Comcast Discloses Throttling Practices

Wired reports that Comcast finally provided information on its network management practices late Friday. In a report to the FCC (PDF), the cable company admitted to targeting P2P protocols Ares, BitTorrent, eDonkey, FasTrack, and Gnutella. Quoting: "For each of the managed P2P protocols, the [Sandvine Policy Traffic Switch] monitors and identifies the number of simultaneous unidirectional uploads that are passed from the [Cable Modem Termination System] to the upstream router. Because of the prevalence of P2P traffic on the upstream portion of our network, the number of simultaneous unidirectional upload sessions of any particular P2P protocol at any given time serves as a useful proxy for determining the level of overall network congestion. For each of the protocols, a session threshold is in place that is intended to provide for equivalently fair access between the protocols, but still mitigate the likelihood of congestion that could cause service degradation for our customers."

Evil from cable companies? Nevar.

Shocked, shocked I am! Evil in the telecoms industry? Never! Well, hardly ever.

Perhaps Google could develop a not evil telecoms company. (Or, as they did with the spectrum auction, play the evils off against each other and not actually spend ridiculous sums of their own money.)

I think we need a Microsoft telecoms company. Their evil has been slipping lately [today.com]. It's not good enough, Mr Ballmer!

(I'm picturing Steve Ballmer with his high-pressure used car salesman shout: "EVIL! EVIL! EVIL! EVIL!" Bouncing around the stage.)

Re:Evil from cable companies? Nevar.

People forget what "unlimited" Internet means when used in marketing access plans. Back in the "old" days, your connection to the Internet was metered by time since everyone pretty much got the maximum available and you didn't have bandwidth tiering you have with today's massive capacities. You usually had X hours of service per month in your plan. This is the "limited" part of the sales pitch. Eventually the ISPs were able to offer "Unlimited" access, meaning you could leave it on 24/7 all month and only pay the monthly fee.

Now some people are clamoring that they were sold "Unlimited" service and they are being cheated. Bullshit. Your still allowed to stay connected for an "unlimited" amount of time which is exactly what your paying for and my guess is that your service contract states this, you get X bandwidth available 24/7. Even then, that 24/7 isn't guaranteed but it's the exception not the rule when there's a problem with connectivity [Insert chosen ISP bashing here].

I'm not saying this is a Good Thing(TM), but it's not like anyone has been cheated. It's just been a case of very slimy marketing by the ISPs.

Re:Evil from cable companies? Nevar.

Okay, simple example.

Just like their "up to" line, they want to advertise more than they can do while lying, as many businesses do. This is like having a 160mph speedometer on a bicycle. Sure, you can do up to 160mph, or have unlimited usage, but they hid the reality, which is "no, you can't have what we promised or else we will disconnect you".

Re:Evil from cable companies? Nevar.

The thing is, time is no longer an issue in modern connections because they are packet-switched down to the bare wire.

In the old days you used a phone line, which was circuit switched, to call your ISP. They had a limited number of ports so they had to limit how long you could be online, otherwise folks would get a busy signal.

Since these days there is no customer-initiated circuit switching involved in cable and DSL links, the concept of "unlimited" can *only* apply to data transfer. There isn't anything else to limit.

Believe me, I remember the days of circuit switching and "hourly limits" quite well. I was on an ISDN connection from 2000 to 2004. Worrying about how *long* you're online is extremely irritating. Those are definitely "good old days" I wouldn't want to go back to.

Re:Evil from cable companies? Nevar.

Comcast hasn't advertised "unlimited internet" in many years. After a Google search, the only use of "unlimited" I could find in a current Comcast ad was associated with their phone service: "Make unlimited local and long distance calls with 12 popular features..."

Bullshit..

That is worded to basically say 'if the bandwidth is available, anyone can do anything' but from what I've been reading, those affected have been saying it's 'no p2p no matter what.'

They're lying.

But either way, the idea of throttling is bunk. If their networks cannot handle the service they sell, then they need to upgrade their networks.

