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Comcast Has 30 Days To 'Fess Up About P2P Throttling
negRo_slim writes with some welcome news from Ars Technica: "Comcast has 30 days to disclose the details of its 'unreasonable network management practices' to the Federal Communications Commission, the agency warned Wednesday morning as it released its full, 67-page Order. As FCC Chair Kevin Martin said it would, the Commission's Order rejects the ISP giant's insistence that its handling of peer-to-peer applications was necessary. 'We conclude that the company's discriminatory and arbitrary practice unduly squelches the dynamic benefits of an open and accessible Internet,' the agency declares." And from reader JagsLive comes news that Comcast has a different plan in place to deal with heavy bandwidth users: slow traffic for up to 20 minutes at a time to users who are grabbing the most bits.
Comcast's problem has got me thinking, has anyone implemented a QOS mechanism that works like *nix CPU time allocation? In simple terms that's where a task's priority is determined as an inverse function of the amount of CPU time it wants. It seems to me the same thing should work just fine for bandwidth allocation. You just let interactive connections have as much as they want, and the continuous hogs get whatever is left - but you do this in a protocol-agnostic way that is based solely on demand.
But: this only would be appropriate if your goal is to deliver maximal performance under full link utilization. I don't know if this is a real problem for the cable providers - I doubt if last-mile congestion is as big an issue as people think. Probably they are more concerned about reducing their total cost for bandwidth to the internet. In that case the strategy of temporarily throttling the hogs seems reasonable and fair because it is protocol-agnostic, but ONLY if the specifics of this mechanism are disclosed to the customer, and this service is NOT advertised as "unlimited".
Awesome. So now I can stop my DOS attacks for 20 minutes at a time, and let comcast take over?
What is the FCC going to do...Send another strongly worded letter?
Seriously, I want to see something actually happen for once.
The greatest revenge in life is massive success.
And from reader JagsLive comes news that Comcast has a different plan in place to deal with heavy bandwidth users: slow traffic for up to 20 minutes at a time to users who are grabbing the most bits.
That's still messed up, and I would think that they're opening themselves up to lawsuits. They're advertising a service at up to a certain speed, and then purposefully throttling it when an user attempts to use that speed.
They either need to raise prices, quit overselling, or put up with users using all of what was sold to them.
why not (gasp!) improve your infrastructure, rather than treating your customers like cattle? If you (by you I mean Comcast) don't do it, your competitors will.
How are folks verifying and actually proving the ISPs are throttling traffic instead of the traffic being slow because of heavy use in the area? How do you prove something like this to a regulator?
Is anybody really happy that the FCC is asserting authority over the internet? I kind of preferred it being run by the IETF.
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
The article says nothing about the consequences. This is just another bullshit "warning" to Comcast with ZERO to back it up.
If I'm late with a child support payment, my license gets suspended. Meanwhile, if a corporate entity is late with some sort of government demand, jack shit happens. Fucking great.
Is there some reason why they aren't asking Time Warner, Cox, AT&T and others each about their practices? The best reason I can think of is that Comcast was caught sending the RSTs.
If the internet is to be free of this sort of tainted service, the protocols that the internet was built on need to be followed and implemented in good faith. Any deviations need to be made crystal clear so we consumers and businesses can make informed decisions about the tradeoffs. Comcast, I'm not just looking at you.
Methinks Kevin Martin is going to be running for public office soon. Or maybe I'm just so cynical that whenever I see a government agency actually working in my interest I start looking for ulterior motives...
"42"
Just charge the heavy users more. Doy. Problem solved.
The FCC rejects Comcast's insistence that it does not have the authority to take these steps.
Want to royally piss off any governmental agency? Tell them they don't have the authority to do what they're doing. They'll find SOME way to get you.
I'm a big tall mofo.
for instance. The minute Starbucks stock stopped earning gobs of money, the greedy investors got cold feet and ditched their shares. What we need to do to battle Comcast is not to go through the FCC, but to scare the investors. We know we can't convince subscribers to give up the service, so we should hit them in the ball sack.
The New Comcast ToC is clear and concise:
You can pay for all the bandwidth that you want
as long as you don't use it.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Comcast cannot exist without the deals it makes with local governments for their monopoly. Can't we just make sure our local franchise agreements include fairness and net neutrality, the next time we negotiate? Then if they default on that agreement, they lose their access (or whatever else the contract specifies).
