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.'"

Comments

Re:Good

[Darkness404]

copying is stealing. Period.

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.

Re:I have Cox High Speed

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Low sample size for Cox

[vsage3]

Here is a link to the actual study (toward the bottom are the pertinent charts). Looking at the third pair of bar graphs, they readily admit

Note that the data for Cox is more noisy than Comcast, due to the smaller number of measured hosts. In fact, the "100%" number for Cox comes from a whopping sample size of TWO.

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.

Re:Good

[geekoid]

"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.

Re:Good

[YellowMatterCustard]

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!

Stupid Putative Waste (comcast self-screw progrom)

[IBitOBear]

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.