Anything an ISP limits - whether it be browsing certain sites, severely limiting upload speed, or throttling p2p - is limiting free speech. They need to watch themselves. It's not hard to see that the 'big media' companies essentially want the Internet to turn into cable TV - where the customers are zombies that cannot contribute.

Re:Bullshit..

I'm not an American - so my understanding may be off.

I thought "Free Speech" meant literally that you couldn't be arrested for saying "stuff".

Specifically it doesn't mean:

• You have a right to yell "fire" in a cinema.
• Whatever you want to say has to be listened to by anybody.
• That your words must be broadcast as far as you want them.
• That people must obey your commands.

So, with that in mind. How is imposing a bandwidth cap in any way related to free speach?

Sure I could see if they didn't let you visit some, politically derived, blacklist of websites then you could argue they were suppressing some topics. But otherwise?

Hyperbole - and the more times you do that the less people pay attention. Cry Wolf, anybody?

VOIP and anti-competitive practices

Comcast offers a voip product. Would anyone like to guess how the throttling practice was applied to traffic that was catagorized as VOIP but was not associated with Comcast's subscription service? Can anyone out there say anti-competitive practice? Real easy for Comcast to put those copyright infringers out front as the rationale for this policy but when one reads between the lines..... things are not quite as pristine as outlined. Connect the dots and get a clue.

Actually, this was put in place to HELP VoIP

This was put in place per Comcast's talk at the IETF largely to IMPROVE VoIP service from Vonage et al. You look back to 2006, before this was deployed, and there were lots of complaints about "Comcast is disrupting Vonage and other voip services..."

Those complaints largely dissapeared after Comcast started policing P2P uploads.

Comcast blows

Choice? I wish! In my area Comcast bought out everyone and now they are the only player in the game. Needless to say their service is horrible and their customer service is horrendous! Something really needs to be done about these ridiculous cable monopolies.

Almost Worse than Legalese

You have to love how the text is carefully crafted to be virtually incomprehensible to the average person. Actually, check that - totally incomprehensible to the average person and virtually incomprehensible to all but the hardest core network tech geeks. Of course, it's intentional because saying, simply, "we slow down users who utilize programs we don't like" is too easy to understand and rally against, which, of course, is exactly the opposite of what Comcast wants. This Byzantine text just sounds like a lot of techno-mumbo-jumbo so it has to be ok, right? Thankfully, Slashdot is filled with hard core network tech geeks so I'll be reading comments with interest to get an informed synopsis rather than staring at Comcast's text and thinking "huh?"

Re:Almost Worse than Legalese

"For each of the managed P2P protocols, the [Sandvine Policy Traffic Switch] monitors and identifies the number of simultaneous unidirectional uploads that are passed from the [Cable Modem Termination System] to the upstream router.

Sandvine checks uploads without downloads. It does this 'above' (in the hierarchy) from the head-end of the cable network (neighborhood box).

Because of the prevalence of P2P traffic on the upstream portion of our network, the number of simultaneous unidirectional upload sessions of any particular P2P protocol at any given time serves as a useful proxy for determining the level of overall network congestion.

P2P is used a lot, and fairly consistently. Therefore, the number of one-way uploads (not SSH or rdesktop like somebody else said) can be used to extrapolate the total congestion for much less 'thought' (for Sandvine)

For each of the protocols, a session threshold is in place that is intended to provide for equivalently fair access between the protocols, but still mitigate the likelihood of congestion that could cause service degradation for our customers."

We count the number (like, only 500 BitTorrent sessions) and cut off after that.
--
My thoughts: I don't think this helps anything. I doubt anybody has much of a problem with them legitimately throttling P2P protocols, as long as it's done consistently and fairly (no need to throttle with plenty of upstream, right?). The real problem are the RSTs which impersonate each side of the connection to the other, saying that the other closed the connection. That's like Bob passing messages between Alice and Candice, and telling Candice that Alice called her a bitch, and telling Alice that Candice called her a bitch.