That sounds a lot teethier than anything FCC could do.
What's wrong with this idea? All I can think of is that it would be slow to implement (I think my city's current Comcast franchise lasts until 2017, and that seems eternal).
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
For everyone who hates Comcast so much go out and try to get a different cable company in say Time Warner Cable. Even if they are not better they will send a message that you don't like comcast, and if TimeWarner was smart and realize wow these people really fought hard against bad service, perhaps we should make sure our service is better. If not do it again, say with Cablevision (if they are still around) Going Boo Hoo on slashdot does nothing. You need to go out knock on some doors talk to your local politicians, etc... To get change. You can whine and complain all you want all you are is a dissatisfied minority to comcast, if you get people and government behind you then you are a force.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
"Comcast has 30 days to disclose the details of its 'unreasonable network management practices'
I can hear it now... "But our practices are all perfectly reasonable, your Honor, we do not practice unreasonable practices here at Comcast."
I'm sorry, but asking a government run entity to enforce the good nature of a free an open internet society is the WRONG way to go. If you are unhappy with Comcast service, or how they manage their network, you have the right, the capitalistic obligation as a consumer to vote with your wallet. Asking the G-man to step in and make the nasty corporation deliver you a different product is a bad precedent here. Most will bicker and complain that "but there isn't any competition in my area", my response is: start your own ISP! That's the great thing about this country, if you dont like how someone else runs their business, you can always try to improve upon it. Hey, you might even succeed and make a few bucks -- that is if pencil pushers up in washington don't force a ton of regulation down on you, driving your costs up before you even roll out services.
Martin: Will you pretty please stop throttling packets?
Comcast: NO
Martin: Aw come on..
Comcast: NO
Martin: I'll be your friend..
What a joke, FCC commissioners should have technical prowess. Not a bunch of dimwitted retards who know NOTHING about the underlying technology they oversee.
"I bow to no man" - Riddick
Naturally.
You can only be young once. But you can always be immature.
That is a pretty wild idea. It's so wild I just might try it if there was another cable company in my area.
Since the FCC has made it clear that ISPs shouldn't be allowed to discriminate against users based on the apps they choose to use, and they're already pissed at Comcast, now is the time to kick it up a notch and use the same argument to demand the opening of blocked web/e-mail ports and an invalidation of TOS terms that ban servers. Bandwidth is bandwidth, if I want to run a web server or my own e-mail server then no one should be able to stop me. The system of traffic management they claim to be moving to in the article should work just as well for users running servers. Of course, they falsely advertise it as unlimited usage at a certain bandwidth and, thus, shouldn't be allowed to throttle traffic in the first place but that's a whole other battle in the war against corrupt telecomm companies.
Rules of Conduct:
#1 - The DM is always right.
#2 - If the DM is wrong, see rule #1
How can I put Time Warner in their place? What data do I need to collect? Are there law firms I should contact with the data who would be likely to pursue a class action lawsuit? Paying to be abused like this is outrageous.
NATIONALIZE Comcast
Boobs at least
http://www.npr.org/blogs/visibleman/2008/07/closing_the_books_on_janets_wa.html
"So, a Philly appeals court has tossed out the $550,000 indecency fine the FCC hit up CBS with after Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction" during the halftime of the 2004 Super Bowl."
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Now while I am a customer, I must ask who their real customers are.
Would Comcast treat their real customers the way they treat their subscribers? By the real customers I mean their advertisers who shell out millions on deals to run ads at peak watch times, i.e. the super bowl, the victoria's secret lingerie show, the martha stewart christmas special.
Should their cable TV viewers then be asked to pay more during these events?
It's Comcastic!
Wired is running a good story critizing the FCC's release, saying they are giving permission to ISP's to block content they feel is "illegal"
From wired...
"We also note that because consumers are entitled to access the lawful Internet content of their choice, providers, consistent with federal policy, may block transmissions of illegal content (e.g., child pornography) or transmissions that violate copyright law. To the extent, however, that providers choose to utilize practices that are not application or content neutral, the risk to the open nature of the internet is particularly acute and the danger of network management practices being used to further anticompetitive ends is strong."
