Comcast Invests in P2P

AHTuttle writes to mention Comcast, recently under fire for throttling P2P traffic, has decided to invest in a P2P video-delivery startup called GridNetworks. "Seattle-based GridNetworks on Monday said that Comcast would make an unspecified investment in the company and collaborate on developing so-called peer-to-peer file-sharing techniques that are 'friendly' to Internet service providers."

Comments

Re:Meanwhile, I still have issues with BT...

[caffeinemessiah]

still takes over 30 minutes to get a consistent speed greater than 100kbps on a so-called High Speed network!

Slow down there, champ. The BitTorrent protocol uses an approximate tit-for-tat strategy -- more peers will upload to you if you upload to more peers. This can take a while, which is why BT speeds generally trend up slowly, although I'll admit 30 minutes is a bit much even in my experience (I used to have comcast, now have at&t -- they're both crap, in short). It's all explained in this very clear and easy to read paper by Bram Cohen (the original protocol author) : Incentives Build Robustness in BitTorrent (PDF link).

Legal is key

[ViperOrel]

FTFA - it looks like they are focusing on the "legal" downloads and rentals aspect of the application. If I had to guess, they might be heading in the "hey, we provide a legal alternative to BitTorrent, so what's all the fuss" as they drop torrent packets or turn off that traffic all together.

How exactly does one download a rental from a peer?

Re:Legal is key

[Penguinisto]

That's nice - now explain to Joe WarcraftPlayer why he has to endure a forced wait just to get patches. Or explain why in the hell it takes someone 3x as long to grab Fedora Core 9 via BT than it would by grabbing it directly from an overloaded mirror server.

Therein lies the clue you appear to be missing - not all BT traffic is illegal. Bittorrent has shown itself to be one hell of a sweet distribution channel during times when new releases of legit content and applications come out, which takes bandwidth pressure off of mirror servers.

Also, all questions of legality and illegality aside, I honestly don't see any improvements in bandwidth that come from Comcast's forging of RST packets. If anything, it would only increase the amount of crap traffic and excess traffic (mostly caused by peer reconnects, re-establishment of connections lost, seeking new available connections, etc)...

You'll find few if any people in here that have anything against buying legit software. The objections come from two places:

1) Comcast is perfoming 'man-in-the-middle' attacks on their own customers, regardless of whether that attack may be justified (pirated material) or not (legit material). Conceptually, if they can do that, then what's to stop them from pretending to be you in any other context? It's a violation of many things, including existing anti-hacking laws.

2) What right does Comcast have to interfere with legitimate traffic?

I already know the argument - it's their network, take it or leave it... great: so let's strip the artificial monopolies they've been granted by state and local government, and remove any special privileges that they've been enjoying from said governments. Until they are willing to give those up, then they should and must be subject to us, the customer base.

/P