QoS isn't that hard, and I'm sure they know how. It's fairly easy to throttle back without sending RSTs, and allows for the full utilization of 'open' bandwidth.

This statement explains the rationale, but not the choice of methods.

Cable

Personally I don't thinks this has anything to do with what they claim. I see it more as comcast realizing that people are starting to get content from iTunes, or off the Xbox 360 or from Netflix and they are going to lose cable advertising dollars as well as customers paying for pay per view or home box office type services. Cable companies do not have a history of being customer friendly and have pretty much always taken the position of "you will pay us through the nose for our crappy signal and you will damn well like it" attitude. Now consumers are getting some choices of how to get their entertainment and I'm sure this just burns them up. So if they give you a 250 gig limit now, you can bet it won't stay that high and you can bet that if they can start throttling traffic they will. If it takes mom 14 hours to download that episode of Lost in HD, you can be sure she will just go back to the lovely ad packed version on TV. Just like newspapers, cable tv has become irrelevant and we all just want pipes to our homes, not the crap they give us over them. Just like when AOL came along and shook up the industry with the one price for all you can eat internet, someone will come along again and kick these greedy crooks in the nuts.

They don't Throttle, they Forge Reset Packets

Per that PDF, on page 10 Comcast described how they "delay" the packets, using "reset packets." Stop letting them get away with calling forging reset packets "throttling". Instead, they are blocking connections via forgery.

Except, they admit that packets with the reset header are only supposed to be used by the two end computers, and not by any of the routers in between, which should be handled by ICMP [wikipedia.org].

They say, in that pdf, "As used in our current congestion management practices, the reset packet is used to convey that the system cannot, at that moment, process additional high-resource demands without creating risk of congestion.", which is just crazy.
Reset isn't a "slow down" message, it is a "stop sending me any kind of data on this connection" message.

Re:Now what will happen?

That is better because now consumers can make an informed decision when choosing a internet provider.

An 'unlimited' internet connection at an affordable price may look like a good deal but if you knew in advance it was actually limited in some way you might have chosen another provider with a better offer. Now at least you know what you're getting for your money and you can make a fair comparison between different providers.

This improves transparency and thus competition and ultimately benefits the consumer.

Take it, leave it, or leave it

That is better because now consumers can make an informed decision when choosing a internet provider.

Only one high-speed Internet provider offers service in many areas of the United States (home of Slashdot). This means choosing a high-speed Internet provider is like choosing any other public utility such as your power or water provider. What recourse do people dissatisfied with a public utility have?

you can make a fair comparison between different providers.

You get this provider if you live here; you get that provider if you live there. Should people really be choosing where to live based on the only ISP that isn't dial-up?

Re:Take it, leave it, or leave it

Only one high-speed Internet provider offers service in many areas of the United States (home of Slashdot). This means choosing a high-speed Internet provider is like choosing any other public utility such as your power or water provider.

The US is a capitalist economy, right ? Isn't the market supposed to fix this ?

Where I live (small city in the Netherlands), I can choose from dozens of ISP's, there's also at least 10 different power companies to choose from. Also, it's always possible to move to an area where there are more or better ISP's to choose from.

Re:Take it, leave it, or leave it

The US is a capitalist economy, right ? Isn't the market supposed to fix this ?

Free markets do not work like that. Free markets fix things when there is an substantial economic incentive. Broadband infrastructure is expensive, time-consuming to lay down, dominated by strong players with political capital and related technology changes rapidly. Given those, why would the free market invest (tens of) billions of dollars in a long term, difficult and risky project? If you have billions of dollars, there are many many more ways to make more money in much less time. Free markets don't magically fix things for consumers. Free markets are about providing the opportunity for capital to move freely and as a result, make the best use of said capital. That's it. The issue is that people apply all kinds of benefits to "best use", as in no monopolies, cheap products, etc., which just isn't how it works. Especially not in the short term.

