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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.
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.
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 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."
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
Unless FCC suspends the operating license of Comcast until comcast changes its policy, nothing is going to change.
Unfortunately this FCC does not have even one ball to do that.
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
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.
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:~#
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).
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.