P2P Fans Pound Comcast In FCC Comments

Not Comcastic writes "Two weeks after officially opening proceedings on Comcast's BitTorrent throttling, angry users are bombarding the FCC with comments critical of the cable provider's practices. 'On numerous occasions, my access to legal BitTorrent files was cut off by Comcast,' a systems administrator based in Indianapolis wrote to the FCC shortly after the proceeding began. 'During this period, I managed to troubleshoot all other possible causes of this issue, and it was my conclusion (speaking as a competent IT administrator) that this could only be occurring due to direct action at the ISP (Comcast) level.' Another commenter writes 'I have experienced this throttling of bandwidth in sharing open-source software, e.g. Knoppix and Open Office. Also I see considerable differences in speed ftp sessions vs. html. They are obviously limiting speed in ftp as well.'"

Well, whatever.

Well, whatever. It's not like their throttling has affec@G#TG%2yv24*SA$FNO CARRIER

fortunately

Fortunately, after reading the scathing criticism, Comcast executives were able to comfort themselves with their huge sacks of money.

As for myself, I plan to dump Comcast right away and switch to... oh wait, Comcast is my only option for Internet access. Well.

Perhaps I'll go dig out the ol' 2400 baud modem, maybe I can find a BBS to call.

Re:fortunately

there is a solution - have the government force comcast to give 3rd parties access to their lines, for a rental fee. this will no doubt have in the same position we in australia have though, a company desperately trying to hang onto it's monopoly, though it has had limited success after many court battles.

old monopolies don't die, they just find new ways to rip you off.

Re:fortunately

So if you are stuck on Cable, like me,

On behalf of everyone who is stuck on dialup without the option of dsl or cable I would just like to say I hope your cable wraps around your throat and chokes the life out of you. have a nice day :)

disclaimer: this post was made out of jest. Any offense taken from it will be ignored.

How to view submitted complaints

Go to this page [fcc.gov] and put "07-52" into the "Proceeding" field.

Comments are in PDF form, so turn off "View in Browser" in Acrobat.

Some Canadian ISPs are going a step further

For example, my local cable ISP has marked ALL encrypted traffic as having a lower priority over non-encrypted content in their "war on P2P filesharing" (this means, amongst other obvious drawbacks, downgraded performance using ssh and sftp) reference [michaelgeist.ca]. I am not sure on the specifics or legality of this kind of "filtering" but it would seem that nobody has made such a big fuss yet up here. Their practice is grey-zone at best I would think and it will be interesting to see what happens with the issue.

FCC vs. CSR

Although FCC comments are all well and good, talking to Comcast's CSR (customer service reps) will have more impact. If every balky P2P connection results in a $5-$10 in call-center time, then Comcast will think differently about it's filtering policy.

The key to solving this is to make unfettered P2P connections the least cost option for Comcast. That means increasing the costs of not providing those connections. FCC fines might do it (assuming the FCC acts), but high customer service cost certainly will.

Only a problem when it is unknown

Throttling is IMHO only a problem when the customer doesn't know about it.

I have specifically chosen an ISP who promise they don't use any kind of throttling. On the other hand I did'nt go with the cheapest ISP I could find. My ISP has a "true flatrate" policy. No maximum usage and no throttling. The price is accordingly a little higher.

Most of my family does not use P2P in any way, and rarely download anything at all. For them, a low price is more important. And lets face it: this kind of bandwidth throttling was only invented because 5% of the customers consume 90% of the ISPs backbone resources. If this wasn't an issue, nobody would have invented the damn thing.

I don't think throttling should be illegal. It should only be illegal to use throttling and not tell customers about it. Throttling keeps the price down for ISPs, and they should be perfectly allowed to implemented - as long as all their customers are aware of it. In that way, if you don't want an ISP/product with throttling you can simply choose another ISP/product.

Bandwidth costs money. Free competition dictates that all ISPs will be seeking ways to lower their costs and in that way offer the consumers lower prices. This is a good thing, as long as customers know what they are buying.

Therefore: Allow throttling, but force ISPs to clearly state which products are subject to throttling. In that way, customers can buy the product they find suitable for their needs, and the "heavy users" can pay a higher price for their actual usage.

It is no different than your (cell)phone bill: if you call people 24/7, of if you buy a true flatrate product, it will cost more than just calling your mom for 5 minutes twice a month. Just as it should.

- Jesper

Forgery, not throttling

Strawman, but not your fault: I just realized the article summary makes the same mistake.

This isn't about throttling. Some people bitch about throttling, but what Comcast has been doing goes far beyond that. It's the RST packet forgery that has people super-pissed.

I see that you support throttling (if done openly and exposed to market forces), and your arguments seem reasonable. But what do you think of packet forgery?

Re:u didnt share that HBO show?

