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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."
only if the FCC can deal on that Merger between Sirius and XM
Well, probably not this horse.
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
It's more like having a professional sniper taking out the competitors.
My $0.02: deregulate, increase investment in infrastructure and leave it to the law enforcement agencies to deal with potential matters of criminal activity online. then we have an internet we can all enjoy!
I'm sick of following my dreams. I'm just going to ask where they're goin' and hook up with 'em later.
For a minute there, I thought we were going to get yet another car analogy.
it won't do anything but make your dick stink..
Education is fairer when you hold the smartest and best back just a little bit when the rest of the class can not understand their input.
Every mans' island needs an ocean; choose your ocean carefully.
If you had a coffee shop, and was told that allowing P2P could put you at legal risk, you ban that traffic. If you had the majority of your patrons telling you they are going to your competitor because they can't access your mail because of 2% of your users not limiting P2P you'd throttle it.
Wheather or not its child porn or a movie, I could care less about those who whine. If you want a law changed write your congress man/woman, goto capital hill, or something that changes the law. Breaking the law will not help anyone.
I had to move recently becuase they did not block P2P and thus couldn't even sustain an RDP/VPN connection to work. As a tele-commuter, I welcome BANNING and PRESSING CHARGES against anyone who cares only about themself and thier corrupt sense of morality. Simply put your not going to cause a massive problem getting anything legal via P2P. If you did police yourself and move the slider throttling yourself.
ISP's are selling these massive speeds / bandwidths, but get pissy when anyone comes close to actually using it.
Just like the tag says. Mod me down/offtopic/whatever, but I'm tired of seeing every other story from ars on slashdot. I understand that the discussion system here is relatively unique and we might benefit from community wisdom on a subject where the discussion system on ars tends to be very obscured and not the focus. I get that not EVERY article there is copied here. I just wonder how much of the slashdot readership sees ars as well as /. and would rather not see a story on both. I can almost always expect to see a story on ars here within a day or so, like clockwork. I'd rather see it stop.
They admit to sending RST packets, but then claim that they don't forge packets. They're audacious enough to say that the people who say that the packets are forged are the liars. They also say RST packets are the only way, completely ignoring options like ICMP source quench, leaky bucket/token bucket filtering, or TCP's own congestion control reaction to dropped/delayed packets.
Whoever wrote Comcast's response has quite a pair.
Oh, no room for P2P, huh?
Fine. I'll go build my own telecom infrastructure with blackjack.. and hookers.
In fact, forget the infrastructure and the blackjack... Eh, screw the whole thing.
I (I'm willing to bet no one has) heard a single analogy that accurately describes how selective and selfish throttling bandwidth, along with "quality premium service" for a fee. It's protection money. It's false advertisement and breach of contract. Why does this need comparison to horse racing and highways?
On my way home from work this evening, a radio host was finally talking about this in a way that regular joes would care about (and the show was for regular joes trying to invest). He said that Comcast is using its monopoly to limit competing content (non-comcast video and audio). I'm sure more than a few ears perked up.
You see, the internet is like a car, and Comcast is like the clutch. If you stick a bologna sandwich in the clutch, obviously you need more cup holders, like Bit Torrent and Vuze.
That's why we need net neutrality!
hookers and grits.
You and ron paul supporters have a lot in common. /taunt
-b
Funny, when I mail an "unfair, not good enough" check for my Comcast bill, they just shut me down.
--
make install -not war
"Whoever wrote Comcast's response has quite a pair."
Most horses do.
That's the worst analogy I've ever heard. What they are doing isn't traffic shaping, it's a criminal offense. How about:
Why are Vuze's lawyers lobbing softballs? The Associated Press documented spoofed IPs. Someone at Comcast should go to prison.
I think it would be fun if the US had some sort of regulating body that would create a set of 20 or so certifications for each type of market in business. Small companies would not necessarily need to get certified, but there could be tax related incentives for large companies to be certified.
