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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."
Shocked, shocked I am! Evil in the telecoms industry? Never! Well, hardly ever.
Perhaps Google could develop a not evil telecoms company. (Or, as they did with the spectrum auction, play the evils off against each other and not actually spend ridiculous sums of their own money.)
I think we need a Microsoft telecoms company. Their evil has been slipping lately. It's not good enough, Mr Ballmer!
(I'm picturing Steve Ballmer with his high-pressure used car salesman shout: "EVIL! EVIL! EVIL! EVIL!" Bouncing around the stage.)
http://rocknerd.co.uk
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.
That is better because now consumers can make an informed decision when choosing a internet provider.
An 'unlimited' internet connection at an affordable price may look like a good deal but if you knew in advance it was actually limited in some way you might have chosen another provider with a better offer. Now at least you know what you're getting for your money and you can make a fair comparison between different providers.
This improves transparency and thus competition and ultimately benefits the consumer.
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.
Comcast will enforce bandwidth caps. How's that better than throttling?
Even if it turns out that 250 gig limits make for a shitty service, at least Comcast are honest about the limits they put on you, so you know what you're buying and you can take the limits placed on you into account when deciding what to download.
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.
You have to love how the text is carefully crafted to be virtually incomprehensible to the average person. Actually, check that - totally incomprehensible to the average person and virtually incomprehensible to all but the hardest core network tech geeks. Of course, it's intentional because saying, simply, "we slow down users who utilize programs we don't like" is too easy to understand and rally against, which, of course, is exactly the opposite of what Comcast wants. This Byzantine text just sounds like a lot of techno-mumbo-jumbo so it has to be ok, right? Thankfully, Slashdot is filled with hard core network tech geeks so I'll be reading comments with interest to get an informed synopsis rather than staring at Comcast's text and thinking "huh?"
so to sum it up, you are getting up the behind but at least you know how far itll go
our big fancy piece of software slows your download speed to a trickle if you use hardly any of your upload speed. so god forbid you try to ssh or rdesktop into your box
That's not really anti-competitive. It's progressive in fact.
The bottom line is that ISPs pay for out-of-network traffic and they can't expect to take that cost and not pass it on.
So, for an ISP to recognize that they are only out of pocket for traffic that goes outside their network and not limit your in-network traffic is actually good.
If P2P protocols were smart enough to recognize and use in-network peers (which could simply be a product of latency perhaps, but better methods are probably possible) before going out of network, think about how much more you could download without hitting your cap.
That is better because now consumers can make an informed decision when choosing a internet provider.
Only one high-speed Internet provider offers service in many areas of the United States (home of Slashdot). This means choosing a high-speed Internet provider is like choosing any other public utility such as your power or water provider. What recourse do people dissatisfied with a public utility have?
you can make a fair comparison between different providers.
You get this provider if you live here; you get that provider if you live there. Should people really be choosing where to live based on the only ISP that isn't dial-up?
No.
Its more like they're saying "traffic outside our network will cost you; internal stuff is free".
In other words it is no different to the way many ISPs behave in the UK. They have mirrors of things people might want to use - so that their customers don't use more external bandwidth than they need to.
For example Virgin Media's Debian mirror.
For well over a year I have had intermittent but persistent dropouts during primetime (Comcast). I've put in about a dozen service calls and had a tech at my house just the other day. I've had two new cable modems and the tech confirmed that the signal is fine.
I used tcpdump to show him the traffic scroll by at a nearly constant rate (I have a very active home network) and then *bam* it's dead. He looked at the lights and from his point of view says "the signal is fine". It's not my network because I see the same dropouts when connected directly to the cable modem, and it's apparently not the signal.
So that leaves the network. I think it's saturated. I can see 30+ ARPs per second immediately after service comes back up. And if this new policy helps that, then I'm all for it.
That the 250GB limit will not be applied to traffic within Comcast's own network. Can you say anticompetitive?
As I understand it, it's fairly commonplace in the Internet access industry not to charge end users for traffic that doesn't cross the ISP's upstream connection. For example, ISPs in Australia and New Zealand, two countries that have a slow, expensive pipe to other anglophone countries (USA, Canada, Ireland, UK), follow this policy of not counting accesses to, say, Linux distro mirrors on the ISP's network against the user's cap.
