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.'"

Industry move

[BigJClark]

Hmm, perhaps if you ssh tunneled out on port 80 to a proxy or destination server... in that way, the ISP at the most: 1) Couldn't read your traffic 2) Wouldn't be able to tell what application you were using (IE 21 = ftp, etc) Just a thought..

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:u didnt share that HBO show?

[timmarhy]

open your eyes, everything uses torrents these days, game demo's/patches for everything and they are as big as a gig each.

Re:fortunately

[timmarhy]

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:u didnt share that HBO show?

[JCSoRocks]

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.

Only a problem when it is unknown

[SplatMan_DK]

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

Re:Here we come Verizon

[Nicholas Evans]

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

Re:u didnt share that HBO show?

[ProteusQ]

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.

Re:Here we come Verizon

[Johnny5000]

it's really bad when you have to flee TO Verizon.

I saw some billboards around here (put up by Comcast) that said
"Three words: We're Not Verizon"

Which I thought was a funny ad campaign, since in my experience, they're so much worse than Verizon.

I mean, Verizon sucks too, but at least they're not Comcast.

A little more info.

[kramulous]

I'm trying to understand the logic here. You want high-speed internet so bad you'd have the government force somebody to rent their property to others?

It was a previous government that paid for the entire infrastructure that this company now has the monopoly over. Then along comes another government that likes to make the books look good (but as usual, are much worse) and sells the government owned infrastructure at a price that is ridiculously undervalued because an end of financial year is approaching and they want to hid the cost of military action and make it look as they are financially responsible. The fire sale is made with little consideration of the implications. I'll let you join the dots from there.

Forgery, not throttling

[Sloppy]

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:Here we come Verizon

[Shakrai]

Most of us, in practice, aren't worried about the NSA other than in the abstract. We're not organising political protests or anything.

The mere fact that you can state you "aren't worried about the NSA" and in the same paragraph say "we're not organizing political protests or anything" is pretty depressing. And I don't know which part is worse -- thinking that you might actually have a reason to fear the NSA because of political protects (First Amendment, what??) or me being cynical enough to understand why you would draw that conclusion.

How far we have fallen.

Re:Trading one monopoly for another?

[Shakrai]

Your phone service travels over fiber instead of copper. Isn't that better?

Not if the power goes out and your FiOS backup battery dies....... at least POTS on copper is line powered.

Re:Industry move

[morgan_greywolf]

The point was -- what do you do if your ISP blocks BitTorrent? ssh out and do port forwarding, right? Except if your ISP blocks BitTorrent, sshing to another server set up on the same ISP doesn't really help you.

Re:Here we come Verizon

[CSMatt]

I hope you realize that you just made the "nothing to hide" argument.

I'll color you wrong, thank you.

[Spy der Mann]

.. but seriously? Bittorrent is a horrendous resource hog. I'm /glad/ comcast is throttling it, because a significant number of paying customers don't want to watch their connectivity slow to a crawl

So, you prefer them watching their connectivity slow to a crawl because of the hundreds of thousands of YOUTUBE users. Oh guess what. If you have a favorite youtube video, there's no easy way to download it. You need to re-download it again and again and again.

Want to download your favorite videos? Download them via bittorrent ONCE (and in high quality for that matter).

I'm sorry, but your resource hog argument is simply a lot of bullshit. You give no statistics, no studies, no data. It's just your opinion.