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FCC Reports Comcast P2P Blocking Was More Widespread

Posted by Soulskill on Wednesday April 23, @06:12PM
from the saw-that-coming dept.
Networking The Internet
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.'

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Firehose:FCC Chairman: Comcast blocking was widespread by Anonymous Coward
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  • Comcast getting their just desserts (Score:5, Funny)

    by Urthwhyte (967114) on Wednesday April 23, @06:14PM (#23176690)
    Comcast: Hating our customers since 1963

    • Re:Comcast getting their just desserts (Score:4, Funny)

      by Tuoqui (1091447) on Wednesday April 23, @06:35PM (#23176878) Journal
      Tag this: Billofrestrictions

    • Anonymous Coward. (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 23, @08:35PM (#23177664)

      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: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by ptrace (1078855)
        It's interesting that a whitepaper provided by Sandvine posits that their equipment actually protects Net Neutrality with "fair allocation of network resources between potentially competing uses of the network." Stating, "the greedy nature of applications

        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          by electrictroy (912290)
          Yes, sometimes Comcast provides good service. For example one morning I turned-on my television and discovered instead of my usual 15-channel service, I had 70-channel service. I was paying $7 a month (plus tax) for 70 channels!

          Of course this was an ACCI

  • In other news... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Lunix Nutcase (1092239) on Wednesday April 23, @06:17PM (#23176714)
    The National Weather Service Reports that the Sky is Blue

  • Suits don't know (Score:5, Interesting)

    by o1d5ch001 (648087) on Wednesday April 23, @06:24PM (#23176798) Journal
    Its always curious when the suits of big ISPs talk about something they really don't understand. I worked at a large International ISP, and everyone from the Ops Manager up didn't understand the technology. They were "results oriented" and they apparently didn't need to know.

    So, I can just imagine what they folks at the top were being told by "middle management".

    Sigh.

    And imagine, no one wanted Block D of the wireless spectrum to deliver wireless services and provide real alternatives. The Internet has been bought and sold to the highest bidders, and now we all have to live with the moronic decisions being made by people who are only interested in squeezing as much revenue of the porn addled, facebook addicted, morons paying the bills.

      • Re:Suits don't know (Score:5, Insightful)

        by MarcQuadra (129430) on Wednesday April 23, @08:50PM (#23177788) Journal
        The -responsible- thing to do would be to use QoS to make all the P2P streams a lower priority than HTTP.

        Instead, they're actively (and randomly) interrupting P2P and causing -all- P2P traffic to fail, even at 4AM.

        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.

        I worked at a place where the Network Manager would see what sites were 'eating all the bandwidth' and just knock them down to 56Kbits/sec for the whole place. What he didn't understand is that -using your bandwidth is a good thing-, it means you're not paying for more than you use. 'blocking' P2P or 'top-talkers' just makes the experience on a network suck, there are much more effective and subtle ways to manage traffic that quietly make the traffic you want more important than the traffic you don't want interfering.

        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          by gozu (541069)
          You're absolutely right about QoS.

          What he didn't understand is that -using your bandwidth is a good thing-, it means you're not paying for more than you use.

          This is not accurate, however. The standard procedure when you are Comcast and are peering with Tie

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by illumin8 (148082)

          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 un

  • Surprised? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by M0bius (26596) on Wednesday April 23, @06:35PM (#23176886)
    Who is surprised by this revelation? From initial denial to any traffic shaping, to stacking the hearing with payed shills, Comcast has proven they are willing to do whatever it takes to oversell their service and then bottleneck it to keep from having to make infrastructure upgrades. I wouldn't be shocked if they rubbed the blood of sacrificed newborn children onto their fiber if it would save them a buck or two. Go Comcast!
      • Comment might have been funnier if you'd have said 'blood of a virgin', but with this being Slashdot, i can imagine that would strike a little too close to home for most :)

  • "Blocking" (Score:5, Interesting)

    by AsnFkr (545033) on Wednesday April 23, @06:53PM (#23177002) Homepage Journal
    I'm convinced instead of "blocking" some customers they simapily drove them to bad service so they would leave. I am an example of this:

    I run lots of torrents, and have for years. I have always had a very very stable line with Prestige Digital Cable, whom was bought by Adelphia whom was eventually bought by Comcast. My service with Comcast started out bad, as the upload speeds were cut in half and the bill was almost doubled (over a course of 6 months) but the actual line was very very stable. I didn't pay for a static IP, but I had the same IP address for a very long time, as most people tend to have. Eventually one day my IP shifted to a new subnet which gave like 90% packet loss (tested 24/hrs a day and averaged out with some Linus scripting). I ran my PC straight into the modem (removing the Linksys router) and it gave me an IP on the old and trusted subnet, with no packet loss at all. When I hooked the router up it associated it's MAC and put me on the bad one again. So I cloned the PC's MAC to the router, and bada-bing I'm on the good subnet and back to my torrents. A few weeks go by and all of a sudden that MAC addy is being pushed onto the bad subnet. I clone another MAC addy and up onto the good subnet I go, and around and around we go. Eventually I got sick of it and canceled the service all together. When I called to cancel the woman was very friendly until she had a chance to pull up my account info, they she just told me "Your service is off. Goodbye, click", leading me to wonder if there is actually a note in my account that has me marked as a high-traffic user.

    I realize most of this is based on paranoid speculation, so take it for what it's worth, but to be fair another friend of mine in the same town had the SAME EXACT situation take place. Just seems a little fishy.
    • Were their no other ISPs? How were you so patient with your paid for service?

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by jd (1658)
        Most places that have high-speed Internet have only one, or perhaps two, actual ISPs. There may be a few low-speed ISPs around (eg: 802.11b wireless) and there might also be one or two resellers of the high-speed bandwidth, but the odds are fairly high tha

    • leading me to wonder if there is actually a note in my account that has me marked as a high-traffic user.

      I wouldn't be surprised by that at all.

      In the same vain, what amuses me is how I could call Roadrunner, whine about the price being too high and get whatever "promotional" deal they were currently running (even if said deal was only for new customers).

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Comcast also has been blocking VPN traffic - and denying it. It took a call from VP of IT with a threat to pull all corporate business before they relented and stopped this in my area.

  • Sigh (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Fatal67 (244371) on Wednesday April 23, @07:11PM (#23177126)
    You would hope the chairman of the FCC wouldn't be so clueless. Well, whoever told him the things he is repeating at least.

    Anyone that has actually configured a sandvine box knows very well that you can set rules to run at any time they want. Anyone even minimally monitoring their network knows when their network is congested and can apply rules during those times.

    To say that the sandvine isn't network aware is false. You would think that the chairman would have contacted the manufacturer or at least had an aide go to the website.

  • This is all so obvious and expected, that I'd go so far as to say that it really isn't news.

  • Last month I got a phone call from a Comcast robot telling me my account was past due. At the time I did not realize that an autopayment had gone through 7 days earlier, so I immediately went and paid my balance online.

    A few days later my bank calls and tells me one of my accounts is overdrawn. Not Comcast's fault, but I ask the bank rep--did the autopayment actually go through? Yes it did.

    So I got on a live chat with a Comcast support agent who tells me that I was not double-billed, I was just charged twice for the same amount successfully. He was not authorized to issue a credit from his "location" so I called the billing department, where a rep told me the billing department does not have the ability to change autopayment settings.

    When I mentioned the robot call that I should never have received and asked if he could tell a manager to look into it, his tone of voice conveyed such disbelief and confusion that at first I thought I'd misspoke and asked him what kind of underwear he had on or something. Then he tried to sell me phone service.

    Coincidence?

    • Re:fixed? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Raineer (1002750) on Wednesday April 23, @06:51PM (#23176990)

      I _still_ only get 20kb/s on my Comcast line...

      They said they are working with BT, and working on this "bill of rights", and also admitting to slowing down the throttling.

      I have never seen them say they are stopping such activities.

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