Slashdot Mirror
Comcast, Pando Partner For "P2P Bill of Rights"
Bibek Paudel writes "Comcast on Tuesday announced that it would partner with Pando Networks to create a P2P bill of rights for file-sharing networks and Internet service providers. Comcast and Pando will meet with industry experts, other ISPs, and P2P companies in order to come up with a set of rules that would clarify how a user can use P2P applications and how an ISP can manage file-sharing programs running on their networks. Last month, Comcast announced that it had reached an agreement with BitTorrent whereby Comcast agreed to alter its network management practices, and BitTorrent acknowledged that Comcast has the right to police its own network. Comcast's battle with P2P networks started last year after the Associated Press published an article that accused Comcast of blocking peer-to-peer services like BitTorrent. Comcast admitted to delaying P2P traffic during peak times, but denied that any file-sharing applications were being completely blocked."
If comcast wants it... no good will come of it
I got you an Andes mint, but it melted in my pocket
Its an attempt to get egg of their face.
It's amazing what lengths companies will go to in order to anger the customers that use their service the most.
Eschew Obfuscation
Users will use technology as they see fit. That is the ONLY thing everyone need know.
"Well, we've determined that information doesn't want to be free. Therefore, all BitTorrent or P2P traffic not sponsored by one of our esteemed peers will be allowed 100MB a month. Over that and your bill will go up."
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
What makes Comcast think that will get rid of their bad reputation?
This is just posturing to look like they did something. Also, I doubt they'd put anything meaningful that didn't please Our Dearest Stockholders from on high.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
The phrase "bill of rights" is and has been for some time corrupted by idotic proposals like this. I cannot hear it without becoming nausious.
Discuss.
Does anyone else find it unusual that all this comes just a day after the FBI requested more $ to spy on, and prosecute, the downloading of "illegal" files on the Internet, and use the system that spies on the Internet to find people using BT?
This isn't about the legality or otherwise of the content being transferred. P2P is not only used for "infringing" content, and Comcast isn't blocking or slowing it down because someone might be transferring something illegal. Your raising of the copyright infringement issue is a red herring. The real issue here is net neutrality.
A closed mouth gathers no foot.
I'm tired of hearing "bill of rights" applied in ridiculous situations by people or organizations who want to make it seem like they're being oppressed.
It seems to me that every meaningful phrase or term -anything that elicits a positive reaction in people- eventually gets co-opted by a political or corporate organization and turned into a complete farce. Sometimes it recovers, sometimes it doesn't.
When's the last time you heard the word "wholesome" in a BS-free situation?
"We haven't blocked any specific p2p applications. BitTorrent packets may have been indefinitely delayed, however."
If you remember, Bittorrent Inc made a similar deal with Comcast to protect their transfers. Now another P2P company peddling a proprietary solution has done the same.
Where does this leave non-commercial P2P on Comcast. Are we going to see a situation where proprietary P2P is whitelisted, while everything else is throttled? Is Comcast going to move towards a protocol agnostic, but vendor specific throttling strategy?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
This was already covered less than a week ago.
This is a publicity move.
BitTorrent, the company, has no say over how people use bittorrent/bittorrent-inspired clients on any other networks. Whether the company says Comcast has a right to police its own network. Technically, they do, but not in a way that is misleading the consumer--companies need to be up front about what they are offering, and Comcast has both broken access to the internet on on BT client in a manner beyond what one obviously expects through normal internet operation, and Comcast has lied all the way about it. It's not a net neutrality issue, it's a contractual issue. If someone sells you a car that they say works great turns out to have a shot engine and they knew about it, then that is misleading the consumer.
Regardless of that, though, Comcast just wants the general public and politicians to think that by getting some sort of acknowledge from the company that now makes the BT client/runs the official network, or the bittorrent company site.
It says nothing of all non-Bittorent-the-company sites. This, again, is just a diversion, a trick to play on the general public.
Tuesday, Comcast Corporation and Pando Networks announced that they will lead the industry to create a "P2P Bill of Rights and Responsibilities" for users and ISPs. With an FCC hearing on Comcast's anti-peer-to-peer practices scheduled for later this week, this is hardly a surprise. Once again, Comcast makes another sweetheart-sounding deal, but at the wrong time, and with the wrong sweetheart.
It takes a special kind of arrogance for a company that sells Internet Access to team up with another company that sells Content Delivery and together decide what rights and responsibilities that the world's Internet users should have.
