FCC Reports Comcast P2P Blocking Was More Widespread

bob charlton from 66 tips us to a ComputerWorld story about FCC Chairman Kevin Martin, who has testified that Comcast's P2P traffic management occurred even when network congestion wasn't an issue, contrary to the ISP's claims. After defending its actions and being investigated by the FCC over the past few months, Comcast has tried to repair its image by making nice with BitTorrent and working towards a P2P Bill of Rights. Quoting: "'It does not appear that this technique was used only to occasionally delay traffic at particular nodes suffering from network congestion at that time,' Martin told the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee. 'Based on testimony we've received thus far, this equipment was typically deployed over a wider geographic area or system, and is not even capable of knowing when an individual ... segment of the network is congested.'

Comments

Comcast getting their just desserts

[Urthwhyte]

Comcast: Hating our customers since 1963

Re:Comcast getting their just desserts

[Tuoqui]

Tag this: Billofrestrictions

In other news...

[Lunix Nutcase]

The National Weather Service Reports that the Sky is Blue

Re:In other news...

[Anonymous Coward]

The National Weather Service Reports that the Sky is Blue [citation needed]

Suits don't know

[o1d5ch001]

Its always curious when the suits of big ISPs talk about something they really don't understand. I worked at a large International ISP, and everyone from the Ops Manager up didn't understand the technology. They were "results oriented" and they apparently didn't need to know.

So, I can just imagine what they folks at the top were being told by "middle management".

Sigh.

And imagine, no one wanted Block D of the wireless spectrum to deliver wireless services and provide real alternatives. The Internet has been bought and sold to the highest bidders, and now we all have to live with the moronic decisions being made by people who are only interested in squeezing as much revenue of the porn addled, facebook addicted, morons paying the bills.

Re:Suits don't know

[MarcQuadra]

The -responsible- thing to do would be to use QoS to make all the P2P streams a lower priority than HTTP.

Instead, they're actively (and randomly) interrupting P2P and causing -all- P2P traffic to fail, even at 4AM.

The sad thing is, I know exactly why this is happening. There's someone (or a group of people) who honestly believe that 'P2P is eating all our bandwidth' and that if they use this blocking method, it'll all be OK.

I worked at a place where the Network Manager would see what sites were 'eating all the bandwidth' and just knock them down to 56Kbits/sec for the whole place. What he didn't understand is that -using your bandwidth is a good thing-, it means you're not paying for more than you use. 'blocking' P2P or 'top-talkers' just makes the experience on a network suck, there are much more effective and subtle ways to manage traffic that quietly make the traffic you want more important than the traffic you don't want interfering.

Re:Suits don't know

[__aailob1448]

You're absolutely right about QoS.

What he didn't understand is that -using your bandwidth is a good thing-, it means you're not paying for more than you use.

This is not accurate, however. The standard procedure when you are Comcast and are peering with Tier1 people like ATT and Cogent is to pay them money for each gig of data you send on to their network and vice versa. So you always want people to be sending packets to your network and you hate those pesky uploaders who are sending them out packets out of it.

In effect, packet flow is money flow and it flows to and from Comcast at the whim of the users. That's why upload bandwidth is insultingly low compared to download bandwidth and business connections cost so much. When comcast prohibits running servers and interferes with p2p, there is an immediate, concrete and CONTROLLABLE effect on the money they make.

Greed is now seeking a balance with customer acceptance.

Re:Suits don't know

[illumin8]

The sad thing is, I know exactly why this is happening. There's someone (or a group of people) who honestly believe that 'P2P is eating all our bandwidth' and that if they use this blocking method, it'll all be OK.

It's much more nefarious than that. To understand why Comcast prevents people from uploading (seeding) torrents, but doesn't prevent people from downloading torrents, you need to understand how peering agreements between large backbone internet providers work.

ISP A (let's call them Comcast) wants to peer (exchange traffic) with ISP B (let's call them AT&T). So Comcast and AT&T both run a big fat pipe to each other, and the agreement is written like this:

If Comcast sends (uploads) more traffic to AT&T's network, they have to cut a check to AT&T like they were a customer, to pay for the traffic that is transitting AT&T's network. If AT&T sends (uploads) more traffic to Comcast, then it's the other way around. AT&T has to cut a check to Comcast for the traffic that is transitting Comcast's network.

So, you see, some "creative" accountants, who probably came over from Enron or Worldcom, looked at these peering agreements and said "hey, if we can just reduce or eliminate our outbound traffic, but keep our inbound traffic high, we can game the system and make $$$$."

In other words, Comcast is just gaming the system. This is a stupid move because the backbone providers they peer with will simply write new contracts when they are up for renewal, and Comcast will end up paying through the nose for bandwidth, in order for them to recoup all of their losses. But it looks good to shareholders and creates temporary short-term gains, which allows executives to retire with golden parachutes once the market turns sour, which it inevitably will.

Mark my words, Comcast will be the next Enron/Worldcom fiasco. Creative accounting cooking the books short-term by gaming the system. It always comes back to haunt you.

Surprised?