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/08/analysis-fcc-co.html
I'd hate to consider the financial consequences of getting recruited into a botnet. Could you imagine finding out that you have a virus when you receive a $200+ cable bill?
greed@All_Evils:~#
In 2001 when I moved to Fresno, CA, my cable provider was MediaOne.
That turned into AT&T Roadrunner.
That turned into AT&T Broadband.
That turned into Comcast.
This was in the span of, what, a year and a half, maybe?
That's a brief snapshot of what happened to smaller cable companies once broadband started to take off. Most were gobbled and re-gobbled, and now we have a lot of areas where Comcast (or some other herculean-sized cable provider) is the only provider in the area.
'a';DROP TABLE users; SELECT * FROM DATA WHERE name LIKE '%'... if you're reading this, it didn't work.
I haven't confirmed this, but I think this is what happens at my parent's house. They have Time Warner Cable's regular Road Runner service. Any time we do any uploading that's more than, say, a small photo album, we get cronked for speed for a good 15 or 20 minutes. It affects both upload and download speed. Ping times get a little laggy as well.
Sources I know inside Comcast say the Sandvine throttling has Greatly reduced their peering costs with AT&T and increased profits. The terms of the AT&T-Comcast broadband merger locked Comcast into using AT&T transit for a lot of their traffic.
This is about their desire to purchase as little bandwidth as possible and nothing else. They can easily justify this by creating "congestion" on their network but it is all about profit (duh).
"And from reader JagsLive comes news that Comcast has a different plan in place to deal with heavy bandwidth users: slow traffic for up to 20 minutes at a time to users who are grabbing the most bits."
But they'll continue to sell it as though this weren't so. They intend to continue perpetrating the fraud they've come to enjoy. While some aspects of this fall under FCC jurisdiction, the fraudulent action of refusing -- not merely failing -- to provide the service they've sold falls under FTC jurisdiction. The FCC is doing better than it has, but still lags. The FTC has been kicking ass for a decade now and shows no sign of letting up.
It just takes one good class action suit against Comcast that gets picked up by a state's Attorney General, and having that AT and the lead counsel for the suit take it to the FTC, and Comcast will end up begging for the used bits from every mom & pop dial-up in the US.
Both presidential candidates are known to keep themselves as outsiders when it comes to the currently unprecedented level of govermental-corporate incest. When the present administration falls, an entire network of croneyism will fall too. There will be sacrificial corporate heads and nads. The astutue sufferer of Comcast's opticalfibersclerosis will take heed, and find or build a suitable bandwagon. Should be a downhill ride.
There should be a "Bandwidth Industry vs. The People" site, much like "The Recording Industry vs. The People". Only this time with a decidedly offensive bent, and tips on forming class actions and enlisting states' AGs as well as filing complaints with the FTC.
Stop spam, a major waste of bandwidth, to solve the supposed problem? Oh no, too hard. Besides, some spammers are downstream customers and the recipients are private and business customers. If that wasted bandwidth shows up buried in the lossage numbers they use to justify their next pseudo-legal FUBAR, well that just gets more people closer to their arbitrary cut-off earning them the 20 minute Time Out. I certainly someone tracks who gets the 20 minute notice and who doesn't, and which of those run P2P and which use as much or more bandwidth but not P2P. They can't shoot the sitting ducks like a bad hunter, they'll try to snatch those ducks underwater from where they sit like a fat alligator. A few decoys on "problem" and "non-problem" lines, with DPI detection and data recording for compariops, and Comcast could be forced to sell off enough shares that customers become the major shareholders.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
I admit I didnt read the article. Therefore, I have to ask... why does it take 67 pages of a document to say "bad dog, tell me what you did wrong"?
It must also disclose what the company's new network management system will look like.
So, does this mean that the FCC had already made the assumption that Comcast is going to use another method to throttle traffic? If the FCC already knows, then what is the FCC exactly fighting for? Because it definitely isn't fighting for net neutrality.
Instead of squelching P2P traffic, kill all the worms, viruses and botnets... I've been trying to tell them how to do it with their existing equipment for many years now.
I'd estimate around 80% of Comcast's bandwidth is malicious packets, based on my firewall logs. Hire somebody competent - by offering a decent wage - and they can kill all that crap off and everybody wins.