As in its earlier "deal" with BitTorrent, Inc., Comcast's announcement tuesday doesn't change any of the facts it faces: in 2006, it assured Congress that network neutrality laws were not necessary, saying it would not "deny, delay, or degrade" its customers in order to deal with traffic congestion. Within a year it was caught secretly doing exactly that! Even after a long string of deceptive and deflective statements and tactics, Comcast continues to degrade their traffic tuesday.
As was the case in the BitTorrent "deal," neither Comcast Corporation nor Pando Networks represents the millions of customers and other members of the Internet community who were impacted when Comcast secretly launched its anti-P2P attack.
Tuesday's announcement came less than 48 hours from the US Federal Communication Committee's public hearing at Stanford University. There, the FCC heard from two panels of experts followed by public testimony on the Comcast incident specifically as well as similar industry practices in general.
And, just like in the BitTorrent deal, we also saw Comcast and Pando Networking executives start to explain why tuesday's "deal" signals that Network Neutrality regulation is not needed in the Broadband Marketplace.
Comcast talking = nothing.
This is a company with a sub-prime credibility rating.
Robb Topolski
I'm all for a bill of rights. Among the enumerated rights should be:
Any p2p user shall have available to them a detailed and complete description of what network services their monthly fees entitle them to. This will include all of the usage limits which may trigger account suspension or termination.
This information is required for any p2p user to make an informed choice among broadband providers. I don't particularly care if they advertise "unlimited" service, but there needs to be an asterisk which points to how they define unlimited.
and if they take that stance they'll find that *they* are going to be sued as they have now lost common carrier exemption.
How we know is more important than what we know.
"All P2P traffic is to be treated the same as all other traffic?"
In this case "bill of rights" is a euphemism for "limitation of rights".
In other words, you want a Bill of Rights Bill of Rights!
Is this fooling anyone?
No, seriously.
Anyone?
"The fight for freedom has only just begun." - Geert Wilders
The solution is simple: get rid of your Comcast 'net service, just keep cable. Get FIOS from Verizon or even DSL.
Comcast is a publicly traded company and as such here's what's important to them.....
Making money for their stockholders.
That means stopping the things that zap their resources. I don't think anyone will disagree that BitTorrent does exactly that.
Comcast is going to do what is best in their corporate interest. Surprised? Don't be. It's business. Vote with something they DO understand, your monthly $$$
No. These corporations do not get to decide how I use the internet. Fuck that. This is not a bill of rights. This is a corporate taking. They are taking your and my rights away. Fuck you, Comcast. Fuck you, Pando. Stay the fuck away from my internet.
How about if people want to use lots of bandwidth, they can pay extra for a special UNLIMITED account?!
Oh... wait.
What bothers me so much about this is that it's a transparent attempt to head off Congress, with the results not being pro-consumer. Last month, Comcast announced that it had reached an agreement with BitTorrent whereby Comcast agreed to alter its network management practices, and BitTorrent acknowledged that Comcast has the right to police its own network. Two companies coming to an agreement does nothing to resolve issues of Net Neutrality, especially when the agreement explicitly seems to disavow Net Neutrality.
I'd much rather have legislation I can comment on, than self-regulation which is not open to the public.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
So Comcast announces a blue ribbon commission on what can we get away with. This will be an exercise in turd polishing. Normal companies would just say they'll behave themselves rather than orchestrate a pantomime to pretend to convey rights.
The chances of Comcast coming up with anything that users themselves will find the least bit palatable is next to nothing, but the fools in the media and government won't hear about that because they're too busy applauding how industry is clearly now ready to take the lead and solve the problems without government intervention.
Such a transparent attempt to kill Net Neutrality, when all we as user want is: It's our pipe. We pay for it. So let us decide how we want to utilize our paid-for bandwidth. And don't make it our problem that you have oversold your system capacity by hundreds of times!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
"That means stopping the things that zap their resources. I don't think anyone will disagree that BitTorrent does exactly that."
In some cases it, no doubt, does sap resources. But, let me ask you this - which is cheaper for an ISP: to move bits between users of their own network, or to move bits from other networks on the Internet to their users? Maybe I'm wrong, but it is my understanding that shuffling data around inside the ISP's network is probably much faster and cheaper than moving data across the limited links the ISP has between itself and other networks.
If I have 10000 users that all want the same data (say the latest patch for Wow - which I believe uses a customized version of bittorrent for distributing patches), I would think it would be *much* more efficient to use P2P to copy the data around almost entirely inside my fiber network, than to transfer that data 10000 times from Blizzard's server across an Internet backbone link.
