Comcast's Throttling Plan Has 'Disconnect User' Option

newtley writes "Comcast's new people, not protocols scheme may mean high speed for some, but by no means all. It's also created a draconian 'disconnect' option for use against anyone who fails to toe the Comcast line. But, says Robb Topolski, the Net protocol expert who originally uncovered Comcast's blatant efforts to control its customers, the plan does offer key take-aways, telling P2P users on Comcast how to do what they do without the risk of corporate interference."

Slow News Day

Excuse me? Where's the news here? We already knew that Comcast's bandwidth cap will be (starting next month) 250 GB... break it once and you're warned, break it twice your service address is cut off for a year.

And

If you want/need more, you can get a business class account. I've had business class Internet for many years now. Currently it's with Cox cable, but I've used Speakeasy and Qwest in the past. Business class accounts get you a number of things, like static IPs and such, but one of them is no bandwidth cap. Whatever speed you pay for, you are free to use as much as you like and you'll hear not a peep out of them.

However, you are going to pay more for it. Where a normal cable account might be $50/month, expect to pay over $100/month for a business account. However, if you are the kind of person who needs lots and lots of bandwidth, it seems only fair you should pay more for it.

You have to remember that consumer connections are something like a big LAN. Everyone gets to have nice fast access, but only if people are nice and share it. You use your fast speed when you need it, let others have it. For example I work for a university. We have a nice fast network, I've got gig to my desktop. We've got plenty of upstream too. I've gotten things like 100+mbit download speeds on Linux ISOs and so on. Wonderful, however everyone on campus can't do that 24/7 full bore. If we did, well there's be maybe 300kbps of bandwidth for each of us. It is fast and cheap because we all share.

Same deal on your consumer grade cable modem. If you want a nice cheap price and a fast link, you need to be willing to share with others and that means not running it at full capacity all the time. Otherwise you either have to settle for less bandwidth, or greater costs. Me, I choose the greater cost option and then do as I please.

Re:And

My Comcast business account is only $5/mo more than my "home" service. And for 10 bucks on top of that I get 5 IPs. Sure only the upstream is a boost over my residential (384Kbps to 1Mbps) but I don't pay for satellite or cable TV, which is how I justified the extra cost.

Although I note my torrent speeds are still poo (I'm trying to download Intrepid Ibex Alpha 6 and I'm gettin' 25-30K). I have Googled around and found nothing about if they're screwing with P2P on their biz accounts.

Re:And

Oh, you mean on the Comcast lines that were partially funded by U.S. taxpayer dollars that were given to Comcast (and others) to get the Internet infrastructure to reach as many people as possible? And now those lines that were funded by the public are to become new profit centers under the guise of "network management"? And you don't have a problem with that?

How about instead Comcast actually do what they were supposed to do and build capable infrastructure that has enough bandwidth for everyone to do anything?

Personally, I would love for the General Accounting Office to take a nice, close look at Comcast's finances to find out exactly where that taxpayer money went to. Looks more like it went into Comcast's advertising budget so that they could oversell their capacity instead of putting it into the hardware that could have prevented all of this in the first place.

Verizon has millions of miles of dark fibre and have said numerous times that they have plenty of bandwidth as it is. What's Comcast's excuse?

Ok fine

But then no bitching if all you can buy is 256kbps. Bandwidth isn't free and the larger the links get, the more pricey they are. You can see this with LAN hardware. It is damn near impossible to get 10mbit switches anymore, 100mbit is the minimum and those are cheap as hell. However gigabit goes up a good deal in cost. A 24-port 100mbite switch might run you $100. A 24-port gigabit switch from the same vendor is over $400. Ok well then 10gbit goes waaaay up. Now you are talking thousands of dollars to get a gigabit switch with even a couple 10gbit ports, and then several hundred per port to get the transceivers.

Now suppose you want to design a network for 500 computers on 5 floors (100 per floor) that gives 100mbit to the desktop. So you get a bunch of 24-port switches and hook them together. Turns out you need about 31 of them. 1 central switch, 5 floor switches and 25 access switches. Those are about $100 each so $3100 total. Ok great.

However you then decide you want everyone to always get their full 100mbit. So now you still connect the computers with 24-port 10/100 switches. However those switches need to have at least 2 gigabit ports (channeled together) on them for uplink, assuming you hook 20 PCs to each. So you now need 25 access switches, but each now costs $180. That's $4500 for for the access switches. Now on each floor, your floor switch has to be able to take 10 1gbit connections in and so a 10gbit connection out. For that you are talking about $2500 per switch for the switch and transceiver. So $12,500 for those. Then for your core switch, you need something with 5 10gbit ports. That is getting extremely high end, and is nearly $10,000 for the switch and transceivers. So for this solution you are talking $27,000.

Well that's a difference of $6/computer and $54/computer. Costs a hell of a lot more to do guaranteed bandwidth. Also this is just a small scale example. Now suppose you have 10 buildings that need connection, then 20 cities with 10 building complexes, and so on. Gets amazingly expensive if you have this "Everyone must have dedicated bandwidth" idea.