But Comcast is so incredibly cheap and technically incompetent they are going after their best customers instead. If it weren't for their geographic monopoly they'd die off like the dinosaurs - Oh, wait, look here, I personally know over a dozen people who've switched to FiOS because of Comcast's craptacular service, how about that!
Comcast turned off my internet due to violation of AUP. Bastards didn't even call or email me and my website went down for three days while I worked it out. Called up their enforcement wing several time and each time was greeted by an english speaking, male, heavy set, mafioso type, you can just picture them sitting there with a the receiver engulfed in one big paw. Of course normal calls to comcast go to some offshore agency with bizarre accents and indeterminate sex. But I digress. So I wasn't using that much bandwith for p2p, maybe 200kB/sec, the rest was dedicated to an online backup service. I don't have any way to limit bandwidth on the online backup service, since it runs on windows and doesn't have a lever for it. So I turned it off for a while, but then had a bunch of new content and programs so had to turn it back on again. So it's happily been pumping almost 1 megabyte/sec over the line for the past 4 months. No calls from comcast, no AUP violations, not a twitter. So one has to wonder who's financing the mafioso AUP wing of comcast, I mean follow the money and I'm sure a good percentage is coming from MPAA or RIAA. BTW, it's not like I was downloading anything legal, strictly expensive pirated software (Photoshop CS Master suite, Autodesk with all the goodies, dozens of first run movies mostly telecined. Good stuff. )
www.aboutthescene.com
whenever I even download a torrent, regardless of whether I'm seeding or not, they completely choke my http.
I'd say it sounds like a connection limit they're imposing.
a few minutes after I shut down all active torrents, web pages start loading again with no delay.
This is not cool at all. I hope the FCC drops the hammer on comcast.
They're using their grammar skills there.
I wonder if Comcast will call this technology ReadyRetard.
What?
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
I guess that's the problem with being a bandwidth provider and a content provider at the same time.
There is a simple solution to that problem.
Either play fair or have your company split in half.
TBH, it could well be that you're choking either your up- or downstream with the torrent. That'd make the web page load like molasses. It's very hard to say without seeing your actual line. Best way to start looking for a solution is to throttle the torrents yourself to ~85% of your up- and downstream speeds, respectively.
For everyone who hates Comcast so much go out and try to get a different cable company
Gee, what a wonderful idea.
Well, except for the fact that the government grants and enforces regional cable monopolies. Which meaning the government prohibits me from switching to any other cable company(*), short of physically moving to a new home in some other state.
(*)My regional monopoly cable company is Cablevison rather than Comcast, but the point is the same.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
... someone mod arth1 up!
------ no thanks... I've quit
I understand needing to keep bandwidth under control, but I'm paying for unlimited access to 6 mbs and I want it.
What is the FCC going to do...Send another strongly worded letter?
Yeah, that's pretty much what Shakashvili said too.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Large ISPs won't go after botnets because the customers really will resist patching their machines and move to an ISP that will let them spread viruses all they want.
Comcast is still calling customers who use too much bandwidth, threatening expulsion. I got the call two weeks ago. The Comcast agent refused as usual to name how much bandwidth usage is okay, but admitted that the median customer downloads 10 gigabytes per month. I guess the FCC doesn't care about the false advertising of "unlimited downloads."
RST are being sent out all over the world, thanks to comcast every ISP it killing p2p. I can connect ares for hours and get nothing as every connection goes idel the monount it starts. It spends all its time sorting users and dropping the connection from them. This is a virus. Comcast also blocked all my e mail for months because I would not buy anti-virus software from the blacklisters they hire, but they don't offer linux version. After FCC started looking at comcast they stopped blocking me and maybe the email to fcc helped. Brake up comcast the bandwidth issue is fake, if its short in supply the price goes up, they just want to stick it to us. If its real stop selling multi mb connections you don't have.
Along the same lines, I don't know what Comcast has been doing lately, but my service the past couple months has nearly doubled.
Before I was capped around 40k upload, now it tops out around 130 for torrents, downloads are as fast as they've always been, and I never have to scale back my torrent speed to surf the web. I've never been happier with Comcast than I have been lately.