If that is the case, I would think it would be entirely within the ISP's self-interest to *promote* the use of P2P, to lessen the amount of traffic on upstream Internet links. Plus, it has the potential to allow their users to appear to get much better performance from their 'unlimited broadband' links than the ISP can really give if all data has to come from the uplink, meaning happier customers paying $X/month.
This is all coming from the same company that wanted to limit the amount of IP addresses that you could have inside your network. It is not legally comcast's job to participate in content control. This seems like a step toward an orwellian style of censorship.
Hey, I'm sorry but BitTorrent doesn't speak for me. They're not even a user and I am, so who died and made them God to decide what's right for Comcast and what's not?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Well said. The only thing they are spouting here is that users will be given permission to use their service that was already contractually given to them, instead of illegally manipulated. There does not need to be a bill of rights. Laws already are in place to manage what ISPs and end users are allowed to do. End of story. If Comcast is getting scared because of FCC fines/class action lawsuits they only have themselves to blame for how they "managed" this, not the end users.
Fuck off...and go to hell.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. indymedia
I don't disagree with your post in general, just that specific statement, I think, might be somewhat incorrect. But, it is somewhat correct to, in that, one could argue that, with regards to *illegal* file-sharing, sans P2P, there would be no *legal* source for that data, so that would just be less traffic, period, to move around the network and the Internet. But the problem is, there's no good way that anyone's found *yet* to discriminate between legal and illegal traffic. I still think that if the ISP's really thought about it, they'd see the benefits to themselves that P2P data exchange provides to them as an ISP - basically, local 'caching' of popular data, with the *end-users* paying for the infrastructure to cache the data (e.g. hard drive space and a computer to serve the data from)!. It's like end-users are subsidizing the ISP. . . wait, maybe ISP's should provide discounts to users who participate in P2P *grin* (yes, I say that with my tongue firmly in my cheek).
For a while I was actually a semi-happy Comcast customer. Sure i've had some nightmare tech support calls, but for the most part i've been fine as long as the modem is working.
Then I ordered Comcast for my new apartment last month.
Since I've gotten their service including digital telephone, anytime I use anything remotely looking like p2p data my data rates go in the toilet. Doing a quick test of pausing and un-pausing p2p traffic while downloading a large file shows this
I'm supposed to have 8mb cable. Without p2p data I see roughly 6mb, with p2p data i'm lucky to break 1.
What we need is our flat rates and honest traffic plans back. We don't need a "bill-of-frights". We don't need Comcast to try and regulate itself. We don't need all this packet monkeying. What we need is government regulation to step in and tell these people to be honest about their rates.
Just give me MY internet back please.
Comcast admitted to delaying P2P traffic during peak times, but denied that any file-sharing applications were being completely blocked.
This sounds like the typical "non-denial denial", of the classical "weasel words" variety. For it to be true, all they need to show is that there are some file-sharing apple that are sometimes not outright killed. So, for example, if they kill all file-sharing apps after 10 seconds, and kill all BT apps outright, there would still be a few transfers of very short files that would go through, and the above statement wouldn't be a lie. But they'd still be sending RST packets to terminate most of the file transfers. No linux ISOs would ever get through, for example, despite the fact that they're totally legal.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
The reason Comcast wants it is because they want it for all the reason that the original Bill of Rights was considered dangerous: it will be an exclusive enumeration of all the rights you have. All other "rights" will exist at the good will of Comcast. Not to mention that I expect all kinds of weasel words in it that mean that Comcast's Bill of Rights will be nothing more than "You're allowed to use P2P for as long as we say you can, and we're allowed to change our mind at any time and without warning".
I hope this goes down in flames.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
"The Bill of Just Enough Rights So Congress Doesn't Get Involved."
They're trying to evoke an image of the Bill of Rights in the United States, am I right? Which was ratified by the _people who use_ the _government providers'_ network of laws..
Does anyone else see this as some sort of backwards situation? SPIN 2 WIN Comcast...
P.s. why don't we have a fiber optic network yet??
Don't screw with your customers packets.
Problem solved.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
BitTorrent Inc. has no more right to state what users or Comcasts rights are than Comcast had the right to retroactively dictate how the bandwidth they sold to consumers should be used in the first place!
