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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.
In the case of the BitTorrent Sandvine filtering incident, Wireshark logs could be taken at both ends of a connection (sync the captures over the phone or whatever).
Compare the logs - If RST packets are detected coming in at one end of the connection that were never sent at the other end, that's proof that someone (in this case the ISP) injected them into the connections to shut them down prematurely.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
The FCC has the regulatory power to revoke licenses and impose fines (Up to $325,000 per infraction, I believe).
"It is possible to commit no errors and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life." -Peak Performance
The internet was never 'run' by the IETF, and the IETF never really claimed to run it- they're the Internet Engineering Task Force, not ISOC (The Internet Society, which probably has a better claim to 'running' the Internet, as it oversees the IETF through the Internet Architecture Board, the IAB).
Really, nobody 'runs' the Internet, but the FCC does basically control communications carriers in the United States.
"It is possible to commit no errors and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life." -Peak Performance
Possibly, but real-time video streaming only demands a limited amount of bandwidth (2 Mbps or so). It would not get throttled like an ordinary download, which consumes as much bandwidth as it can.
That's for SD content. Good-quality HD content will need about 5Mbps or more.
Is there some reason why they aren't asking Time Warner, Cox, AT&T and others each about their practices?
Because it is easy to get around the blocks that they have, however Comcast uses Sandvine (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandvine#Controversy) to throttle the BT packets and inject false information. The rest basically just block or slow down traffic to certain ports. The reason injecting packets is so big of a deal is that where does it stop? Can I inject false information into an e-mail that is being sent? IM message? Etc?
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Hahahaha, that was priceless. You really think they'd throttle their own content? No, they're throttling Netflix and anyone else trying to do VOD.
Comcast offers VOD on their internal network, this costs them nothing. Netflix VOD comes over the Internet link they rent from another company, so they would rather make this unwatchable and continue to have a monopoly on content delivery.
They're preemptively trying to stamp out any competition but under the guise of "oh noes we're out of the bandwidths." Comcast charges plenty for the bandwidth you're using, but to push profits higher they need your Internet use to go down but your costs to go up. Just another instance where Wall St.'s "make more every year" mentality is going to hurt us more every year.
they can pull their rf license forcing comcast to shut down all RF operations.
You gotta have a FCC license to be a Cable company.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Yes, this has been integrated into Cisco routers for quite some time. It's called Weighted Fair Queueing. WFQ schedules high-bandwidth streams in a round-robin fashion, yielding bandwidth to low-bandwidth streams so applications that speak infrequently don't get starved out. i.e. The more you talk on the pipe, the lower your overall priority becomes.
Cisco also extends this concept with class-based Weighted Fair Queueing. CBWFQ allows you to put traffic into buckets and each bucket can have different queuing strategies. This is commonly used with an LLQ with VoIP RTP traffic to guarantee clear voice communications, put some business critical applications second in line (Citrix, Terminal Server, Exchange, etc.), and put all the traffic in the default WFQ bucket.
LOAD "SIG",8,1
LOADING...
READY.
RUN
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).
Cable VOD doesn't run over IP and thus is automatically exempt from any IP traffic shaping.
But seriously, the right solution is to make VOD use multicast
How do you multicast when each household can decide to start, pause, stop, fast-forward and rewind the video whenever they want?
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
"It would not get throttled like an ordinary download, which consumes as much bandwidth as it can."
You mean as much as the server your connected to allows? How many servers out there give you their full pipe? Not many I suspect.