So it is all well and good that people think this is about torrent and p2p, but I have seen the browser experience degraded also. And after enough resets, some things fail. I hate that. I have no other choice but to remain with comcast as the alternative to my 16Mb broadband is lousy DSL at 1.5Mb. Those are my only choices, except for satellite and I cannot do that.
You mean $325,000 per faked packet! :))
Per customer!
On a 24 hour active torrent client!
OWWWwwwwwwwwww.......
That is is the point to get an other cable company in the area. That is why you need to get your local government involved to attract and pull strings to get them there. The main loophole in local monopolies in a democratic country is that if your pressure government they usually will cave in and swap monopolies.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
From my original point: You need to go out knock on some doors talk to your local politicians
Local Government is the key. People always go crying to their state and federal government however go to your towns government and you will find that they will most likely listen to you. Then the people further up will listen to them. For a town of say 5,000 people with say 30% who vote for local government and you can get a few hundred people to sign a petition or even just a few dozen or so go to a town hall meeting, you can effect change. These guys are elected to office, most of them democrats or republicans or whatever will normally cave in at this level to a little political pressure from a vocal group.
Boo! Hoo! The corporation is bad and there is nothing to do so Ill just take it. If you feel like you are not getting what you want evoke change yourself. As for me in my area we have TimeWarner and I am happy with it compared to Cablevision and Comcast.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
"We conclude that the company's discriminatory and arbitrary practice unduly squelches the dynamic benefits of an open and accessible Internet,"
Well, if that's really how they feel about Comcast's practices you would think they would order it to stop imediately wouldn't you?
Comcast must send the FCC a plan explaining how it will mend its ways by the end of the year, and do so by then
What?! They get to the end of the year?!? How long can it possibly take? They added something to their router's programming, just take it back out already!
It seems to me, that what's really happening is that Comcast got caught. Publicly the FCC is playing the part of consumer protector while privately they are giving them all the time they need to find a more hidden method of controling how there users use the internet.
my torrents now run on port 80. BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH
For a town of say 5,000 people
Chuckle. 5000 people sounds more like a gigantic dance floor to me, than a town :D
I happen to live in the most populous town(*) in the nation. Three quarters of a million people. If we were a city we'd be the 14th most populous city in the country. Rounding up 5000 votes would ...probably... be enough to swing the local election for dog catcher. hehe.
(*)Footnote: The Town of Hempstead is subdivided into a number of villages and hamlets effectively about every mile-and-a-half or so, but they are not significantly functional governmental levels.
Anyway.... we've got Cablevision and thus far they have been one of the best of the cable companies. None of which matters to the original issue that for most of the country they are unable to vote with their wallets. It is disingenuous to say that the government should not meddle in these business affairs, disingenuous to suggest that natural free market competition can be relied upon to solve this market's ills. The government is already entangled from the beginning. The government is providing chosen companies with benefits and protections, is in most cases imposing a monopoly market by force of law.
I certainly do sympathize with and side with "the government shouldn't meddle in business affairs" in many cases, but I think this case is one of the clearest possible exceptions. The government itself regulated the market into existence in the first place. The government is responsible for prohibiting competition and for excluding natural free market forces. And when the government does that then the government can and *must* step in to replace those excluded market forces, can and *must* step in to manually remedy market failures and market abuses. Because the government is ultimately responsible for causing/enforcing those market failures and abuses.
And to the extent that these companies "compete" to obtain those local-government-granted monopolies, that competition is much more indirect and of a very different character. It is poor proxy for actual customer competition and actual customer interests. While I consider Cablevision one of the best of US Cable providers, I have little doubt that if all cable companies could reasonably and freely compete everywhere, that competitive forces would dive them all to better serve their customers. Unfortunately running all of that parallel networking across the public phone poles to every home in the nation is not a particularly viable approach.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Because the current model works like a gym membership: Infinite free classes! Use the gym infinitely! ...we're counting on the fact you won't!
I don't want to trade monopolies. It's enough time and work to get them changed that I don't believe it would change the way they behave. IMO, the only thing that will change behavior like this using market forces, as you suggest doing, is having multiple companies - and by multiple I mean 3-5, not the 2 you can get if you're lucky.
To be fair, I of course don't have any real suggestions to solve the problem. It's easy to say "allow more cable companies, more phone companies, etc". It's much more difficult to do it due to the cost of entry for a new competitor in the market.