I can really see the EFF going "oh, that's fine then, BitTorrent Inc. said it's 'OK' for them to abuse their users"
The real Bill or Rights in the US is sheredded on a daily basis. You wouldn't even recognize it any more, and what's left requires a lawyer to explain. When the real deal is restored to its rightful place of dignity and respect, and politicians and elected leaders are subject to criminal prosecution for violations thereof, then come talk to me about a stupid (yes, it's stupid) "bill of rights". This makes me sick, really. Just like the dumb airline passenger "bill of rights" that got shot down in New York State just last week.
I for one, am happy comcast throttles p2p traffic. It's perfectly fair when you consider that 90% of comcast's bandwidth is being used by 10% of the users doing p2p, yet everyone is paying (nearly if not exactly) the same price--that's what's not fair. Comcast's throttling simply evens the playing field. You have to consider that when the networks are being saturated, SOMETHING has to give. Personally, I think that they need to lower their monthly throughput limits and charge those who are using the lion's share of the bandwidth the lion's share of the PRICE, but until then, RDP/VNC traffic is far more important than p2p traffic (it requires sub-second responsiveness), chat would be next, then HTTP, email, and p2p down at the bottom. p2p downloads frequently take hours anyway, so why should my RDP/VNC traffic get blocked by some jerk uploading/downloading the latest porn fest? Let the flaming begin!
I don't want a P2P user's bill of rights. I want an ISP subscriber's bill of rights. Top entries:
--
make install -not war
The reason people use them is because they work. They only stop when they stop working (becoming meaningless, or phony enough). As long as people have reason to manipulate us, they will continue to do it.
Unfortunately, there's no way to stop that, though you may be able to stem it a little by highlighting it when someone is misusing words like that.
I think that is why Russia recently passed laws requiring WiFi equipment to be registered, because they know that dynamic networks will be the norm and the only way for individuals to ultimately have information freedom. I must admit I did enjoy broadband speeds when I had DSL/cable, but really do miss the freedom I had to just switch internet providers when I had dial-up. Oh well so goes progress.
when the constitution's Bill of Rights was controversial in its day because many educated people believed that it would work more to limit people's rights than protect them.
They never had common carrier to begin with.
Careful...there is such a thing as an undesirable customer. Comcast could easily say, "You're costing us too much, we don't want your business." Then what?
Comcast is making a wonderful business model for up and coming ISPs such as Copowi (http://www.copowi.com/). Keep screwing with our service and they will continue to be more and more successful as we leave comcast and flock to them. You provide internet access. nothing more. Don't shoot yourself in the foot comcast.
The word "and" was invented a long time ago; use it.
Comcast will have to learn the hard way that bandwidth is (or at least should be) a commodity, and therefore is not to be policed. They sell X GB/month of transfer at a speed of Y mb/s for a price N. A P2P Bill of Rights is absurd - if you want to throttle me, I'll switch providers.
The only thing that's letting them get away with this at the moment is the virtual monopoly most of these ISP's have. Which has a lot to do with them pretending to "own" the last mile, paid for by tax dollars.
It's too much to hope for that we could get some legislation to put these companies in their place...
ISP aren't common carriers. Although in the US they have some protections under the DMCA when it comes to copyrighted material.
Your ISP could block google tomorrow. This is not illegal, unless you have an agreement with them that says they won't. But broadband internet is not the type of product to come with such guarantees.
The ISPs are supposed to act in a "neutral" manner but this does not bear the weight of law.
Tag this 'itssatrap'. You know it is. Comcast has nothing to gain from this upfront. It's their hidden agenda that is making them do this. They do NOT want to proliferate p2p. They want to control it.
Modding Trolls +1 inciteful since 1999
I believe less than 5% of the US has this as an option, with most areas getting less and less options daily, with DSL prices going higher and higher.
In my area (Chicago), which is a very large metro area, you basically have Comcast or nothing else. Seven (yes Seven) years ago you could get full 1.5mbps SDSL at $80/month, but just like all of the local cable companies, most of the local Internet providers got bought out and dropped all of their customers.
Now, the same service is somewhere in the ballpark of $250/month, which is still somewhere in the range of 1/4 of the speed of what cable offers standard.
If the government actually did it's job and did not allow these buyouts / mergers!, competition would still exist and none of us would be having this argument today. Net neutrality and P2P would be a non-issue since people would just pick another option.
It's unfortunate people aren't educated enough to know that it's the politicians that are the problem, and that this will continue until we force them to change things.
