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."

Comments

Evil from cable companies? Nevar.

[David Gerard]

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.)

Re:Evil from cable companies? Nevar.

[theskunkmonkey]

People forget what "unlimited" Internet means when used in marketing access plans. Back in the "old" days, your connection to the Internet was metered by time since everyone pretty much got the maximum available and you didn't have bandwidth tiering you have with today's massive capacities. You usually had X hours of service per month in your plan. This is the "limited" part of the sales pitch. Eventually the ISPs were able to offer "Unlimited" access, meaning you could leave it on 24/7 all month and only pay the monthly fee.

Now some people are clamoring that they were sold "Unlimited" service and they are being cheated. Bullshit. Your still allowed to stay connected for an "unlimited" amount of time which is exactly what your paying for and my guess is that your service contract states this, you get X bandwidth available 24/7. Even then, that 24/7 isn't guaranteed but it's the exception not the rule when there's a problem with connectivity [Insert chosen ISP bashing here].

I'm not saying this is a Good Thing(TM), but it's not like anyone has been cheated. It's just been a case of very slimy marketing by the ISPs.

Re:Evil from cable companies? Nevar.

[not_anne]

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..."

Re:Evil from cable companies? Nevar.

[ZorinLynx]

The thing is, time is no longer an issue in modern connections because they are packet-switched down to the bare wire.

In the old days you used a phone line, which was circuit switched, to call your ISP. They had a limited number of ports so they had to limit how long you could be online, otherwise folks would get a busy signal.

Since these days there is no customer-initiated circuit switching involved in cable and DSL links, the concept of "unlimited" can *only* apply to data transfer. There isn't anything else to limit.

Believe me, I remember the days of circuit switching and "hourly limits" quite well. I was on an ISDN connection from 2000 to 2004. Worrying about how *long* you're online is extremely irritating. Those are definitely "good old days" I wouldn't want to go back to.

Re:Now what will happen?

[BorgDrone]

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.

Re:Now what will happen?

[jonaskoelker]

Comcast will enforce bandwidth caps. How's that better than throttling?

1. You're told up front what the limits are.
2. It's not discriminating against any application, not even the legal ones.
3. It's fairly generous: 250 gigs lets you download at 0.77878308 megabit/s 24/7 (thanks, GNU units), or 8 gig per day. Plenty enough for a few aptitude full-upgrades, some online gaming and downloading a new distro to try out, plus some video to watch.

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.

Take it, leave it, or leave it

[tepples]

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?

Re:Take it, leave it, or leave it

[Klaus_1250]

The US is a capitalist economy, right ? Isn't the market supposed to fix this ?

Free markets do not work like that. Free markets fix things when there is an substantial economic incentive. Broadband infrastructure is expensive, time-consuming to lay down, dominated by strong players with political capital and related technology changes rapidly. Given those, why would the free market invest (tens of) billions of dollars in a long term, difficult and risky project? If you have billions of dollars, there are many many more ways to make more money in much less time. Free markets don't magically fix things for consumers. Free markets are about providing the opportunity for capital to move freely and as a result, make the best use of said capital. That's it. The issue is that people apply all kinds of benefits to "best use", as in no monopolies, cheap products, etc., which just isn't how it works. Especially not in the short term.

I also live in a small city in the Netherlands btw. I can choose dozen of ISP's, but only one which is faster than 8 Mbps. Not sure about the figures, but despite what the OPTA (Dutch Telecom Watchdog) says, there does exist a monopoly for "fast" internet in a considerable part of the Netherlands (wet finger approach: 25-35%). And moving to an area with faster internet??? That is rather a ridiculously expensive solution.

Re:Take it, leave it, or leave it

[Mateo_LeFou]

"The US is a capitalist economy"

Oh my god, that's *so *CUTE !!!!

The US, if you hadn't heard, is what we call a "mixed economy" -- with an interesting mix:

Profits are held by private individuals, and losses are distributed among the general public via bailouts, etc.

Re:Bullshit..

[stevey]

I'm not an American - so my understanding may be off.

I thought "Free Speech" meant literally that you couldn't be arrested for saying "stuff".

Specifically it doesn't mean:

• You have a right to yell "fire" in a cinema.
• Whatever you want to say has to be listened to by anybody.
• That your words must be broadcast as far as you want them.
• That people must obey your commands.

So, with that in mind. How is imposing a bandwidth cap in any way related to free speach?

Sure I could see if they didn't let you visit some, politically derived, blacklist of websites then you could argue they were suppressing some topics. But otherwise?

Hyperbole - and the more times you do that the less people pay attention. Cry Wolf, anybody?

Re:Now what will happen?

[Twanfox]

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.

Actually, this was put in place to HELP VoIP

[nweaver]

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.

Re:Now what will happen?

[Triv]

From the FAQ:

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."

They don't Throttle, they Forge Reset Packets

[corsec67]

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.