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Comcast Makes Nice with BitTorrent
Posted by
Zonk
on Thu Mar 27, 2008 10:24 AM
from the friendly-dogs-and-cats dept.
from the friendly-dogs-and-cats dept.
An anonymous reader writes "In a dramatic turn-around of relations, cable provider Comcast and BitTorrent are now working together. The deal comes as BitTorrent tries to put its reputation for illegal filesharing behind it. The companies are in talks to collaborate on ways to run BitTorrent's technology more smoothly on Comcast's broadband network. Comcast is actually entertaining the idea of using BitTorrent to transport video files more effectively over its own network in the future, said Tony Warner, Comcast's chief technology officer. '"We are thrilled with this," Ashwin Navin, cofounder and president of BitTorrent, said of the agreement. BitTorrent traffic will be treated the same as that from YouTube Inc., Google Inc. or other Internet companies, he said. It was important that Comcast agreed to expand Internet capacity, because broadband in the United States is falling behind other areas of the world, Navin said. Referring to the clashes with Comcast, he said: "We are not happy about the companies' being in the limelight."'"
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Submission: Comcast makes nice with BitTorrent by Anonymous Coward
[+]
Your Rights Online: Canadian ISPs Limiting Access To CBC Shows 108 comments
An anonymous reader sends word that, even as ISP interference with BitTorrent traffic is easing in the US, the issue is heating up in Canada. Major Canadian ISPs are limiting access to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's shows, made available online using BitTorrent. This issue has burst onto the scene due to smaller ISPs, such as Teksavvy, blowing the whistle on the fact that Bell was expanding its traffic-shaping policies to smaller ISPs that rent Bell's network. These events have sparked a formal complaint by the National Union of Public and General Employees, which represents more than 340,000 workers across Canada, to the regulatory body, CRTC, and calls for change in Parliament.
[+]
Comcast Offers 50 Mbps Residential Speeds 332 comments
An anonymous reader notes that Comcast is offering a new 50-Mbps / 6-Mbps package for residential customers for $150, starting in Minneapolis-St. Paul and extending nationwide by mid-2010. The new service will use the DOCSIS 3.0 standard, which is nearing ratification. We've recently discussed Comcast's BitTorrent throttling and promise to quit it, and their low-quality 'HD' programming. How attractive will $150 for 50 Mbps be compared to Verizon's FiOS offerings?
[+]
Comcast Blocks Web Browsing 502 comments
An anonymous reader writes "A team of researchers have found that Comcast has quietly rolled out a new traffic-shaping method, which is interfering with web browsers in addition to p2p traffic. The smoking gun that documents this behavior are network traces collected from Comcast subscribers Internet connections. This evidence shows Comcast is forging packets and blocking connection attempts from web browsers. One has to hope this isn't the congestion management system they are touting as no longer targeting BitTorrent, which they are deploying in reaction to the recent FCC investigations."
[+]
FCC Reports Comcast P2P Blocking Was More Widespread 120 comments
bob charlton from 66 tips us to a ComputerWorld story about FCC Chairman Kevin Martin, who has testified that Comcast's P2P traffic management occurred even when network congestion wasn't an issue, contrary to the ISP's claims. After defending its actions and being investigated by the FCC over the past few months, Comcast has tried to repair its image by making nice with BitTorrent and working towards a P2P Bill of Rights. Quoting:
"'It does not appear that this technique was used only to occasionally delay traffic at particular nodes suffering from network congestion at that time,' Martin told the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee. 'Based on testimony we've received thus far, this equipment was typically deployed over a wider geographic area or system, and is not even capable of knowing when an individual ... segment of the network is congested.'
[+]
ISPs & P2P, Getting Along Without Getting Cozy 118 comments
penguin-geek writes "Researchers at Northwestern University have discovered a way to ease the tension between ISPs and P2P users. As we all know, there's been a growing tension between Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and their customers' P2P file-sharing services, and this has driven service providers to forcefully reduce P2P traffic at the expense of unhappy subscribers and the risk of government investigations. Recently, some ISPs have tried to fix the problem through partnerships with certain P2P applications. The Ono project represents an alternative solution: a software service that allows P2P clients to efficiently identify nearby peers, without requiring any kind of cozy relationship between ISPs and P2P users. Using results collected from over 150,000 users, they have found that their system locates peers along paths that have two orders of magnitude lower latency and 30% lower loss rates than those picked at random by BitTorrent, and that these high-quality paths can lead to significant improvements in transfer rates. In challenged settings where peers are overloaded in terms of available bandwidth, Ono provides a 31% average download-rate improvement; in environments with large available bandwidth, Ono increases download rates by 207% on average (and improves median rates by 883%). Ono is available as a plugin for the Azureus BitTorrent client, an open tracker and an standalone service you can integrate into any P2P system."