Do people even remember when there was more than one option out there and how capitalism actually works then?
When you have a monopoly it is broken, plain and simple. We need to bust up Comcast, Microsoft, you name it, like Ma Bell and then things will start working again, and that will require different politicians in office.
But, this is really a pipe dream since most people just don't get economics (or care to educate themselves) and they'll keep on electing people who won't change a damn thing.
I thought that said "Lando."
Get out of there, Han, it's a trap!
If you can read this, I forgot to post anonymously.
Preamble The Preamble to the Bill of Rights: THE Conventions of a number of the States, having at the time of their putting up with Comcast, expressed a desire, in order to prevent misconstruction or abuse of its powers, that further declaratory and restrictive clauses should be added: And as extending the ground of public confidence in the ISP, will best ensure the beneficent ends of its institution. Articles: 1. Comcast shall be entitled to oversell bandwidth at a ratio of not less than 20 to 1. 2. Comcast shall not upgrade it's infrastructure without additional public funding. 3. Comcast shall have monopoly rights in as many markets as possible. 4. Comcast shall not be liable for anything or to anyone except it's shareholders. 5. The list goes on...
How will they lose something they don't have?
If you keep this up, you'll lose your title of "Smartest Slashdotter".
A "set of rules" is a "Bill of Rights" now?
Liberty in your lifetime
1. "You have the right to remain silent" [we will ignore all complaints anyway].
2. "Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law" [we will log all your packets]
3. You have the right to an attorney [if you can afford one]
And the rights basically end there. I am very suspicious when anyone wants to tell me what rights I have, when they are not a law enforcement official. This is just another way to reword the TOS [Terms of Service] agreement, and make it sound double-plus good.
-With appologies to the Miranda Convention
I trust Comcast in coming up with a P2P bill of rights about as much as I trust the fox in coming up with stipulations for how close it can legally get to the henhouse.
LEGISLATE IT.
Do not trust these slimeballs to police themselves.
"reached an agreement"
read: someone got paid to shove off
Well, if Comcast is too unreasonable about what is "allowed" on their networks, they will end up with a lot of undesirable customers. Bearing in mind economies of scale and the fact that most of their overheads are fixed (eg server/line maintenance costs) losing a substantial chunk of their clientele is bound to hurt. Plus theres an old saying, "nature abhors a vacuum"... I would not be surprised to see a upstart company challenging Comcast if they see a potential to make a profit off these disgruntled customers.
> ...a set of rules that would clarify how a user can use P2P applications...
I don't need clarification. The answer is, as much as I want and in any way I see fit. And I damn sure don't need Comcast or any ISPs involved in any decisions I make as to what I see as fit.
This is a failed attempt at disguising their effort to legitimize themselves as arbiters. They only want their hand in it so they can yank out what they want. And it's a (piss poor) PR move attempting to sweep their present reputation as net.police under the rug.
If I hadn't had experience 5 years ago with Comcast that made me make the decision not to ever have anything to do with them, I'd make that decision now.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
So you're saying that if you're downloading something over a torrent your packets should have the same priority as someone who's watching a YouTube video? That probably explains why YouTube playback is so crappy during peak hours.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Seriously, WTF is Pando and why do I give a crap about them?
This is like "US Government partners with Some Guy from Nowheresville, New Jersey for US Citizen Bill of Rights."
Just goes to show how big a load of crap this so-called bill of rights is. Given that it means jack and they are free to ignore it at will because it will have no force of law.
Yes my packets should have the same priority as someone who is watching a YouTube video, subject to the bandwidth that was advertised to me and that I have paid for.
But if the guy watching youtube doesn't get a minimum number of packets the video will stutter and keep buffering. Basically it will be unwatchable.
But a torrent will just take a bit longer to download. On busses like USB streamed media is actually a different class, isochronous from non latency sensitive transfers which use bulk transfers. It seems likely to me that something like this will have to happen on heavily loaded TCP/IP networks. That way streamed, latency sensitive connections will allocate the bandwidth they need and torrents will take up whatever is left. Which is what happens on USB. I think QOS does it to some extent, but I'm not sure how well that is supported by routers, which would seem to be necessary.
I think a non neutral network will work like this. You go to youtube. The youtube server talks to a box that connects youtube to the network and a allocated a multicast channel, or joins you to an existing one. At the point you have an isochronous channel from youtube to you. Whereas if you have a torrent it will just what bandwidth is left. Bittorrent is good at using whatever bandwidth is available.