What's more, you'd find that for less than that, you could do something that's better overall. If you ran gigabit to the desktop, gig to the floor switches and then gig or maybe 2 gig to the core you'd find that in real usage, everyone would have faster transfers, and you'd pay a less than the dedicated 100mbit solution. Yes, it can get overloaded, however so long as people share it'll actually be faster for everyone.

Re:Slow News Day

there's more to it than the cumulative cap. they also have an elaborate throttling scheme based on how much you're currently downloading:

The issue will be their strange throttling scheme, which puts users in a "penalty box" for using more than 70% of available bandwidth in any 15 minute window and releases them from the box when their activity drops below 50%.

It has the net effect of decreasing the effective sustained bandwidth. I don't have Comcast, and I think the cumulative limits are fair, but this strikes me as unfair. What if I don't come close to the monthly limits, but I'm streaming/DLing something that will take longer than 15min? If congestion isn't an issue, why not let someone DL at the capabilities of their connection?

Comcast is just playing by the FCC's rules.

Isn't this what you guys wanted? Comcast is being told they're can't discrimate against so-called-p2p protocols... so they're just counting bits and if you use to many, you get a warning, then you're out. Only people who are using their Internet connection as their primary HDTV input will be affected at the proposed level.

There's enough room in 250 GB to watch what you want 16 hours a day... sleep the other eight or you'll go insane!

Re:Comcast is just playing by the FCC's rules.

The cap sounds pretty reasonable, but the warmings and disconnects are weird to say the least.

If you are over your alloted bandwith for a month, would it not be logical to block you for the rest of the month only, or even give you an option to buy more?

The warning and disconnect seems more like a scare tactic, "do not even dare to come close to this limit"

Re:Comcast is just playing by the FCC's rules.

All of the major cell phone companies give you a free text message and/or wireless web page that tells you as best as they can how many minutes/bytes you've used this billing cycle and such. Why Comcast can't do the same for their bandwidth limit is beyond me.

Re:Comcast is just playing by the FCC's rules.

All of the major cell phone companies give you a free text message and/or wireless web page that tells you as best as they can how many minutes/bytes you've used this billing cycle and such. Why Comcast can't do the same for their bandwidth limit is beyond me.

Then you haven't thought very hard about it from Comcast's point of view. It makes perfect business sense. Developing a customer-ready bandwidth usage meter has very real fixed and recurring costs to Comcast, costs which have no potential to increase profits now or in the future. If customers are going to switch to or from Comcast, it will be because of the cap, not because of the availability of a usage meter.

Additionally, an easily-viewable bandwidth meter would in all probability only encourage customers to get much closer to the limit than they would otherwise. It's fear-based policy. The more of their customers that decide "I'd better not download this movie/album/ISO/whatever, I might hit my bandwidth cap", the better. Comcast wants customers to stay in the dark regarding usage and be as conservative as possible in their internet activities, while still pretending to offer the full 250 GB.

Re:Comcast is just playing by the FCC's rules.

I agree. The cap is a perfectly good idea. Giving users no way to see how close they are to their cap, and cutting people off for exceeding it, are terrible ideas.

I see no reason why I, a moderate internet user, should subsidize that guy down the street who downloads 1TB of torrents every month. He uses more, he should pay more.

But the way Comcast is going about it is stupid. They're trying to have their cake and eat it too, essentially. An explicit cap can lead to more traffic, since now people know what the limit is and what they're really paying for, and they may decide that they should use more of what they're paying for. I think they're trying to limit the top people without causing this sort of increase, and doing this by having an explicit cap that still happens to be vague and dire.

If you were to do this right, you should really have a system where many different caps are available. You'd have a default one, probably well under 250GB, that comes with a service that's cheaper than what they offer now. Then you can pay more to increase your cap. You'd be able to monitor your usage, get a warning well before you hit the cap, and increase your account's cap at any time just by requesting it. And if you do hit your cap, then your account gets throttled to dialup speeds until your 30-day sliding window average decreases below the cap level.

Of course this would make far too much sense so Comcast won't do it, but it's what they ought to do.

Question

I don't do a lot of torrenting -- only when I really want something I can't find for sale, or to download "legit" stuff -- but I've found that TOR works really well against comcast's nonsense. It isn't like I'm downloading much, maybe ten to fifteen GB on a busy month (and zero most months). Before I found TOR, I'd start a torrent and my connection would be cut off within an hour or two. I could reestablish it by powercycling the cable router, but then would have it happen again in a few minutes. Then, I started spoofing my MAC address, which seemed to buy a few hours each time before the same thing would happen. Finally, I installed TOR and now it just works, at least with rtorrent.
I have read that some people believe that using torrent over TOR is abusive, but I never saw an explanation of why that would be so. If I operate a node (give back) it's fair, isn't it? And if not, why not?

Re:Question

That's the solution to the old model of blocking you... under the new plan that'll just put you deeper in the whole because adding all of TOR's routing information just makes your packets bigger. And bigger packets mean more bits against the 250 GB.

Re:Question

Torrenting over TOR is incredibly slow, I typically get maybe 3-5kbps, as opposed to 150-800 without it.

Re:Question

I have read that some people believe that using torrent over TOR is abusive, but I never saw an explanation of why that would be so. If I operate a node (give back) it's fair, isn't it? And if not, why not?

