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Comcast Discloses Throttling Practices
Wired reports that Comcast finally provided information on its network management practices late Friday. In a report to the FCC (PDF), the cable company admitted to targeting P2P protocols Ares, BitTorrent, eDonkey, FasTrack, and Gnutella. Quoting:
"For each of the managed P2P protocols, the [Sandvine Policy Traffic Switch] monitors and identifies the number of simultaneous unidirectional uploads that are passed from the [Cable Modem Termination System] to the upstream router. Because of the prevalence of P2P traffic on the upstream portion of our network, the number of simultaneous unidirectional upload sessions of any particular P2P protocol at any given time serves as a useful proxy for determining the level of overall network congestion. For each of the protocols, a session threshold is in place that is intended to provide for equivalently fair access between the protocols, but still mitigate the likelihood of congestion that could cause service degradation for our customers."
That is worded to basically say 'if the bandwidth is available, anyone can do anything' but from what I've been reading, those affected have been saying it's 'no p2p no matter what.'
They're lying.
But either way, the idea of throttling is bunk. If their networks cannot handle the service they sell, then they need to upgrade their networks.
Anything an ISP limits - whether it be browsing certain sites, severely limiting upload speed, or throttling p2p - is limiting free speech. They need to watch themselves. It's not hard to see that the 'big media' companies essentially want the Internet to turn into cable TV - where the customers are zombies that cannot contribute.
Comcast offers a voip product. Would anyone like to guess how the throttling practice was applied to traffic that was catagorized as VOIP but was not associated with Comcast's subscription service? Can anyone out there say anti-competitive practice? Real easy for Comcast to put those copyright infringers out front as the rationale for this policy but when one reads between the lines..... things are not quite as pristine as outlined. Connect the dots and get a clue.
Choice? I wish! In my area Comcast bought out everyone and now they are the only player in the game. Needless to say their service is horrible and their customer service is horrendous! Something really needs to be done about these ridiculous cable monopolies.
The US is a capitalist economy, right ? Isn't the market supposed to fix this ?
Where I live (small city in the Netherlands), I can choose from dozens of ISP's, there's also at least 10 different power companies to choose from. Also, it's always possible to move to an area where there are more or better ISP's to choose from.
Personally I don't thinks this has anything to do with what they claim. I see it more as comcast realizing that people are starting to get content from iTunes, or off the Xbox 360 or from Netflix and they are going to lose cable advertising dollars as well as customers paying for pay per view or home box office type services. Cable companies do not have a history of being customer friendly and have pretty much always taken the position of "you will pay us through the nose for our crappy signal and you will damn well like it" attitude. Now consumers are getting some choices of how to get their entertainment and I'm sure this just burns them up. So if they give you a 250 gig limit now, you can bet it won't stay that high and you can bet that if they can start throttling traffic they will. If it takes mom 14 hours to download that episode of Lost in HD, you can be sure she will just go back to the lovely ad packed version on TV. Just like newspapers, cable tv has become irrelevant and we all just want pipes to our homes, not the crap they give us over them. Just like when AOL came along and shook up the industry with the one price for all you can eat internet, someone will come along again and kick these greedy crooks in the nuts.
very good observation!
in fact, in my world (snmp) its ALL udp for this very reason. as I explain it, the same 'work' is done by tcp or udp based apps by the time the top 'layer' edge is reached; but the diff is WHO does the work - the app or the stack. in snmp, its the app since the app 'knows better' how to manage its segmentation, retries and timeouts. letting tcp do that is convenient but rarely optimal. that's why a lot of protocols run on udp - they want more control over the aspects of their comms nature.
tcp connections are sometimes NOT what you want when you are trying to get data thru a congested network. exactly 100% the historical reasons for why udp is the layer of choice for snmp (netmgt control to shut down 'noisy' ports during a broadcast storm, etc).
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"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
As for the recent "bailouts", it's going to be the profitable and well-off being taxed to bailout institutions that gave money away (rich people's money, mostly) to that part of the general public that is never going to pay that money back.
It's NOT "rich people's money, mostly". The bulk of investments made on our (US) stock exchanges - and I'd guess world-wide as well - is institutional. Some of that is money-market funds bought by the middle class and above; but the majority, I believe, is retirement money. This affects a very large number of Americans (and yeah, I'm one of them).
At this point the problem doesn't really have much to do with bailing out those people who bought houses that were way out of their price range - those people have largely been foreclosed on already.
If you can take an hour to learn quite a bit about what led to all this, listen to the "This American Life" episode 'The Giant Pool of Money'. The way this crisis came to be is breathtaking in terms of the greed, arrogance, and stupidity involved.
#DeleteChrome
Comcast hasn't advertised "unlimited internet" in many years. After a Google search, the only use of "unlimited" I could find in a current Comcast ad was associated with their phone service: "Make unlimited local and long distance calls with 12 popular features..."
This is true for extremely small values of many.
My own contract with Comcast specified that I would receive access to the internet at a certain bitrate. Comcast has since repeatedly increased this promised bitrate. At no time have they informed me of any limitations on my use of this service other than 1) insisting that I not run an NNTP service and 2) prohibiting certain types of abusive behaviour (most of which are already forbidden by law anyway). They have never, ever told me I could not run my own mail server although they actively prevent my doing so.
Why in the world are you apologizing for them? They have abused their customers, what makes you want to defend them?