games start seeing over half a second of latency). Perhaps it helps that we're paying for their highest consumer tier, but that wouldn't really make sense.
...when they turned off the torrents For I was not a torrent user...
Give it time - they'll get to you.
I used to do the same thing (using exim instead of sendmail), until I got this letter from Comcast claiming that I was sending spam. They claimed to have proof:
I knew this to be bogus, as there is only one way out of my home network and every email is logged. Despite this, they stuck to their guns and refused to unblock port 25, and refused to even discuss the possibility of sending me the proof they claimed to have, or even reveal anything about the email, the IP in question, etc.The worst part of this was not the block on outgoing. I just had to use a different port and authenticate each time, which was a pretty simple configuration change in Exim. A lot of ISPs refused email directly from me anyway, indicating that they don't accept email from a network unless it's from an "official" email relay on that network. The list of host names that I had to send through Comcast was getting rather long.
The worst part was that they also blocked port 25 for all incoming traffic. What is that supposed to do for anybody? How is it even justified? But of course their TOS already prohibits "servers", so they felt justified to block mail from reaching me. I had to set up a RollerNet account to get around it. Very annoying.
Yea, yea, I know "switch providers if they treat you like that" you say. Well my only other option is Verizon FIOS (can't even get DSL), and they block 25 by default as well as any incoming port 80 traffic. So that's just a non-starter.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
If you download over a MB a day, they come to your house and hit you with a bat.