Full disclosure: I'm in the Don't-use-Tor-for-torrenting camp.

I think the issue depends on how much you give back vs. how much you take. If your node is running 24/7 and you aren't limiting how much bandwidth goes through it (since it eats up your own bandwidth) I say torrent away. Whatever you're downloading is your business, BTw. What I take issue with are the people that leech off the Tor network by sending GB of data through it without giving anything back. (leeching http/text doesn't count as being bad, IMO, b/c it 's too small to make much of a difference)

Re:Question

It really depends on how much you give back.

Remember, Tor uses onion routing which means that every packet you send or receive goes through many nodes to get to you. This effectively multiplies your bandwidth usage by a factor of perhaps 5-10, depending on how many hops your packets travel. (I don't really know what a typical number would be.)

So, you run a node. Do you process 5-10x as much traffic as you torrent? If so, great. If you're only passing an amount of traffic equal to what you torrent, or worse less, then you are definitely abusing the system.

Warning! Don't read referenced articles!

telling P2P users on Comcast how to do what they do without the risk of corporate interference.

I've already watched a Netflix movie and downloaded a couple iTunes this month.

So I haven't read the referenced articles, as I'm afraid that doing so might exceed some Comcast quota.

Heh heh heh...

How about a better idea. They should put into place a system whereby the speed of your access is inversely proportional to the amount of data you transfer. Thus, when people first sign on to this service, they'll be impressed by its speed. But as time goes on, it'll slow down increasingly, until Google's homepage takes a year to load.

Re:Heh heh heh...

Similar systems already exist overseas and with the US satellite Internet providers.

Re:Heh heh heh...

They should put into place a system whereby the speed of your access is inversely proportional to the amount of data you transfer. Thus, when people first sign on to this service, they'll be impressed by its speed. But as time goes on, it'll slow down increasingly, until Google's homepage takes a year to load.

Comcast has that option already. It's called "Comcast High-Speed Internet".

Problem with caps

The problem I have with bandwidth caps as offered by ISPs is that when the ISP is also the cable provider the bandwidth cap is anti-competitive with Hulu and other video entertainment sites. As far as I can tell this is prime territory for an anti-trust investigation.

IANAL but it seems to me that these caps are not because of P2P but put in place because of competition for the television audience. By capping the users Comcast seems to be trying to guarantee that their cable service is still viable.

Chill pill people

250 GB is both transparent and a real shitload of bandwidth.

This is 7 hour a day, 7 days a week, of 720p HDTV video over Hulu. It takes a LOT to reach this point.

Additionally, beacuse any user who gets terminated will undoubtedly ALSO terminate their cable TV and phone services with Comcast, its something that a company would not want to do lightly.

Holy exaggeration Batman!

A draconian option for those who don't toe the line? Blatant efforts to control their customers? Corporate interference? Are you sure you aren't being just a teensy wee bit melodramatic about this?

I recently got Comcast (they are the only provider available at my new place), I routinely get download speeds around 1-2MB/s (with a 'bytes', not a 'bits'), including torrents, and the price is more or less reasonable. By my calculations I am damn unlikely to ever hit the 250GB cap (I may use 8GB in day from time to time, but far from most days), and even if I do, I was aware of this limitation of the service before signing up.

So remind me, why am I so damn outraged about this? Is it because someone would dare to suggest that there be some kind of limit to the amount of porn and movies I can download for 60 bucks a month?

I used to pay through the nose for Speakeasy, so far I'm getting a better service from Comcast.

The beginning of the end for cable modems

It's not that Comcast is setting bandwidth caps. It's that they have no choice. Now that you can get high-speed internet service via the cellphone network, AND Verizon is rolling out FiOS everywhere, how can they compete?

Remember, the internet runs over the *phone* network. The big cellphone/telecommunications providers own most of that. AT&T and Verizon are both Tier 1 providers with huge networks. It's almost *guaranteed* the Comcast is paying AT&T and/or Verizon for bandwidth and/or transit. And yet, Verizon and AT&T are competing with them.

And the same is true for most of the other cable TV providers in the United States. They have been offering phone and internet service for the past 5 years or so, but only because the telcos weren't doing it. They are now. The cable companies are FUCKED.

Re:"without the risk of corporate interference"

Are you really that fucking stupid?

To put it as plain as day: If the corp is making a decision to maximize value, by denying or restricting your access to something, you are going to want to find a way around it. None of this is good or bad in any general sense, just rational behavior.

A better question may be, why don't we give credit to corporations when they do good? Well, we do give credit, in the form of $$$. Complaining, boycotting, &c. is the socially acceptable form of "negative money" (the unacceptable form is vandalism, robbery, kidnapping, &c.).

I think the problem is that Americans (I am one) tend to pay far too much respect to the rich and corporations. I can and do complain legitimately about Microsoft, but I still oppose most uses of anti-trust against them. Nonetheless, people look at me like I'm a communist, when I suggest that Bill Gates isn't wonderful. Even an atheist can appreciate the sense of the phrase "Render unto God what is God's and unto Caesar what is Caesar's."