Comcast's FCC Filing Called Unfair, Not Good Enough

Shoemaker brings us a follow-up to Comcast's recent defense of its traffic management procedures. The companies involved in the original FCC investigation are not satisfied with Comcast's response. From Ars Technica: "Comcast made an aggressive defense of its policies, claiming that it only resets P2P uploads made during peak times and when no download is also in progress. Free Press, BitTorrent, and Vuze all say that's not good enough. In a conference call, Vuze's general counsel Jay Monahan drew the starkest analogy. What Comcast is really doing, he said, wasn't at all comparable to limiting the number of cars that enter a highway. Instead, it was more like a horse race where the cable company owns one of the horses and the racetrack itself. By slowing down the horse of a competitor like Vuze, even for a few seconds, Comcast makes it harder for that horse to compete. 'Which horse would you bet on in a race like that?' asked Monahan."

Now....

[yamiyasha (1119417)]

only if the FCC can deal on that Merger between Sirius and XM

Which horse?

[ShaunC (203807)]

'Which horse would you bet on in a race like that?'

Well, probably not this horse [fastgate.net].

but, it's Premium!

[AmishElvis (1101979)]

"Premium 56K Dial Up Internet Access"

Bad analogy.

[calebt3 (1098475)]

It's more like having a professional sniper taking out the competitors.

Re:Bad analogy.

[dwpayne (1239848)]

I think a better analogy is if the post office had a policy of deliberately throwing away mail when they were too busy, like at Christmas time or whenever. That's not really interfering, right? Just delaying your mail, I mean, if you don't reply, the other people know to just resend you the same mail again, it just takes a few weeks.

The post office is a good example of net neutrality too. When I write to a congresscritter, I just have to put a stamp on it, I don't have to pay every person who carries the letter. I don't pay my local carrier, then the guy who brings it to the regional center, the long haul trucker who brings it to DC, and so forth, just the one stamp.

Re:

[budgenator (254554)]

And I just send a copy of the letter out every other day until I get a letter back stating you got the original letter, that's how they manage traffic.

Re:Bad analogy.

[ookabooka (731013)]

It's more like having a professional sniper taking out the competitors.

My favorite analogy: It's more like AT&T interrupting a phone call to your buddy, faking his voice to you and saying "Oh sorry, gotta go" and hanging up. As if that weren't bad enough it fakes your voice to your buddy doing the same thing. This is fraud, they inject RST packets and make it look like it's legitimate traffic from the other computer. It's an awful way to do QoS if it can even be construed as such. Why don't they just add in nice shaping rules like everyone else?

Re:

[kaizokuace (1082079)]

if you want a car analogy, its probably something like that freeway scene in one of them matrices movies. Packets, err...cars blowing up all over the place. And the bad guys catching up to the good guys. And lots of explosions and cgi.

Re:

[omeomi (675045)]

If anything the competing horse is repeatedly sent back to the starting gate.

Ooh, we could name the horse Sisyphus!

I wonder if anybody will get that...

Re:Bad analogy.

[somersault (912633)]

Nope, I didn't get it. If only I had some method of searching through large quantities of information quickly, trying to match a certain word or phrase.. or perhaps some large collection of knowledge indexed in an orderly fashion that I could lookup quick (or as the Hawaiians say, 'wiki') for the name Sisyphus.. oh well, guess neither I nor anyone else will get this joke.

You are a Moon Master!

[milsoRgen (1016505)]

My $0.02: deregulate, increase investment in infrastructure and leave it to the law enforcement agencies to deal with potential matters of criminal activity online. then we have an internet we can all enjoy!

Re:

[milsoRgen (1016505)]

Damn it, I meant regulate should of previewed I suppose....

Re:You are a Moon Master!

[erlehmann (1045500)]

But the post office charges different rates for different types of mail [...]

certainly not based on what's in the packages (read: packets).

Phew

[Nero Nimbus (1104415)]

For a minute there, I thought we were going to get yet another car analogy.

Re:Phew

[wjhoffman1983 (1145155)]

It's more like a series of racetracks...