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huh? (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
But seriously this just means Comcast is going to work with the bittorrent folks
to put tighter than ever controls in place. They'll shape traffic to prefer the comcast
servers and peers to those same peers or any others talking to non-comcast servers.
They way they can claim to be embracing p2p traffic while actually throttling anything
they don't like.
Using comcast peers (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm surprised more ISPs (particularly foreign ones where bandwidth is pricey) haven't looked at ways to bias traffic to share internally. I know i talked with some ISP in the UK and tried to convince them to let their cable modems run much faster but to apply the traffic caps at their network boundary. Unfortunately it didn't seem practical to do that on that scale at that time.
If comcast were to double or triple the upstream available when staying within their network then i'm sure p2p tools would start exploiting it.
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Re:huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
Soon you can expect to get false 404's on port 80 if you've used "too much" of your "unlimited" bandwidth...
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
I've been seeing these on
Re:huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:huh? (Score:4, Insightful)
In an ideal world, you could do whatever you want with your connection, but this is the real world, where bandwidth is expensive, and ISPs would rather not be the ones paying to feed your free porn addiction
Parent
Half a loaf is bad when you are thirsty. (Score:5, Insightful)
This sounds more like, "sorry I got caught" than sorry:
BitTorrent traffic will be treated the same as that from YouTube Inc., Google Inc. or other Internet companies, he said. ... "We are not happy about the companies' being in the limelight."
No one caught doing something wrong is happy about the attention but they need to admit what they did was wrong not because a company was involved but because it harmed their customers. The above makes it look like they think they still have the right to block traffic their customers want. Beware of special deals like this.
Re: (Score:2)
There is probably more to it. Might be they will target P2P users in a different way, like nabbing music and whatever else sharers. Also there might be a fear that unless a deal is struck with Bit Torrent, the technology will be pushed underground where it will become even more difficult to monitor and control.
the water is still wet. (Score:5, Interesting)
All that "more to it" is the problem and Comcast needs to be clear about network freedom. They can rig all sorts of schemes to make BitTorrent a traffic cop or to be some kind of traffic cop but none of that is appropriate. Comcast needs to do it's job, which is delivering bandwith. Everything else is bad for them and leads to real censorship.
All of this nonsense about "unauthorized reproduction" and single file copies being a criminal offense represent a tremendous and wrong expansion of copyright laws. Copyright disputes should be a civil matter of who deserves money earned from works. Copyright protection of restricted files violates the limited time provision of the Constitutional establishment clause and the whole point of copyright is to insure a rich public domain. Censoring the press (aka the internet) in order to enforce this new and unwholesome copyright idea violates yet another portion of the US Constitution.
Money that can't be earned in a free society is money that should not be earned. It would be better to live without mass produced entertainment than to live without a free press. Comcast and other ISPs should be at the forefront of the battle to preserve network freedom. As long as they insist on port blocks and traffic shaping, they are an enemy of freedom.
Parent
O RLY? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:O RLY? (Score:5, Funny)
Me: "Is there a limit on bandwidth usage?"
CR: "No."
Me: "So I'll never be cut off no matter how much bandwidth I use?"
CR: "If you disrupt other customers' service with your usage, you will be cut off."
Me: "How much bandwidth would I have to use to disrupt other customers' service?"
CR: "There's no actual limit."
Me: "But if I'll be cut off for using enough to disrupt other customers, you must know how much it would take to do that."
CR: "There's no hard limit on bandwidth usage."
So... there's no such thing as too much... but I'd better not use too much.
Parent
BAANNNGG!!!! SPLLAAATTTT (Score:3, Funny)
Even though I had hoped that bit torrent would become the ISP's friend, I had not expected the devil himself to be one of the first to cozy up... WTF?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
As it should.