I don't play WoW, so someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that it uses Torrents for updates and patching. GP is pretty naive to assume that just because you've had to use a torrent it means you're a big pirate. It's a legitimate way of moving huge files around the 'net. That's like saying all truck drivers are smugglers just because a few people use semi-trucks to smuggle drugs into the country.

Re:u didnt share that HBO show?

You're right! In order to stop this smuggling, I move that all truck traffic must observe a maximum speed of 45 mph.

There! That'll fix it.

That's the stupidest thing I ever heard.

That is a terrible idea. Your analogy falls flat when you realize that the Internet isn't a truck. It's a series of tubes.

Re:Bit Torrent has been hijacked by thieves

If ISP's didn't oversell bandwidth you would be paying $300/month for internet access.

Overselling isn't the problem. Way, way overselling is. Some things can be oversold without a problem, including bandwidth.

Re:Industry move

I've got mod points, and I was going to moderate in this thread, and then I saw this and needed to reply.

I've got Comcast at home, and lately anything over :80/tcp has been horrendous. Most pages take a good 10-30 seconds to connect to the server, and never mind the number of pictures that can be on some sites.

I grabbed my laptop, hit the OpenVPN button to my server in a datacenter in Atlanta, and surprise! The pages loaded instantly.

Between P2P throttling and general crappy service, I sincerely hope that this suit changes things for the better.

Re:Industry move

Just a note (perhaps you know this, but others may not), but the reason VPN works and SSH tunnels don't is because Sandvine targets long-lived TCP connections. By default, OpenVPN tunnels over UDP; the control messages for session handling is done by OpenVPN and is unreadable by intermediaries. With SSH tunnels, they can't read your data, but they can forge TCP control messages, which isn't encrypted.

Ironically, Comcast may be really hurting themselves in the long run; if it gets bad enough, P2P software writers will switch to UDP, and manually do the in-order/reliable delivery stuff themselves. TCP has a lot of fancy congestion control, and I doubt that the P2P writers will bother with it...

Re:Industry move

I'm on Comcast, and I upload pictures to my photography website via SCP. The uploads get throttled after the first couple of MB. Encryption makes no difference to what they're doing. They don't need to know what's in the packets to decide whether or not to throttle them -- they can make that decision based on what's in the header.

Re:Industry move

"and it wasn't clogged with porn and javascript? "

*sigh* I know. Wasn't it a magical time when the internet was ALL porn and NO javascript??

Re:Here we come Verizon

"these people are horribly incompetent and have horrible customer service"

Say what you will, but they are the ONLY ISP who didn't roll over and provide their customers info to the RIAA. Theyd
fought for their customers right of privacy to the Supreme court and PREVAILED.

  In this day and age... that means something.

 

Re:Here we come Verizon

They rolled over for the NSA. They fought when it was convenient for them. Being inconsistent means nothing.

Re:Here we come Verizon

They rolled over for the NSA. They fought when it was convenient for them. Being inconsistent means nothing.

Oh, but it does. If you're worried about the NSA, you're... well, stuffed, really. Encrypt everything you can, and check for hardware keyloggers on the cable every morning before you log on.

Most of us, in practice, aren't worried about the NSA other than in the abstract. We're not organising political protests or anything. We're doing nothing to attract their attention. But we are worried about the MAFIAA, because a lot of us are... well, we are doing things to attract their attention. Gigabytes of things. Daily. An ISP that will stand up for its customers against those guys is golden.

Re:Here we come Verizon

Were you not paying attention when Qwest actually stood up and refused because they read what the law says?

Re:Here we come Verizon

Absolutely! One thing we're missing in today's society that we seem to admire most is integrity and courage to do what is right and lawful even [especially] under threat of retaliation! We've heard of many journalists being put in jail for not violating their ethics and principles. Many people find that extremely courageous while others think it's stupid. That's part of the difference in long-term thinking versus short-term and it has become our national bad-habit to go for the short-term gains and giving up our long-earned legacy.

Re:Here we come Verizon

"let's compare national security, and rolling over to a government agency, as required by law"

The phone companies didn't have to turn over anything "as required by law". The government made a request, and all the others gave them what they wanted when it WASN'T required by law. It wasn't a legal demand, because the government didn't have the legal right. Qwest basically said "show us the warrant and you can have any of the information it specifies". Seeing there never was any warrants, nothing was turned over by Qwest.

Re:Failure of the natural monopoly

He's trying to say Tux Racer isn't a game...

Re:So about that witch hunt...

That's false. There are numerous (Wireshark-confirmed) reports of RST injection happening on ANY TCP stream with a signficant amount of upstream bandwidth for more than a very short period of time.

For example, there's a well documented incident where Comcast's RST injection is killing Lotus Notes sessions where moderate sized (>1MB) attachments are sent.