FCC Reports Comcast P2P Blocking Was More Widespread

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.'

Re:Bittorrent unblocked

[alphasubzero949]

Bad ISPs [azureuswiki.com]

P2p blocking is old hat at Comcast

[Anonymous Coward]

It's funny that the chairman of the FCC gets involved when a protocol that is primarily used for copyright violation gets throttled, but nobody cares about the way Comcast manipulates SMTP traffic, as they have for many years.

The semi-random port-blocking on 25 that they do often seems designed to optimize the ability of worms and viruses to spread while simultaneously forcing all legitimate traffic through their (failure prone) mailservers.

I had a lot of conversations with them about it and eventually gave up trying to edjumacate their underpaid moronic techs. Since verizon figured out how to get FIOS to my house (no small technical feat) I switched to them... at least they are competent evil. Well, by comparison anyway.

Wow, my posts aren't usually this cynical.

Anonymous Coward.

[Anonymous Coward]

Comcast: Hating our customers since 1963

I've worked for Comcast since the mid-eighties. Over the last few years everything has really went to pot. Miserable managers who lie as easily as talk, faked technical and management reports are the norm. You can't survive without doing this. I really believe it started when we picked up a lot of former AOL and TCI/AT&T guys. After that the company culture, which wasn't stellar to start with, took a serious wrong turn.

Anyway, as far as the packet meddling: it's done by a Sandvine box. There's thousands of them nationwide. There's one wherever there's a CMTS (Cisco UBR or Arris Cadant router) That means there's one in your neighborhood.

Re:Bittorrent unblocked

[ciscoguy01]

That site is badly out of date and cannot be relied on.

Comcast No (does not limit BitTorrent bandwidth)

Which they clearly have bought Sandvine.com equipment specifically to do.

Re:"Blocking"

[ion.simon.c]

I had read that as of late 2007, such exclusivity agreements are no longer "legal".

Ars makes a mention in this article, but I can't be arsed to find a press release or Order on the FCC's site.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080319-fcc-overhauls-its-broadband-data-as-eu-points-and-laughs.html [arstechnica.com]

Re:Suits don't know

[illumin8]

The sad thing is, I know exactly why this is happening. There's someone (or a group of people) who honestly believe that 'P2P is eating all our bandwidth' and that if they use this blocking method, it'll all be OK.

It's much more nefarious than that. To understand why Comcast prevents people from uploading (seeding) torrents, but doesn't prevent people from downloading torrents, you need to understand how peering agreements between large backbone internet providers work.

ISP A (let's call them Comcast) wants to peer (exchange traffic) with ISP B (let's call them AT&T). So Comcast and AT&T both run a big fat pipe to each other, and the agreement is written like this:

If Comcast sends (uploads) more traffic to AT&T's network, they have to cut a check to AT&T like they were a customer, to pay for the traffic that is transitting AT&T's network. If AT&T sends (uploads) more traffic to Comcast, then it's the other way around. AT&T has to cut a check to Comcast for the traffic that is transitting Comcast's network.

So, you see, some "creative" accountants, who probably came over from Enron or Worldcom, looked at these peering agreements and said "hey, if we can just reduce or eliminate our outbound traffic, but keep our inbound traffic high, we can game the system and make $$$$."

In other words, Comcast is just gaming the system. This is a stupid move because the backbone providers they peer with will simply write new contracts when they are up for renewal, and Comcast will end up paying through the nose for bandwidth, in order for them to recoup all of their losses. But it looks good to shareholders and creates temporary short-term gains, which allows executives to retire with golden parachutes once the market turns sour, which it inevitably will.

Mark my words, Comcast will be the next Enron/Worldcom fiasco. Creative accounting cooking the books short-term by gaming the system. It always comes back to haunt you.