[M0bius]

Who is surprised by this revelation? From initial denial to any traffic shaping, to stacking the hearing with payed shills, Comcast has proven they are willing to do whatever it takes to oversell their service and then bottleneck it to keep from having to make infrastructure upgrades. I wouldn't be shocked if they rubbed the blood of sacrificed newborn children onto their fiber if it would save them a buck or two. Go Comcast!

Re:Surprised?

[deepershade]

Comment might have been funnier if you'd have said 'blood of a virgin', but with this being Slashdot, i can imagine that would strike a little too close to home for most :)

Re:fixed?

[Raineer]

I _still_ only get 20kb/s on my Comcast line...

They said they are working with BT, and working on this "bill of rights", and also admitting to slowing down the throttling.

I have never seen them say they are stopping such activities.

"Blocking"

[AsnFkr]

I'm convinced instead of "blocking" some customers they simapily drove them to bad service so they would leave. I am an example of this:

I run lots of torrents, and have for years. I have always had a very very stable line with Prestige Digital Cable, whom was bought by Adelphia whom was eventually bought by Comcast. My service with Comcast started out bad, as the upload speeds were cut in half and the bill was almost doubled (over a course of 6 months) but the actual line was very very stable. I didn't pay for a static IP, but I had the same IP address for a very long time, as most people tend to have. Eventually one day my IP shifted to a new subnet which gave like 90% packet loss (tested 24/hrs a day and averaged out with some Linus scripting). I ran my PC straight into the modem (removing the Linksys router) and it gave me an IP on the old and trusted subnet, with no packet loss at all. When I hooked the router up it associated it's MAC and put me on the bad one again. So I cloned the PC's MAC to the router, and bada-bing I'm on the good subnet and back to my torrents. A few weeks go by and all of a sudden that MAC addy is being pushed onto the bad subnet. I clone another MAC addy and up onto the good subnet I go, and around and around we go. Eventually I got sick of it and canceled the service all together. When I called to cancel the woman was very friendly until she had a chance to pull up my account info, they she just told me "Your service is off. Goodbye, click", leading me to wonder if there is actually a note in my account that has me marked as a high-traffic user.

I realize most of this is based on paranoid speculation, so take it for what it's worth, but to be fair another friend of mine in the same town had the SAME EXACT situation take place. Just seems a little fishy.

Re:"Blocking"

[Anonymous Coward]

Comcast also has been blocking VPN traffic - and denying it. It took a call from VP of IT with a threat to pull all corporate business before they relented and stopped this in my area.

Re:"Blocking"

[jd]

Most places that have high-speed Internet have only one, or perhaps two, actual ISPs. There may be a few low-speed ISPs around (eg: 802.11b wireless) and there might also be one or two resellers of the high-speed bandwidth, but the odds are fairly high that if you've upset one ISP, that confidential information will somehow appear on the desk of all the other ISPs. The odds are much much greater for resellers. Choice in the ISP world is very limited and what appears to be choice will often be an illusion, at least in the general consumer market.

When you get into the big money game, then the rules are different. You have choices when you start talking T1s or above. Not, as a rule, always a good set of choices, and again most of the smaller companies have long-since been bought out. You might have three or four real, genuine, independent ISPs to choose from. They charge the Earth, may ignore their own quality of service guarantees (one company I worked for got bit by the small-print), and cusomer service is almost as bad as the domestic service, but appear to show a marginally higher interest in keeping you as a customer.

Re:"Blocking"

[nehumanuscrede]

This kind of behavior actually makes more sense from a Comcast perspective.

Not that I agree with it mind you, it's simply the cheaper alternative when
faced with bandwidth limiting or expanding your infrastructure.

If you can identify what may cause serious headaches for your network
and / or your available bandwidth you are simply one step closer to
making the call to minimize it's effect by whatever means you have available.

In this case, the degradation of the P2P applications in the hope that
the masses ' give up ' on technology that obviously doesn't work
well. When, in fact, it works wonderfully when Comcast isn't meddling
with it. Once the majority of users give up on it, that part of your
network headache has been dealt with and you can move on to the next one.

Problem is, what is the next one ?

Competing VOIP applications ? High-Def video content ? Anything that
isn't considered ' Comcastic ' ? Ever wonder why your VOIP application
doesn't work as well as it should ? Is is shoddy programming or shady
ISP's degrading the service so you'll use their own product instead ? Tin
hat ? Probably. I will not put it past any company anymore. The ever
increasing profit margin trumps all. Ethics, honor, respect. All of it.
It's pathetic really.

It's lovely that Comcast decided to throw in the towel and wants to make
it all go away. The real problem is it took them getting CAUGHT before it
happened. These aren't the actions of a company who wants to make the
internet a better and equal place for everyone. These are the actions of
a company who are now worried their actions mightget the government involved
and REALLY start causing problems when it comes to network management.

Not that any fine ( even a record setting one ) would even make them flinch.
Think about how much money Comcast pulls in monthly. The fine would have to
be several Billion dollars before they would even notice it.

The idea there is broad-band level competition is laughable. I have two
choices. Comcast or Verizon DSL across a copper plant that is so old
and degraded ( they bought it from GTE ) that I would set a world record
if my download speeds exceeded 1MB down. When it worked at all that is.