Re:

[MrShaggy (683273)]

Exactly, cause when you put that horse on the track on Friday, you might not be able to get off till Monday, because every other horse is there. Unless you have a dump-truck.

Re:

[djupedal (584558)]

How's this?

If the internet were a limousine, Comcast would be a temporary spare...left to rot in a warehouse...in the dark. Without heat. Behind an unlocked door. Without an id tag. On a weekend. In New Jersey.

Feel better?

Re:

[Romancer (19668)]

And remember, beware the leopard.

Another bad analogy

[GaryOlson (737642)]

Education is fairer when you hold the smartest and best back just a little bit when the rest of the class can not understand their input.

Re:

[brian0918 (638904)]

And when the entire class does not give a sh*t about even going to school, the ones with potential get nowhere and become demotivated. Switch to private education and help those who want to be helped; stop teaching the attitude that progress requires no effort from those meant to progress.

They even flat out lie

[Sangui5 (12317)]

They admit to sending RST packets, but then claim that they don't forge packets. They're audacious enough to say that the people who say that the packets are forged are the liars. They also say RST packets are the only way, completely ignoring options like ICMP source quench, leaky bucket/token bucket filtering, or TCP's own congestion control reaction to dropped/delayed packets.

Whoever wrote Comcast's response has quite a pair.

No room P2P huh!

[neonmonk (467567)]

Oh, no room for P2P, huh?

Fine. I'll go build my own telecom infrastructure with blackjack.. and hookers.

In fact, forget the infrastructure and the blackjack... Eh, screw the whole thing.

This made a rant during an economic radio show

[Culture20 (968837)]

On my way home from work this evening, a radio host was finally talking about this in a way that regular joes would care about (and the show was for regular joes trying to invest). He said that Comcast is using its monopoly to limit competing content (non-comcast video and audio). I'm sure more than a few ears perked up.

Re:

[Protonk (599901)]

ears might have perked up, but that isn't strictly the case. That is what is wrong w/ the analogy. This is the REASON we want net neutrality provisions but it is not what is actually happening. To call comcast's video on demand service a direct competitor to other p2p and video systems is laughable. It is a potential competitor to some small sectors of the market.

Needs more car analogies.

[Lordfly (590616)]

You see, the internet is like a car, and Comcast is like the clutch. If you stick a bologna sandwich in the clutch, obviously you need more cup holders, like Bit Torrent and Vuze.

That's why we need net neutrality!

Repeat Programming

[Doc Ruby (173196)]

Funny, when I mail an "unfair, not good enough" check for my Comcast bill, they just shut me down.

Re:Repeat Programming

[calebt3 (1098475)]

The post office dropped your packet. Or did it send you a fake cancellation of service notice to both of you?

Horse shit

[syousef (465911)]

I don't think the analogy in the summary is worth a horse's turd. Disconnecting is more like shooting the horse, not slowing it down.

Anyway there's no car in that analogy. I don't understand!!!

Why concentrate on "throttling"?

[Sparr0 (451780)]

I don't think the EFFECT of Comcast's interference is the main issue here. Traffic shaping IS an issue, but not the important one in this case. HOW they are doing it is important. They are forging network packets (RST packets, in particular). This isn't just limiting the cars getting on the highway, it's like calling you on your cell phone before you get on the highway, pretending to be your boss, and telling you not to bother coming to work today. They are committing fraud, of multiple sorts, every time they do this.

Re:

[elronxenu (117773)]

Can we make a technological defense against this problem, e.g. by comparing Time-to-live (TTL) on the RST packets against TTL on the legitimate packets, and if it is substantially higher on the RST packet then assume interference and drop the RST?

Re:Why concentrate on "throttling"?

[WK2 (1072560)]

You should be able to work around it by adding something to your iptables. I found this page: http://www.tweak3d.net/forums/tech/possible-fix-comcast-torrent-blocking-28264 [tweak3d.net] which has a simple fix. I haven't tested it myself. It looks like it should work. Their solution is to drop ALL RST packets to your bit torrent port. If the RST was legit, the connection will time out eventually anyway.

