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Comcast Makes Nice with BitTorrent
An anonymous reader writes "In a dramatic turn-around of relations, cable provider Comcast and BitTorrent are now working together. The deal comes as BitTorrent tries to put its reputation for illegal filesharing behind it. The companies are in talks to collaborate on ways to run BitTorrent's technology more smoothly on Comcast's broadband network. Comcast is actually entertaining the idea of using BitTorrent to transport video files more effectively over its own network in the future, said Tony Warner, Comcast's chief technology officer. '"We are thrilled with this," Ashwin Navin, cofounder and president of BitTorrent, said of the agreement. BitTorrent traffic will be treated the same as that from YouTube Inc., Google Inc. or other Internet companies, he said. It was important that Comcast agreed to expand Internet capacity, because broadband in the United States is falling behind other areas of the world, Navin said. Referring to the clashes with Comcast, he said: "We are not happy about the companies' being in the limelight."'"
This sounds more like, "sorry I got caught" than sorry:
BitTorrent traffic will be treated the same as that from YouTube Inc., Google Inc. or other Internet companies, he said. ... "We are not happy about the companies' being in the limelight."
No one caught doing something wrong is happy about the attention but they need to admit what they did was wrong not because a company was involved but because it harmed their customers. The above makes it look like they think they still have the right to block traffic their customers want. Beware of special deals like this.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=216934&cid=17629948
I'm not sure they have said anything but it looks like nothing good if they want to make a special deal with a single company. If they want some good attention, they can unblock ports and dedicate themselves to network buildouts. The core issue is one of network freedom. Without freedom, the internet is no better than cable TV.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=216934&cid=17629948
i think itsatrap would be more appropriate. something tells me we're not getting the whole picture here.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
Right. All you people going "about time" "suddenoutbreakofcommonsense" didn't even read the summary. The deal is with BitTorrent, Inc. and probably has nothing to do with ALL bittorrent traffic, just the stuff Comcast is doing with video.
BIG HINT: This is probably why they started throttling bittorrent traffic to begin with.
My blog
No, read the article more closely, especially in between the lines -- Comcast will starting screwing with *other* protocols on an even keel with bittorrent.
Soon you can expect to get false 404's on port 80 if you've used "too much" of your "unlimited" bandwidth...
The article states:
"The Comcast-BitTorrent dispute has been a cause celebre among Internet advocacy groups and others who called for greater regulation for an open Internet, citing Comcast."
I fail to see how greater regulation would ever be the solution. It was regulation that made Comcast's monopoly possible in the first place, allowing them to pull idiotic stunts like traffic filtering. No company in a competitive environment could ever get away with that, because users would simply switch to another provider. Greater regulation is definitely not the answer. Instead, the government should be keeping its claws out of the economy in the first place.
This is just Comcast PR spin doctor damage control, since most people won't differentiate between Bittorrent, Inc and the bittorrent protocol. Comcast is just saying that they will stop inhibiting Bittorent, Inc's traffic without mentioning other bittorent programs/services like Azureus, utorrent, etc... Or possibly Comcast will give Bittorent, Inc. preferential treatment as compared to other bittorrent programs/services - so long, net neutrality!
The real issue is Comcast underinvesting in its infrastructure to the point where nodes meant to serve 400 residential customers are serving up to 700 (as confirmed to me by a tech who came in for a service call). In fact, Comcast actually INCREASED it's dividend to shareholders this year, meaning that instead of investing its increased profits into its own network for the benefit of its customers, it paid out to investors since the stock price is stagnant and it hopes they will plow that dividend back into Comcast shares.
Without investing in its infrastructure Comcast will continue to use underhanded tactics to scrimp and save bandwidth costs on a seriously overburdened network, to the detriment of its millions of customers. Complain loudly enough to Comcast and threaten to switch providers unless their service improves - ultimately that's the only way to make it change course to a customer-centric business model, which ultimately is the only way for it to stay in business.
Isn't that the perfect network model?
I'm surprised more ISPs (particularly foreign ones where bandwidth is pricey) haven't looked at ways to bias traffic to share internally. I know i talked with some ISP in the UK and tried to convince them to let their cable modems run much faster but to apply the traffic caps at their network boundary. Unfortunately it didn't seem practical to do that on that scale at that time.
If comcast were to double or triple the upstream available when staying within their network then i'm sure p2p tools would start exploiting it.
Mod parent up. It's exactly what Comcast will be doing, slowing all traffic for people who use more bandwidth than they deem acceptable. They're still as seedy as ever. I just hope this doesn't throw the FCC of of their track, if they even intend to do anything about it.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. indymedia
This still smells bad on Comcast's part. What the heck does Comcast care what is BitTorrent used for? So if it's going to be used to share files with a friend (the extent of which is illegal is questionable) it's wrong and needs to be censored, and if it's going to be used for business it's acceptable?
This is still comcastic censorship, corporativism and licking the media mafia's asshole. Keep boycotting Comcast.
I was about to say 13256278887989457651018865901401704640, but it appears this number is private property.
What I don't get is why they're not just advertising that you do in fact have a bandwidth limit - that way the customer knows what they're *actually* getting, and Comcast can make a few extra dollars selling top-ups to people who hit their bandwidth limit.
;)
In an ideal world, you could do whatever you want with your connection, but this is the real world, where bandwidth is expensive, and ISPs would rather not be the ones paying to feed your free porn addiction
The difference is that the record company's favourite customer is the one who buys the most CDs. I ISPs favorite customer is the one who pays for the service, but doesn't use it. Nothing better than a guy paying for a 10 mbit connection, so he can check his email, chat on msn, and read a few news articles everyday. The ISPs don't like people who download 100 GB of stuff every month.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.