Comcast Makes Nice with BitTorrent

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."'"

huh?

[68030]

Is it April already?

BAANNNGG!!!! SPLLAAATTTT

[zappepcs]

My head just asploded!

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:huh?

[Kickersny.com]

Soon you can expect to get false 404's on port 80 if you've used "too much" of your "unlimited" bandwidth..

It's funny you should mention that ... [imageshack.us]

I've been seeing these on /. for the last few days. And yes, I'm on Comcast :)

Really, really creepy

[Bovius]

This sounds like the plot of a B-rated sci-fi horror flick. Two organizations have a difference of interests, become aggressive and then hostile, conflict escalates, and then, all of a sudden: everybody's happy! Of course we'll help you out! We'd be delighted! Think of all the ways we could help each other! And then the one PI starts poking his nose where everyone's so happy and he finds out it's stage one of the evil plan of a mind-controlling space bug from Venus, building it's legion of manslaves.

Re:Jacking off into a hat

[kellyb9]

This, to me, is like Comcast jacking off into a hat and BitTorrent wearing that hat with the full knowledge of what's just been deposited in that hat.

I like to think of it as Comcast allowing bittorrent traffic, but your analogy works too.

Re:huh?

[entoke]

it's just a preemptive strike so it can be duped on april the first..

Re:O RLY?

[HeronBlademaster]

When i was shopping around for internet a few months ago I tried to get a comcast call center employee to explain this "unlimited - no it's not" thing to me. It went like this:

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.