For example, a mining company could not also be a railroad company (the classic steel monopolies). Likewise, a company certified as an ISP could not also get certified as a media distribution company. Also, if one company starts to encroach on a market that is not their own, they would risk losing their certification. Companies could still function without certification, but they would lose certain perks related to the market they want to operate in.
You could also enforce rules, such as net neutrality on government owned fiber. That way, ISPs still retain their property rights to tamper with people's data (we do route over their machines), but then the government would be able to revoke their certification. This would allow customers to know which companies play nice without having to dig through a ton of information themselves.
I think this model has the potential to greatly simplify the tax code, and corporate law, while increasing customer awareness of sketchy business practices.
I don't think the analogy in the summary is worth a horse's turd. Disconnecting is more like shooting the horse, not slowing it down.
Anyway there's no car in that analogy. I don't understand!!!
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
I don't think the EFFECT of Comcast's interference is the main issue here. Traffic shaping IS an issue, but not the important one in this case. HOW they are doing it is important. They are forging network packets (RST packets, in particular). This isn't just limiting the cars getting on the highway, it's like calling you on your cell phone before you get on the highway, pretending to be your boss, and telling you not to bother coming to work today. They are committing fraud, of multiple sorts, every time they do this.
Slashdot claims to be a free and open haven on the net. A place for geeks to catch up on the latest news, and read interesting opinions about it. Instead, it is rife with behind-the-curtains moderation and subversive actions taken against accounts.
The editors are well known for their abuses. The canonical example is documented here yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/01/10/174240. A post which detailed troubling trends in moderation on slashdot was modded up by many moderators. Slashdot's editors secretly banned each and every moderator who modded the post up from moderating again on slashdot.
The Editors Are Unqualified
The editors of slashdot are unfit for the positions they hold. Above all, they lack journalistic integrity. The news posted is often factually incorrect, and is always slanted by the opinions of the editors. Their ineptitude in every aspect of the job crops up constantly. They are horrible programmers, incompetent sysadmins, and make elementary spelling and grammatical errors, and the quality of the site reflects this.
This problem produces a number of symptoms. Most notably, the competent readership is driven away. This is the group that has something to offer to slashdot- informative comments, wise moderations, etc. However, they are driven away by the site's amateur execution and moronic readership.
Moderation Sucks
Comments are judged by popular opinion. This means that anything that sounds smart gets the stamp of approval, which means that complete nonsense is promoted. While this may sound like a small point, consider that Slashdot is one of the most popular geek sites around. To a young, uneducated programmer, this sort of misinformation is extremely harmful.
Time for a people's free internet, with A.I. Tor forks!
You know, I have to admit, as much as I like this seeing the light of day, it scares me to have Congress so...involved...in these technological affairs that they cannot, really, possibly all understand.
I know plenty of hot young IT geeks who don't really "get" the bigger picture, let alone a bunch of technophobic Congrescritters...
expandfairuse.org
I have said this before, why does Comcast not just throttle BT packets when the lines are being saturated? On multiple levels. You could also throttle the bandwidth of the largest users in general if other users who barely ever use the internet want bandwidth. AKA if all I do is log on once a day and watch 10 youtube videos I would get priority over the guy who maxes out his line doing BT all day.
Of course, you would always want to prioritize VOIP, games, DNS and other types of vital traffic. Could even prioritize based on what servers are being accessed. Blackberry.net, Chase Online Banking, ETrade, and other similar sites are a bit more important than YouTube.com for most customers.
This shaping would only be if the line is being saturated.