I also live in a small city in the Netherlands btw. I can choose dozen of ISP's, but only one which is faster than 8 Mbps. Not sure about the figures, but despite what the OPTA (Dutch Telecom Watchdog) says, there does exist a monopoly for "fast" internet in a considerable part of the Netherlands (wet finger approach: 25-35%). And moving to an area with faster internet??? That is rather a ridiculously expensive solution.

Re:Take it, leave it, or leave it

"The US is a capitalist economy"

Oh my god, that's *so *CUTE !!!!

The US, if you hadn't heard, is what we call a "mixed economy" -- with an interesting mix:

Profits are held by private individuals, and losses are distributed among the general public via bailouts, etc.

Re:Take it, leave it, or leave it

Profits are held by private individuals, and losses are distributed among the general public via bailouts, etc.

Oh bullshit.

Profits are divided between the individual and the state. Losses are almost always suffered by the individual. How often does the state step in to help bailout any business? You think AMD is going to get a helping hand if they go under? Did Pets.com get any help? Mostly the government says "suck it" if you fail and "gimme" when you succeed.

As for the recent "bailouts", it's going to be the profitable and well-off being taxed to bailout institutions that gave money away (rich people's money, mostly) to that part of the general public that is never going to pay that money back.

Fuck. The might as well have just increased income taxes and handed the money directly to those with bad credit. They could have avoided the charade of mortgages, etc, and just called it welfare and subsidized housing.

Re:Last-mile natural monopoly

The problem isn't logistics, it's political. ISP's cut deals with local government to ensure they keep their monopoly and eat the whole cake.

Re:Now what will happen?

Comcast will enforce bandwidth caps. How's that better than throttling?

1. You're told up front what the limits are.
2. It's not discriminating against any application, not even the legal ones.
3. It's fairly generous: 250 gigs lets you download at 0.77878308 megabit/s 24/7 (thanks, GNU units), or 8 gig per day. Plenty enough for a few aptitude full-upgrades, some online gaming and downloading a new distro to try out, plus some video to watch.

Even if it turns out that 250 gig limits make for a shitty service, at least Comcast are honest about the limits they put on you, so you know what you're buying and you can take the limits placed on you into account when deciding what to download.

Re:Now what will happen?

From the FAQ:

How is this announcement related to the recent 250 GB monthly usage threshold?

The two are completely separate and distinct. The new congestion management technique is based on real-time Internet activity. The goal is to avoid congestion on our network that is being caused by the heaviest users. The technique is different from the recent announcement that 250 GB/month is the aggregate monthly usage threshold that defines excessive use.

Gizmodo's take on the thing [gizmodo.com] is much easier to read.

Going over the 250GB cap will get you disconnected, but your bandwidth will get throttled long, long before that if you do anything their software deems "excessive."

Re:Now what will happen?

The idea isn't to guarantee the service you would want to have in your wildest dreams. It is to receive all terms and conditions prior to sale so that you can make an informed decision. It is fraud prevention.

Re:I have a sneaking suspicion

well, let them go home if they're not going to offer service like a big boy does. This is the Internet we're talking about. INTER being the key word. They're not being progressive here. They're being very regressive. Comcast wants to be the sole content provider to their subscribers like AOL did back in the 90's. Until AOL subscribers discovered the actual Internet.

This is what Comcast wants. They want their users to use their services. This is purely anti-competitive behavior. I say, if Comcast doesn't want to provide true undiscriminatory Internet access, get out of the damn business. They're already screwing their customers. Deregulation has allowed Comcast to act like this.

True competition would allow me to jump to an ISP who would provide the same level of service at the same cost without these BS tactics to force me to use their content.

Unfortunately, there's no other ISP here who provides cable. And no DSL providers want to provide me DSL despite having fibre to the curb. Since AT&T hasn't disclosed that I have fibre to the curb. Speakeasy thinks I can't only get 144k IDSL. AT&T knows I can get 100Mbit if they offered it. Comcast just wants me to stop using the service altogether. I hope the FCC really drops the hammer on these anti-competitive greedy bastards.