Problem with the DSL line ? Call the DSL folks. Oh no ! It's not our
DSL service, it's the copper phone lines! Call the phone company ! Oh
noes ! DSL problems ? It can't be the phone lines, call the DSL folks !
Wash / rinse and repeat until your sanity catches fire.

Been there, done that.

As much as I hate to say it, the major ISP's NEED some regulation or
oversight in how they provide service. It's pretty obvious they can't
be trusted to police themselves. Comcast is the poster child of that
idea much to their dismayI'm sure.

Think the other ISP's aren't doing something similar ? Please.
They just haven't been caught yet.

Re:"Blocking"

[ion.simon.c]

I had read that as of late 2007, such exclusivity agreements are no longer "legal".

Ars makes a mention in this article, but I can't be arsed to find a press release or Order on the FCC's site.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080319-fcc-overhauls-its-broadband-data-as-eu-points-and-laughs.html

Sigh

[Fatal67]

You would hope the chairman of the FCC wouldn't be so clueless. Well, whoever told him the things he is repeating at least.

Anyone that has actually configured a sandvine box knows very well that you can set rules to run at any time they want. Anyone even minimally monitoring their network knows when their network is congested and can apply rules during those times.

To say that the sandvine isn't network aware is false. You would think that the chairman would have contacted the manufacturer or at least had an aide go to the website.

Re:Bittorrent unblocked

[alphasubzero949]

Bad ISPs

Of Course It's Deliberate

[BitHive]

Last month I got a phone call from a Comcast robot telling me my account was past due. At the time I did not realize that an autopayment had gone through 7 days earlier, so I immediately went and paid my balance online.

A few days later my bank calls and tells me one of my accounts is overdrawn. Not Comcast's fault, but I ask the bank rep--did the autopayment actually go through? Yes it did.

So I got on a live chat with a Comcast support agent who tells me that I was not double-billed, I was just charged twice for the same amount successfully. He was not authorized to issue a credit from his "location" so I called the billing department, where a rep told me the billing department does not have the ability to change autopayment settings.

When I mentioned the robot call that I should never have received and asked if he could tell a manager to look into it, his tone of voice conveyed such disbelief and confusion that at first I thought I'd misspoke and asked him what kind of underwear he had on or something. Then he tried to sell me phone service.

Coincidence?

P2p blocking is old hat at Comcast

[Anonymous Coward]

It's funny that the chairman of the FCC gets involved when a protocol that is primarily used for copyright violation gets throttled, but nobody cares about the way Comcast manipulates SMTP traffic, as they have for many years.

The semi-random port-blocking on 25 that they do often seems designed to optimize the ability of worms and viruses to spread while simultaneously forcing all legitimate traffic through their (failure prone) mailservers.

I had a lot of conversations with them about it and eventually gave up trying to edjumacate their underpaid moronic techs. Since verizon figured out how to get FIOS to my house (no small technical feat) I switched to them... at least they are competent evil. Well, by comparison anyway.

Wow, my posts aren't usually this cynical.

Anonymous Coward.

[Anonymous Coward]

Comcast: Hating our customers since 1963 I've worked for Comcast since the mid-eighties. Over the last few years everything has really went to pot. Miserable managers who lie as easily as talk, faked technical and management reports are the norm. You can't survive without doing this. I really believe it started when we picked up a lot of former AOL and TCI/AT&T guys. After that the company culture, which wasn't stellar to start with, took a serious wrong turn.

Anyway, as far as the packet meddling: it's done by a Sandvine box. There's thousands of them nationwide. There's one wherever there's a CMTS (Cisco UBR or Arris Cadant router) That means there's one in your neighborhood.

Re:Anonymous Coward.

[ptrace]

It's interesting that a whitepaper provided by Sandvine posits that their equipment actually protects Net Neutrality with "fair allocation of network resources between potentially competing uses of the network." Stating, "the greedy nature of applications and the over-subscription model of the Internet challenges network operators and the regulatory environment as they strive to maintain Internet freedoms that subscribers expect from the Industry". http://www.sandvine.com/general/getfile.asp?FILEID=37

Can you believe it? I'm sure Comcast execs bought right into this.

Re:Anonymous Coward.

[electrictroy]

Yes, sometimes Comcast provides good service. For example one morning I turned-on my television and discovered instead of my usual 15-channel service, I had 70-channel service. I was paying $7 a month (plus tax) for 70 channels!

Of course this was an ACCIDENT. It was not the result of a genuine desire by Comcast to make me happy.

Re:To qoute Eminem...

[tepples]

To qoute Eminem... The red one or the yellow one? The pinkish-white one with the yellow hair.

Re:Bittorrent unblocked

[ciscoguy01]

That site is badly out of date and cannot be relied on.

Comcast No (does not limit BitTorrent bandwidth)

Which they clearly have bought Sandvine.com equipment specifically to do.

Re:You worked at comsuck

[dw604]

Dude, it's not his company... even if it were, you're still an ass. Are we still making fun of AOL these days?