The idea isn't to guarantee the service you would want to have in your wildest dreams. It is to receive all terms and conditions prior to sale so that you can make an informed decision. It is fraud prevention.
well, let them go home if they're not going to offer service like a big boy does. This is the Internet we're talking about. INTER being the key word. They're not being progressive here. They're being very regressive. Comcast wants to be the sole content provider to their subscribers like AOL did back in the 90's. Until AOL subscribers discovered the actual Internet.
This is what Comcast wants. They want their users to use their services. This is purely anti-competitive behavior. I say, if Comcast doesn't want to provide true undiscriminatory Internet access, get out of the damn business. They're already screwing their customers. Deregulation has allowed Comcast to act like this.
True competition would allow me to jump to an ISP who would provide the same level of service at the same cost without these BS tactics to force me to use their content.
Unfortunately, there's no other ISP here who provides cable. And no DSL providers want to provide me DSL despite having fibre to the curb. Since AT&T hasn't disclosed that I have fibre to the curb. Speakeasy thinks I can't only get 144k IDSL. AT&T knows I can get 100Mbit if they offered it. Comcast just wants me to stop using the service altogether. I hope the FCC really drops the hammer on these anti-competitive greedy bastards.
They're using their grammar skills there.
It's not discriminating against any application, not even the legal ones.
I hope by "application" you mean "use" (noun), as opposed to "software product".
BitTorrent, for example, isn't illegal (I hope). Using it to distribute some specific content might be.
This was put in place per Comcast's talk at the IETF largely to IMPROVE VoIP service from Vonage et al. You look back to 2006, before this was deployed, and there were lots of complaints about "Comcast is disrupting Vonage and other voip services..."
Those complaints largely dissapeared after Comcast started policing P2P uploads.
Test your net with Netalyzr
How is this announcement related to the recent 250 GB monthly usage threshold?
The two are completely separate and distinct. The new congestion management technique is based on real-time Internet activity. The goal is to avoid congestion on our network that is being caused by the heaviest users. The technique is different from the recent announcement that 250 GB/month is the aggregate monthly usage threshold that defines excessive use.
Gizmodo's take on the thing is much easier to read.
Going over the 250GB cap will get you disconnected, but your bandwidth will get throttled long, long before that if you do anything their software deems "excessive."
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.
The problem isn't logistics, it's political. ISP's cut deals with local government to ensure they keep their monopoly and eat the whole cake.
I have Comcast in Denver. I can not get a VPN connection to work now. The packets get to the gateway but get dropped on the way back. Also, I cannot load www.parts-express.com, it consistently fails when I know the site is up. This has been consistent for a month. Will Comcast fix this if I call with a tracert, or is Qwest an alternative?
Oliver Wendell Holmes, the judge writing the Unaninous(sp) brief for the case
used the fire thing as an example.
The private entities in the US operate under the US Constitution. Therefore they
must obey the law as written or ajudicated through precedence. Failing to do
so would open them up to a ton of lawsuits.
The tail shall not wag the dog. We ALLOW these people to do business here, not the
other way around.
And move the TCP part into the application. You can't break a session where there is none to break.
Azureus already has UDP support, but it very rarely falls back to UDP unfortunately.
Per that PDF, on page 10 Comcast described how they "delay" the packets, using "reset packets." Stop letting them get away with calling forging reset packets "throttling". Instead, they are blocking connections via forgery.
Except, they admit that packets with the reset header are only supposed to be used by the two end computers, and not by any of the routers in between, which should be handled by ICMP.
They say, in that pdf, "As used in our current congestion management practices, the reset packet is used to convey that the system cannot, at that moment, process additional high-resource demands without creating risk of congestion.", which is just crazy.
Reset isn't a "slow down" message, it is a "stop sending me any kind of data on this connection" message.
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
The part I liked was how they are degrading customer service to prevent degradation of customer service. Orwell would have loved these guys.
Remember, Big Chimpy is watching you.
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There ARE people lying out there. Plenty.
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The funny part is that I just move to New Mexico and the only available option was Comcast. Oh the irony.