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Comcast, Cox Slow BitTorrent Traffic All Day
narramissic writes "A study by the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems found that Comcast and Cox Communications are slowing BitTorrent traffic at all times of day, not just peak hours. Comcast was found to be interrupting at least 30% of BitTorrent upload attempts around the clock. At noon, Comcast was interfering with more than 80% of BitTorrent traffic, but it was also slowing more than 60% of BitTorrent traffic at other times, including midnight, 3 a.m. and 8 p.m. Eastern Time in the U.S., the time zone where Comcast is based. Cox was interfering with 100% of the BitTorrent traffic at 1 a.m., 4 a.m. and 5 a.m. Eastern Time. Comcast spokeswoman Sena Fitzmaurice downplayed the results saying, 'P-to-p traffic doesn't necessarily follow normal traffic flows.'"
So now I am not allowed to use my rights to download GPL'd software or public domain software now? Implying that P2P is all illegal copying is incorrect and makes you look misinformed. P2P can contain free-to-copy files along with not-free-to-copy files as can HTTP/FTP/Etc. So can CDs, Hard disks, Floppy Disks, Cassette Tapes, Flash drives, the list goes on and on. Just because some people use knives to kill people shouldn't mean that we have to now use forks to cut our meat.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
I hate everything about Cox. Their customer service is horrible and not at all knowledgeable. I had to explain to the Cox agent how much I was paying for cable while she was looking at my account. I've had mistakes made in my service, slow speeds, long wait times, and billing mistakes. Comcast was much, much better to work with, and if that doesn't give you a good idea about how bad Cox was, nothing really will.
On the internet end it's really slow, too. On their highest tier of home internet service, I get 40 kps on bittorrent and no more than 100 for regular downloads from the internet.
I have Cox and run bittorrent 24/7 and have never had bandwidth problems at all. Are you maxing out your upstream? If so, you could be choking your internet connection. I always set my bittorrent client to upload at about 10KB less than my maximum upstream. If I let it go to maximum, everything grinds to a halt.
Now I shouldn't be defending them because I have Cox, but I'd just like to say I get anywhere from 30-300kBps when downloading torrents which is not terrible but ultimately lags far behind what I could get back in the urban area where my parents live that uses Bright House.
"There is more illegal software than legal software."
I would like to see a citation..and perhaps a clarification by what 'software' means in that sentence. I am unaware of any illegal software, except software that circumnavigates protections.
More and more service are using bit torrent, Blizzard spring to mind.
I ahve worked for companies that use bit torrents to send information out to there home workers.
Switching isn't the correct answer because of the limited choices, and you know it.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
This is the only thing I have seen that will allow me to get speeds on torrent networks where they should be. If I didn't do this Cox cable red flag me for days and my internet drags for a couple of days until they decided to uncap me. I would have not been able to get Kubuntu 8.04 when it launched without using bit-torrent so don't give me the bit-torrent=pirate bullsh*t. All the Http and FTP distribution servers were overloaded that day.
Actually, a few monopolies do own most of the internet. After all, they're the ones who paid for the hi-speed backbones that everyone uses. Second to them is universities and the government.
Of course that doesn't change the fact that they offer X kbps d/l speed, but only give it to you when they feel like it, which is seldom if ever. I wonder though, what are good bittorrent speeds on a cable connection? How do you know if you're getting throttled?
And one other thing, slightly off topic, but why does firefox on linux download from the same http server 3x as fast as firefox on windows? (750KBps linux, 250KBps windows)
The path to enlightenment is truly through homemade drugs!
Including me. In my area, it's Comcast or nothing, literally. As soon as anybody has any other type of hi-speed Internet, I'd love to switch to them. Comcast has the right to be as lousy as they want, cause they're a effing MONOPOLY, which is WRONG. Argh!
This is not hatred. This is retribution. This is not revenge. This is justice.
SerpentMage, are you a total idiot or do you just play on these boards??!!! Seriously, don't give me crap like "two way satellite" because if you knew anything about internet service that is about as useless as a hole in my foot. Satellite internet has horrible lag/latency issues and is just unacceptable for my use. When I pay for high speed internet and I get internet that is throttled then I don't get what I paid for and I am blatantly being robbed. How would you feel if you knew that the highway in your city had a speed limit of 60mph but when you get on it the city decides to put out some pace cop cars and they prevent anyone from going more than 20mph...I'm pretty sure you'd be pissed. It is one thing if the traffic built up because of too many cars and that caused things to slow down but yet another when they do it on purpose. Even in that situation I would expect the city to use the tax revenue to build a bigger highway to once again increase the speeds of the cars traveling. Well, these fucking ISPs are not doing anything for us other than steal our money. They decrease the speeds yet lie to us that we get high speeds and then they take our money and don't provide improved and better pipes to increase the speeds to match their advertising and promises. Fuck Comcrap and fuck all of you idiots who think that what they do is ok.
What about Linux? I download Ubuntu install DVDs via BitTorrent.
How about music and movies which I've bought? There are now at least two major services through which I can buy a movie online, and download it via BitTorrent. Allow me to take a moment to mock you: Just because the internet existed when you were born does not mean that free music and movies are a birthright. And just because you were senile before the Internet existed does not mean that a fucking protocol is the devil.
Remember -- these fucktards are throttling BitTorrent, which is a protocol. It happens to be popular among filesharing, but this is not the way to go about stopping these "thieves". And fuck your nitpicking - copying is stealing. Period. Fuck your generalizing. Some things are actually public domain, and copying is legal, and is what the original author intended.
In fact, copying stuff which I bought, to other devices which I own, so that I can enjoy it for myself, is also legal, but often prevented by DRM, because morons like you couldn't wrap your head around the difference between copying and copyright infringement, let alone stealing.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Well, my BitTorrents of Ubuntu, Slackware and such aren't "stealing" a single thing from a single person by _any_ definition.
The _stupid_ thing about this disruption is that it actually causes the transfers to use _more_ bandwidth.
Consider:
The participant will _still_ download the entire content.
The participant will, for every segment downloaded, now have several false starts and partial segment transfers.
Participants who elect to stop their transfers will most likely go to another means (http etc) of transfer so 100% of the content will be transferred again on top of the partial transfer that was aborted.
A given provider pays cash money only for bandwidth usage that "crosses" the boundary of their service. So every Comcast/Cox customer who would have gotten a percentage of their transfer from a peer on the same service instead gets their transfer from original source, raising Comcast/Cox/etc's upstream service usage.
Now a big company like comcast _may_ be able to soak some of this cost in proxy space so that several transferers are actually not leaving their net, but are instead getting the contents from their proxy. But that would make Comcast/Cox/etc's proxy server the agent of "illegal sharing" in those cases where the content was infringing, so I doubt they are doing that to any useful extent.
As an added bonus, by interrupting the TCP connections, they _do_ prevent the TCP window sizes from scaling up to speed, but they don't prevent the outstanding window-size-worth of packets to be delivered and discarded by the target host. That is, by inserting the reset artificially, _neither_ side had the opportunity to discard their "already queued" packets, so that buffer skid goes all the way across the internet, costing time and money and congestion but now artificially devoid of benefit to anyone.
So by sandbagging their own customers they are actually raising their bandwidth costs and in-network infrastructure usage. And an infinite number of their customers can raise their "simultaneous connections per torrent" for free. I raised my limit to something like 200 in each direction, which restored my throughput and cost Comcast one hell of a pile of churn. [I also use advanced packet shaping where my packets leave my network and hit the wire, ensuring that I never "drop" a connection request locally due to modem buffer sizes etc.]
The technique being used by the provider is a classic foot bullet by every technical measure.
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press