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."

Comments

Re:You'd do the same

[locokamil]

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. :)

Re:Why concentrate on "throttling"?

[elronxenu]

Can we make a technological defense against this problem, e.g. by comparing Time-to-live (TTL) on the RST packets against TTL on the legitimate packets, and if it is substantially higher on the RST packet then assume interference and drop the RST?

Re:Why concentrate on "throttling"?

[WK2]

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.

Re:Bad analogy.

[budgenator]

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.