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Comcast's FCC Filing Called Unfair, Not Good Enough
Shoemaker brings us a follow-up to Comcast's recent defense of its traffic management procedures. The companies involved in the original FCC investigation are not satisfied with Comcast's response. From Ars Technica:
"Comcast made an aggressive defense of its policies, claiming that it only resets P2P uploads made during peak times and when no download is also in progress. Free Press, BitTorrent, and Vuze all say that's not good enough. In a conference call, Vuze's general counsel Jay Monahan drew the starkest analogy. What Comcast is really doing, he said, wasn't at all comparable to limiting the number of cars that enter a highway. Instead, it was more like a horse race where the cable company owns one of the horses and the racetrack itself. By slowing down the horse of a competitor like Vuze, even for a few seconds, Comcast makes it harder for that horse to compete. 'Which horse would you bet on in a race like that?' asked Monahan."
Who are these paragons of good ISP behavior, by the way? If they are in the northeast, I would like to give them my custom.
:)
When, that is, they are willing to take it.
You should be able to work around it by adding something to your iptables. I found this page: http://www.tweak3d.net/forums/tech/possible-fix-comcast-torrent-blocking-28264 which has a simple fix. I haven't tested it myself. It looks like it should work. Their solution is to drop ALL RST packets to your bit torrent port. If the RST was legit, the connection will time out eventually anyway.
Your solution is technically better, but much harder to do. I think it would require patching and compiling a kernel.
Write your own Choose Your Own Adventure. http://www.freegameengines.org/gamebook-engine/
You know what, as much as I want Comcast to stop this RST packet shit, this argument, while I guess technically having some merit, isn't very convincing:
(1) Yeah, I agree, they shouldn't advertise unlimited if it isn't. Their equivocation on what "unlimited" means is sleazy, but...
(2) If you feel rooked, you *can* cancel service. What I don't like is I have no alternative to Comcast, but that's a completely separate issue.
(3) I doubt there's any Comcast reader or torrent junkie who doesn't know what Comcast is doing, so I'm a lot less sympathetic to this argument today. Whether they're dishonestly advertising unlimited or not, we know what they're doing, so we all know to seek out alternatives or not sign up.
We're arguing over fine-print. Now unless Comcast works differently in other locations than my own (I am a Comcast subscriber), there are no contracts anyone's locked into. You can cancel, and maybe go with DSL or something else if it is available.
My point is that I don't know how useful this argument is - that they advertise unlimited and goddamit, I'm going to max out my bandwidth 24/7 because of it. All you invite them to do is adjust their advertising verbiage a bit, and continue doing the same shit, which isn't going to help anyone.
We should be looking at why there's not more competition, why there is not more capacity, why the US is falling behind, broadband wise, and what can be done about this situation. As much as the self-righteous guardians of intellectual property rant about how THEY can't use their internet because of Warez kiddies (A situation I've never encountered, nor have I met anyone IRL who this has happened to), it will be interesting to see what they say as television and phone companies start pumping more and more data across the internet, and the same conditions occur because some octogenarian next door watching reruns of The Golden Girls, or some telecommuter is running massive system backups across his pipe.
Comcast has been a poor steward of them tubes, and what I'd really like to see is competition - something needs to light a fire under their ass to invest in their infrastructure - as others have pointed out, there's dark fiber all over the place, and the only thing that, in the long run, is going to make a damn bit of difference, is to hit their stockholders in the wallet. We need to figure out how to create conditions where this is possible. It is not, now, the way cable companies work, at least where I live.
But complaining about "false advertising" is just childish, even if it's true. We all *know* they don't really mean unlimited now, and the kind of people who don't know and sign up for Comcast are probably not people who give a crap about bittorrent. Let's move on; this argument is a tarpit.
And I just send a copy of the letter out every other day until I get a letter back stating you got the original letter, that's how they manage traffic.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
I think a better analogy is if the post office had a policy of deliberately throwing away mail when they were too busy, like at Christmas time or whenever.
You are getting close. I have contacts inside Comcast and they are saving a lot of money by reducing the amount of bandwidth they must purchase, especially from AT&T. They don't really care about traffic that stays on the comcast networks. They are thrilled with the cost savings.
So this is more like laying off more and more postal carriers to save money and using the lack of delivery capacity to justify throwing away more mail...
I know the names of the Comcast people they need to subpoena.