Your solution is technically better, but much harder to do. I think it would require patching and compiling a kernel.

Car analogy

[elronxenu (117773)]

It's like cars on a highway ... when the highway is crowded and traffic is slowing down, some cars being driven to a competitor's shop are picked up by a crane and moved back to their starting point, at the onramp to the highway.

Just traffic shape!!!

[NickCatal (865805)]

I have said this before, why does Comcast not just throttle BT packets when the lines are being saturated? On multiple levels. You could also throttle the bandwidth of the largest users in general if other users who barely ever use the internet want bandwidth. AKA if all I do is log on once a day and watch 10 youtube videos I would get priority over the guy who maxes out his line doing BT all day.

Of course, you would always want to prioritize VOIP, games, DNS and other types of vital traffic. Could even pri

Cox Communications

[Smordnys s'regrepsA (1160895)]

I just had to deal with spending 3+ hours to download a 150MB file, due to my entire connection going down every time I have Bit Torrent up for more than ~5 minutes. From what I've read, Cox is supposedly using the same forging method as Comcast. When does the FCC start hanging other companies out to dry? ...or, do they feel that putting pressure on only one company will solve the problem?

Its just backhaul....

[AHuxley (892839)]

They know what all the end users modems up speeds are set at.
The end users cannot unlock their modems.
They know what the up load at a set maximum speed will do to the network.
There are no real unknown unknowns with closed network math.

Light up some dark fiber, make it glow.
Put few new big boxes in.

Re:You'd do the same

[JStegmaier (1051176)]

Or ISPs could stop over-selling their capacity, then no one would need to "police" themselves by making sure they use less than the bandwidth they're paying for.

ISPs either need to take on less customers (I know at least one DSL provider in my area is taking this path, actually refusing new customers and their money because they've oversold) or actually tell their customers how much bandwidth they're getting.

Instead, they sell, sell, sell accounts with "unlimited" bandwidth at X speed; add something in their ToS that some unknown amount of usage is too much; and then blame their infrasture problems on those that use BitTorrent and the like (whether they are used for legal or illegal purposes) rather than on their own irresponsibility and money-grabbing.

Re:You'd do the same

[locokamil (850008)]

Who are these paragons of good ISP behavior, by the way? If they are in the northeast, I would like to give them my custom.

When, that is, they are willing to take it. :)

Re:

[nbert (785663)]

Another possibility would be to accept that their mixed calculation doesn't add up. They could make the flatrates more expensive and add a variety of volume/time based options for "normal" people. It's not the fault of the customers if the current model fails because some people really use what they paid for.

Disclaimer: I don't know about Comcast's pricing model (and I can't really check without a valid address in the states). But wrong flatrate pricing seems to be a generic ISP problem nowadays

More like a water bill

[mcrbids (148650)]

Instead, they sell, sell, sell accounts with "unlimited" bandwidth at X speed; add something in their ToS that some unknown amount of usage is too much; and then blame their infrasture problems on those that use BitTorrent and the like (whether they are used for legal or illegal purposes) rather than on their own irresponsibility and money-grabbing.

I live in an old house, parts of which over 100 years old. (It's been heavily remodeled) Old enough that there's no meter on the water. We pay a flat rate. You c

Re:

[micheas (231635)]

That includes the 120 TB of network traffic I accounted for last month on my DSL account. That's not BT traffic, that's mostly offsite backups of my business, but still, I know I'm in the "blood sucking leaches" category.

WTF You average 485.451852 megabytes per second on your home DSL line!!!

I WANT THAT DSL SERVICE!
120 GB of network traffic a month my dsl could do, but that's 500 times as fast as what I have.

