I was about to point out that the article headline was misleading because the authors claimed that this only happened when using a P2P app: When Comcast tries to filter the P2P packets, as a side effect browsing was also affected because (they presumed) the flood of reset packets was interfering with the connection.
Turns out, though, that they did some bad science (note to self - reconsider applying to the University of Colorado at Boulder IT course). Their NAT router was the problem and they've since retracted the claim:
QUOTE:
A note regarding our findings: Further experiments have led us to believe that our initial conclusions that indicated Comcast's responsibility for dropping TCP SYN packets and forging TCP SYN, ACK and RST (reset) packets was incorrect. Our experiments were conducted from behind a network address translator (NAT). The anomalous packets were generated when the outbound TCP SYN packets exceeded the NAT's resources available in it's state table. In this case, TCP SYN, ACK and RST packets were sent. We would like to thank Don Bowman, Robb Topolski, Neal Krawetz, and Comcast engineers for bringing this to our attention. We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience that this posting may have caused.
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I was about to point out that the article headline was misleading because the authors claimed that this only happened when using a P2P app: When Comcast tries to filter the P2P packets, as a side effect browsing was also affected because (they presumed) the flood of reset packets was interfering with the connection. Turns out, though, that they did some bad science (note to self - reconsider applying to the University of Colorado at Boulder IT course). Their NAT router was the problem and they've since retracted the claim: QUOTE: A note regarding our findings: Further experiments have led us to believe that our initial conclusions that indicated Comcast's responsibility for dropping TCP SYN packets and forging TCP SYN, ACK and RST (reset) packets was incorrect. Our experiments were conducted from behind a network address translator (NAT). The anomalous packets were generated when the outbound TCP SYN packets exceeded the NAT's resources available in it's state table. In this case, TCP SYN, ACK and RST packets were sent. We would like to thank Don Bowman, Robb Topolski, Neal Krawetz, and Comcast engineers for bringing this to our attention. We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience that this posting may have caused.