I go to a school that, when I was a freshman, had a few thousand students on the residential network sharing a single T3. There were arrays of squids which basically cached all of Facebook & Yahoo Mail and traffic shapers for everything else. The shapers were set to aggregate and monitor the usage of bandwidth that is not being pulled from the squids based on the mac addresses they registered when they first connected to the network. So if one user was using a ton of bandwidth, their devices would be throttled down. I was absolutely floored by this. Not only because I feel like I was getting ripped off by sharing a single T3 with a thousand other college students, but also that I never even suspected that I was sharing such a small connection. In fact, since the squids were there things seemed to load even faster! (although I wouldn't recommend having Squids for business customers, if it is a residential non-business network then it should be fair game if the remote hosts don't specifically say not to cache the content)
It can be done, and Comcast doesn't have to mess with the actual packets or play games with the traffic on their network. Just do some traffic shaping for Christ's sake! Not only that, you can start offering faster connections like RCN... Hey, if they can get me 20mbit even if any BT I use is throttled based on what my neighbor's needs are, then I'm game.
-nick
"Or ISPs could stop over-selling their capacity, then no one would need to "police" themselves by making sure they use less than the bandwidth they're paying for. "
Sounds to me like you're making the argument that they should cancel the subscriptions of all the hogs then. That way all the bandwith that's left would then fall "within capacity" and no one would ever have to read a "overcapacity" post again. Nice and the remainder need never fund the habit of those who never read about the "tragedy of the commons". Now the only remaining issue is if the "my exclusive slice of pie" view that everyone has of broadband will still be broadband once our "rights" are taken care of?
I just had to deal with spending 3+ hours to download a 150MB file, due to my entire connection going down every time I have Bit Torrent up for more than ~5 minutes. From what I've read, Cox is supposedly using the same forging method as Comcast. When does the FCC start hanging other companies out to dry? ...or, do they feel that putting pressure on only one company will solve the problem?
Just -1, Troll talking to another.
The end users cannot unlock their modems.
They know what the up load at a set maximum speed will do to the network.
There are no real unknown unknowns with closed network math.
Light up some dark fiber, make it glow.
Put few new big boxes in.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
"Premium 56K Dial Up Internet Access"
If your business model requires you to use another companies LIMITED resources for free or you go out of business, your business model is busted.
From the testing I have done, I have only seen throttling applied to external networks trying to download from me. All comcast customers appear to be able to download from me with no issue. So if these companies are in fact being throttled it is because they are using Comcast's bandwidth and transit to serve video to non comcast customers.
Your mileage may vary as the sandvine policies implemented may vary from region to region or even sandvine box to sandvine box.
If the FCC says that Comcast cannot manage their network, expect internet access to switch to a per bit pricing model. Everyone using p2p to seed those ever popular linux iso's might have a change of heart when they end up paying what it costs comcast, which is close to 30 bucks a meg.
People expect an internet service that has a best effort price but dedicated bandwidth performance. You can't have both. You can order your t1 for 500.00 a month, or you can have your best effort cable modem service. the kicker is.. the p2p abusers will stop when they have to pay for it, but the rest of us will have to live with the new pricing structure they forced the ISP's to adopt.
Instead, they sell, sell, sell accounts with "unlimited" bandwidth at X speed; add something in their ToS that some unknown amount of usage is too much; and then blame their infrasture problems on those that use BitTorrent and the like (whether they are used for legal or illegal purposes) rather than on their own irresponsibility and money-grabbing.
I live in an old house, parts of which over 100 years old. (It's been heavily remodeled) Old enough that there's no meter on the water. We pay a flat rate. You could call this "unlimited" water because there is no specific limit on the water usage.
Technically, there's no particular reason why we couldn't run pipes over to our neighbors and run the whole block on our single water feed. In theory, I could turn on a faucet and use it as a fountain to feed some forever-flushing toilet art.
Except that would be fraud. See, even with my "unlimited" water source, there are practical limits, if not technical ones. If I were caught, the city would have every right to sue me for damages. I can't go in the business and sell water to southern California. (Yes, I live in Northern CA)
Your Internet pipe is not much different. No, you aren't being sold to specific limits. But the reality is that a very small percentage of the customers account for most of the bandwidth used. They don't want to worry about the 97% of the customers, they just want to put some limits on the last 3%, or get rid of them altogether.