If USB was designed according to principle of "Network Neutrality" then every time I tried to copy a large file my USB speakers would stutter and my USB mouse would become unusable. Chucking more bandwidth at the problem wouldn't help either. Bulk transfers, like torrents, are designed to use whatever bandwdth they can.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
fine. So you have no problem with people using comcasts network to host child porn and racist hate sites then?
just asking, because its amazing what sick shit people will try to defend if it means they get to keep stealing music, movies and games.
You need to widen your viewpoint beyond the YouTube vs Bittorrent question to some broader issues
1. As a general principle, WTF gives one user more right to bandwidth then another user when both pay the same for it?
2. If you erode neutrality then surely dollars, not data classes, will decide precedence. Do any of us want an Internet effectively "owned" by Microsoft, AOL and News International?
By narrowing the argument in this way you are failing to consider the wider consequences of any such change
Real happiness lies in the completion of work using your own brains and skills.
They have been making noises about the 'right' to use P2P or whatever protocol. But they aren't saying anything about communicating with whomever we choose at full bandwidth.
You bet its about net neutrality.
Except that they didn't. It was some journalist that fucked up, as usual. If you have a cellphone tower in your back yard you need to register. If you have a wifi router, you don't.
c++;
How could they either support or deny P2P "rights"? No matter what they do to try to stop so-called "P2P", nothing will work. Peer-To-Peer, technologically, means that when two boxen communicate, neither is in control of the other. That describes the entire internet. Every computer decides for itself what data to send and receive, and data can be bundled anyway teh sender wants. The only reason some apps get blocked now is because until now, the programmers trusted that the hardware connections ("ISPs") wouldn't interfere deliberately. If Comcast and cronies come up with some kind of "rights" (i.e., restrictions), it'll just open up a new front in the arms race against malware.
Pavlov wouldn't be so famous if he'd used a can opener instead of a bell.
Write a data transfer app ("P2P") that works like military radio. Mil comm switches between frequencies hundreds of times per second, so that any would-be eavesdropper hears nothing but static or at most, a tiny burst on any one frequency. This can be done with digital communications, also:
Toggle between protocols every few milliseconds. Use all of'em: from http and ftp to the wierd exotic stuff of MMORPGs. Deliberatley route thru multiple "targets" that converge on the reciever.
Eventually, it will be modified to match the shape of "normal" traffic, like to cnn.com, etc, that goes to proprietary server systems. At this point, it looks like a high rate of transfer, but that's all that's unique about it.
This may not be possible right now, but it is the ultimate end of the arms race.
Pavlov wouldn't be so famous if he'd used a can opener instead of a bell.
I will be going to Verizon FiOS because of the upload speeds, and nothing more.
To all those who say Comcast oversells their bandwidth are truly ignorant. People shouldnt be downloading and uploading 24/7. IF they want that get a business account and stop bitching about your freaking residential accounts getting filtered and throttled. It is getting quite ridiculous and to the point you all sound like whiney bitches. Wahahahaha, I can't use my home account to download and upload 24/7 wahahahahaa comcast filters/throttles p2p application wahahahahaha I cant watch the newest movies before it hits the theaters whahahahahaha whahahahahahaha . [insert cussword of choice here] Comcast wahahahahahaha I cant use my internet for constantly downloading/uploading wahahahahahaha comcast sucks wahahahahahaha boohoo grow up and get a business account and stop complaining. You want your cake and eat it too then pay for your cake.That way streamed, latency sensitive connections will allocate the bandwidth they need and torrents will take up whatever is left.
And then somebody will invent a P2P file transfer protocol that disguises itself as a streamed latency sensitive connection. So everyone ends up being back to where they were before.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
I don't know if the guffaw was due to your passionate opining, but you will do well to understand this:
Niger != Nigeria
Sheesh.
But Comcast are being oppressed by the dirty P2P users who take advantage of the generous unlimited service to flood the network and lower the quality of service to those honorable customers who only check email and browse the web, like Comcast^Wgod intended.
[/sarcasm]
I think the way it will end up working is that YouTube pay for allocated bandwidth to the users rather than the users can request bandwidth from YouTube for exactly that reason.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
It's kind of like the British writing the Declaration of Independence.
does this just mean that temporarily comcast is doing the right thing? and they allow themselves to go back to blocking or monitoring whatever they want later? personally i don't think slowing down p2p sharing is a bad thing if it allows better pings for such things that pings are a do or die factor (such as most online games).