Heavy users (typically the younger crowd who typically don't have landlines) are precisely the demographic that Comcast targets.
The situation is not unlike the media companies complaining about widespread piracy when the category of people who regularly pirate music and movies are the media company's best customers. You think, for example, someone over 40 buys or watches the same number of movies? Or would even consider buying the same number of new CDs?
Good to see that
Re:BAANNNGG!!!! SPLLAAATTTT (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
proving once again... (Score:2)
1.) excommunicate
2.) ???
3.) cooperate!
Jacking off into a hat (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Jacking off into a hat (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
all bittorrent traffic, or just BitTorrent, Inc? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:all bittorrent traffic, or just BitTorrent, Inc (Score:5, Insightful)
BIG HINT: This is probably why they started throttling bittorrent traffic to begin with.
Parent
Re:all bittorrent traffic, or just BitTorrent, Inc (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re:all bittorrent traffic, or just BitTorrent, Inc (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
It should be noted that one can bypass comcasts crappy seeding-only blocks by running tracker traffic through an external proxy. Encryption of the individual p2p connections doesn't
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
But how would they discern the difference
BT Inc. could provide hashes of official torrents to Comcast. If the handshake doesn't send an approved info_hash, Comcast throttles.
Money? (Score:3, Interesting)
BitTorrent the company, not the protocol (Score:5, Interesting)
BitTorrent Plugin Detects ISPs Raping Your Torrent (Score:5, Interesting)
http://gizmodo.com/372442/bittorrent-plugin-detects-isps-raping-your-torrents [gizmodo.com]
Of course, a peaceful solution such as this agreement is always preferred, as it enlightens more and more people about the true nature of BitTorrent, and opens up the doors for more and more ISPs to do The Right Thing (tm).
first off.. (Score:4, Interesting)
Could Make P2P more palatable for CDNs (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
note : IAC
Useless article (Score:4, Insightful)
"The Comcast-BitTorrent dispute has been a cause celebre among Internet advocacy groups and others who called for greater regulation for an open Internet, citing Comcast."
I fail to see how greater regulation would ever be the solution. It was regulation that made Comcast's monopoly possible in the first place, allowing them to pull idiotic stunts like traffic filtering. No company in a competitive environment could ever get away with that, because users would simply switch to another provider. Greater regulation is definitely not the answer. Instead, the government should be keeping its claws out of the economy in the first place.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The Hollywood studios howled that their business was being destroyed by g
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
This is laughable. A director signs a contract with a studio, which agrees to exchange their property (money) for the director's talent. If
agnostic (Score:2)
Bittorrent Inc., NOT bittorrent protocol! (Score:5, Insightful)
The real issue is Comcast underinvesting in its infrastructure to the point where nodes meant to serve 400 residential customers are serving up to 700 (as confirmed to me by a tech who came in for a service call). In fact, Comcast actually INCREASED it's dividend to shareholders this year, meaning that instead of investing its increased profits into its own network for the benefit of its customers, it paid out to investors since the stock price is stagnant and it hopes they will plow that dividend back into Comcast shares.
Without investing in its infrastructure Comcast will continue to use underhanded tactics to scrimp and save bandwidth costs on a seriously overburdened network, to the detriment of its millions of customers. Complain loudly enough to Comcast and threaten to switch providers unless their service improves - ultimately that's the only way to make it change course to a customer-centric business model, which ultimately is the only way for it to stay in business.
Really, really creepy (Score:4, Funny)
What does comcast get from this? (Score:2)
Unless bittorrent has sold out, the way kazaa and napster have... *sigh*
I like-a to say (Score:5, Interesting)
This certainly is unexpected.
First off, Comcast is going to stop blocking or filtering or slowing down bittorrent traffic. That's bittorrent the protocol, not BitTorrent the company. From TFA, "We are working hard on a different approach that is protocol-agnostic during peak periods." Protocol. Not just torrents sanctioned by BitTorrent, Inc., but any torrents whatsoever.
