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."

Which horse?

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

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

Bad analogy.

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

Re:Bad analogy.

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:Bad analogy.

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:

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:Bad analogy.

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!

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:You are a Moon Master!

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

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

Phew

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

Re:Phew

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

Another bad analogy

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.

They even flat out lie

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!

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

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.

Needs more car analogies.

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

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

Re:Repeat Programming

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

Why concentrate on "throttling"?

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:

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"?

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.

Re:You'd do the same

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

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:You'd do the same

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:

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 overl

Re:It's paid for.

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.