That 3% is us. That includes the 120 TB of network traffic I accounted for last month on my DSL account. That's not BT traffic, that's mostly offsite backups of my business, but still, I know I'm in the "blood sucking leaches" category.
Now, let's talk about brass tacks: My company hosts servers. We have half a dozen in a top-notch hosting facility in Sacramento, CA on a 6Mb burstable contract. In short, we serve data at about a 6 Mb rate during my daily peaks. Yet a single cable customer could account for 6 Mb of data stream if they're set up right.
But while the cable customer pays $50/month for their 6 Mb service, we pay over $1,000 per month for my 6 Mb hosting contract, and I'm happy to pay that (damned cheap!) price. For that $1,200 per month, I get at 5 nines (99.999%) network uptime with dual network feeds, a half-rack, (about 20 U) 20 amps of redundant power, and the ability to burst up to 100 Mb during peak usage.
Are you noticing a small price disparity? $1,200 on my side, $50 on yours. Is that fair? Not that I mind the $1,000 price tag, it's a million-dollar business. The $1,200/mo is peanuts. But it's a big number compared to your $50/month.
Where was I going with this? I don't know. But the bottom line is that Mb isn't the only factor, and the telecoms aren't being as greedy as your limited experience would lead you to believe.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
they have absolutely no right to do that. does your landlord have the right to go into your appartment and tamper with your property ?
Back in 2002 is wasn't on Slashdot, but this stuff seems kind of interesting - i know now what they mean with "browse at -1 to spot abuse".
Are there any newer threads like this [1] ?
[1] http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=26315&cid=2850660
Yep, ComCast own the little bit of the internet between you and the rest of the world that isn't on ComCast, and probably operate a hell of a lot of hardware between you and the border router. What little of that they DON'T own is copper owned by some telcom carrier company between your house and your local phone exchange and ComCast are paying to license the use of that anyway :)
So yeah, ComCast can run the horse race however it likes. It can also run foxy boxing in the middle of the track too, while it does it. Their network. If you don't like it, get another ISP.
Net Neutrality is for morons. Only in the USA could you legislate that networks and routers that you own CANNOT be flow controlled, while strengthening physical international borders using biometrics, reshuffled border agencies and more strict immigration..
And you can pay more to have your letters treated preferentially above other letters. "First class" service for the internet... no thanks.
We call a rigged horse race a "boat race." Don't ask me how I know that.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
Over at Capitol Valley they've got a pretty good clue about how strong Vuze's reply is.
Basically, they hit the Republican Commissioners over the head with their own free market theories and say that if Comcast creates the market by entering the video distribution world (as opposed to just managing a network and controlling the flow to keep it fair for all users), they have to let the market decide if they are the bes provider of video instead of messing with their competitors under the guise of "network management."
I (heart) irony.
what is p2p used for? illegal music pirates, mostly. shut it down
I am a Comcast customer. Every time I update World of Warcraft, which does so via P2P, the client eventually loses its connection and appears to be "behind a firewall", making it use the direct download from Blizzard, instead of the P2P download method. Comcast are either a bunch of filthy, stinking liars or they're just grossly incompetent. They are hitting more than just pure upload P2P traffic when they "shape". No matter how you slice it, I want Comcast to get kicked in the teeth on this.
If your business model requires you to use another companies LIMITED resources for free or you go out of business, your business model is busted.
I have some sympathy for this position, however I do not find the pricing information you include in your article persuasive:
If the FCC says that Comcast cannot manage their network, expect internet access to switch to a per bit pricing model. Everyone using p2p to seed those ever popular linux iso's might have a change of heart when they end up paying what it costs comcast, which is close to 30 bucks a meg.
I rent a couple of colo servers, which do not tend to benefit near as much from overcommitment as the last mile, and if my colo company was paying 30 bucks a megabyte, let alone a megabit (if that's what you're claiming) I would be out of business. If you said 30 bucks a *gig* I'd still be suspicious, given the rates I'm paying for bandwidth. Can you elaborate on this point?