Second, what seems to be even better, is that Comcast is going to be increasing throughput to its customers. "Internet Capacity" as stated in the summary doesn't really make sense, unless it's referring to an IPv4-IPv6 changeover (-1: Pedantic), but if that means what I think it was supposed to mean, then it's great. However, is it an increase in last-mile throughput, or overall throughput? Or both? Because overall throughput would simply mean that if your neighbors are torrenting, your connection isn't slowed down, whereas last-mile throughput would only increase your peak speed when no one else is downloading anything. It seems like last-mile throughput is generally already maxed out with today's (yesterday's?) technology, namely, cable, at around 6Mbps, and the bottleneck is in the shared line.
What I'm saying is that both should be improved. The shared line should be made so that everyone could attain peak throughput at all times, and the peak throughput should be about 10x-20x what it is now. That's right. The bottleneck should be in our own Cat5 cables or 802.11g networks, not imposed on us by our ISPs.
Of course, ISPs won't willingly provide this (it costs precious $$$s), but for what we're paying ($50 a month, or $100 with TV, which amounts to $1,200 a year) it kinda seems like we deserve it. Telecom companies are required to put most of their profits back into their networks, but I don't think ISPs like Comcast, which operate over cable, are. Maybe they should be. Seems like it might help.
Of course, most of that was just my incoherent rambling about one aspect of the state of technology in the US (don't get me started), so if you were expecting that to be meaningful, well, just forget what you read.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Comca$t is our $aviour (Score:2)
Notice the Fine Print, please... (Score:3, Interesting)
Which is a Good Thing, IMO, and I'm happy to have been proven wrong (I thought the P2P vs ISP war was going to heat up further.)
However, a guess: it may be a consequence of improved traffic shaping: they are already starting to prioritize short connections ("Speed boost", which is being very heavily advertised in this area).
You don't NEED to do RST injections if you can take the 1% heavy-users and traffic shape them down to a reasonable level when there's congestion. RST injection is very crude traffic management compared to the alternatives.
It also allows the ISP to deal with the cost externalities indirectly, because now the 90% don't complain as much about bad performance when they want to surf the net.
Finally, there is NOTHING in this that says they have to treat BitTorrent UPLOADS as special, just "not different from youtube".
Comcast has repeatedly claimed that they are only killing "leeches/seeds", flows which upload vastly more than they download. If Comcast instead just shapes all large uploads, this will have effectively the same effect, without the visible political repercussions.
Likewise, if ALL ISPs agressively shape uploads, this kills the P2P business model nearly as sure as anything else.
Also, the lack of topological awareness does hurt BitTorrent, as well as the lack of cacheability. If the ISP is able to say that
a) BitTorrent-type protocols can stay in my local loop and
b) These flows are ones I CAN cache without being sued
BitTorrent type flows become far less objectionable.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
BT is bulk traffic, so it's really not a big deal if it has a lower priority than other packets, AS LONG AS no extra throttling is done. That is to say - If BT runs fast during offpeak periods when no one is using the network, but slows down significantly during peak times of the day
What they said. (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not sure they have said anything but it looks like nothing good if they want to make a special deal with a single company [slashdot.org]. If they want some good attention, they can unblock ports and dedicate themselves to network buildouts. The core issue is one of network freedom. Without freedom, the internet is no better than cable TV.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
'Good Laws?'
Laws are neither good nor evil. It's a persons perspective that attaches good and evil. It is also worth bearing in mind how laws are created and how they are enforced. In short, the law is not there to protect you but to cage you.
Almost. Good and Evil are subjective concepts, which means they can potentially apply to anything that interacts with people. There have definitely been both good and evil laws.
'User Privacy?'
There is no such thing as privacy the sooner people understand this the sooner you can see what a childish concept it is.
It's absurd to say something doesn't exist when it actually does. Do *you* have anything that you've kept private? If you do, how can you possibly say it doesn't exist?
'You are in prison and don't know it.'
The size of the cage is limited by the size of your mind. If you wish to be caged then you will be.
I'm not even sure what to make of this one. How is merely "thinking" going to change the "cage"? The only way I can think is via Orwellian "the cage is freedom" sty
No (Score:5, Insightful)
This is still comcastic censorship, corporativism and licking the media mafia's asshole. Keep boycotting Comcast.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I think I speak for all Comcraptastic Customers (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Oh dear. I guess they do have the big picture. I can see it now: all Comcast users must keep a background application running while using their network (or have bandwidth severely throttled on a per MAC address instead of per packet shape) and
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)