Re:

[temcat (873475)]

If they have promised and sold some bandwidth to a customer, the customer is not a "hog" if he/she takes all available bandwidth. And tragedy of commons doesn't apply here: the simple solution is to sell less bandwidth or have fewer customers. Also, I guess at least some ISP contracts are written so that an ISP can unilaterally change the provisions of an existing contract whenever it wants. If this is the case, an ISP can just alter its contract terms to provide lower bandwidth. But resetting uploads is a

Re:

[Protonk (599901)]

Fine then, as long as I sign a contract that says my traffic can be interrupted by forging packet requests. That's totally cool. turns out my contract DOESN'T say that. Also, the fact that cable companies represent something of a natural monopoly means that regulation in this sense might be the right answer.

Where do you get the notion that using p2p software is immoral or illegal? This is a funny one. I don't care if you can't keep a VPN connection up. that sounds like a problem you need to take up

Re:You'd do the same

[corsec67 (627446)]

Except in this case it is much more than just blocking connections. Comcast was making forged reset packets, and sending it to both parties. Forgery != Blocking.
These reset packets were also targeted at VPN connections.

Re:

[Sangui5 (12317)]

Not only that, but their own arguments support the view that they're massively oversold.

They say that they are only targeting a few users--that a "small minority" of people are hogging the bandwidth. If a small percentage (say, 2%) of your users can overload the network, that directly means you are heavily oversold (by 50x).

Re:

[Burdell (228580)]

Yes, the network is oversold; the Internet (and packet-switched networks in general) is designed around the assumption that nobody uses 100% of their bandwidth 100% of the time. We could go back to circuit-switched networks, but who wants to pay $1000+/month for residential Internet access?

In Comcast's case though, the problem is the design of the cable modem network protocols. There are a limited number of channels available for upstream bandwidth, and they have to be shared among all users on a segment.

Re:

[Grishnakh (216268)]

So why can't they just advertise "speeds UP TO xxxx Mbps*" (with "* speed only seen at off-peak times" in small print)?

No one expects their new sports car to go 180 mph on the freeway in rush-hour traffic, so why is this such a problem with advertised network speeds?

Re:It's paid for.

[Sangui5 (12317)]

It isn't that there is overselling that is the problem, it's that there is *heavy* overselling. Comcast is promising gobs of bandwidth for very little money, yet they don't have the capacity to back it up. They probably based the amount they could oversell on estimates from pre-broadband usage patterns; it's not the customer's fault that Comcast made an incorrect assumption. If they've oversold so much that it is causing such bad problems, then advertise lower peak bandwidths, or stop accepting new customers. Cheating your existing customers is not a valid option.

As for the shortcomings of DOCSIS; the DSL specs allowed tuning which frequency bands are assigned to upstream vs. downstream. The phone company understood that traffic patterns can change, and that they need to be flexible. If the cable internet industry was incompetent/shortsighted when designing their specs, then they brought their troubles on themselves.

Shared co-ax has some advantages in that it does allow for very large peak bandwidth for individual users; it stinks in that it supports quite poor average bandwidth per user. For DSL, the expensive, super-high-speed links only have to go to the central offices; for cable internet, the whole loop has to operate fast. It was a good design for broadcasting TV; not so much for internet.

Re:

[Protonk (599901)]

I agree that the horserace analogy is pretty stupid. I had to read it twice to figure out if that was all there was to it. I don't agree that comcast's policy is akin to protection money (another analogy), nor do I agree that the use of analogies in general is bad.

The false advertising claim is probably baseless. The laws on what constitutes false advertising vary state to state and aren't as strict as one might imagine. The breach of contract might also be shaky. I don't have a comcast contract on

Re:

[KingMotley (944240)]

I'd rather see it continue. I don't go to Ars. I don't want to. I also do go to reuters. Or cnews. Or many other news sites. I expect slashdot to bring the most important news here, and that's why I come here. It's not like slashdot has original articles I can't find elsewhere. Every article on slashdot comes from somewhere else.

Re:

[Protonk (599901)]

I guess I never felt that slashdot will bring the important news to me. OR.....I should be more clear. I feel that slashdot should be aggregating news that isn't showing up in other major venues. I should see a story about some weird linux nonsense or something about the ESA or some such. I don't want to see something from "ars" or "cnet" every other day. That appears to be a very narrowly held viewpoint.