FCC Reports Comcast P2P Blocking Was More Widespread 120
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.'
Comcast getting their just desserts (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Comcast getting their just desserts (Score:4, Funny)
Anonymous Coward. (Score:5, Informative)
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.
You worked at comsuck (Score:1, Troll)
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It only truly went downhill circa 2000 when it tried to hand-out more customer contracts than bandwidth available, thus giving everybody the infamous "always busy" signal when they tried to dial-in. If Comcast is now run by former AOL managers,
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Ca
Sandvine (Score:2)
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Of course this was an ACCIDENT. It was not the result of a genuine desire by Comcast to make me happy.
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Not yet they aren't (Score:1, Interesting)
You'll notice that no where in the article are penalties for Comcast mentioned. They do say that Congress is "considering clarifying" the FCC's power to "act on blocking complaints," but at this point there is nothing besides speculation of what that means, and absolutely no mention of punitive action on the current complaints.
Comcast could get off with a gentle scolding and a "we'll be watching you from now on" talk. That's at the strict end of the scale. They could a
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http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/just_deserts [wiktionary.org]
"Middle English originating from the old French 'deserte' meaning 'to deserve'. This in turn is from the Latin 'deservire' which in Vulgar Latin means 'to gain or merit by giving service'."
In other news... (Score:4, Funny)
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Italians cheat at football.
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They just play more aggressively and use 'creativity' to win matches.
Much like Enron and Citi used 'creative' accounting to make profits.
Much like Microsoft used 'creative' sales of XP to avoid taxes.
As long as its not illegal, am not cheating.
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In plain words, (Score:1)
Suits don't know (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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...squeezing as much revenue of the porn addled, facebook addicted, morons paying the bills.
The key words in that sentence are "paying the bills." Like it or not, all of this infrastructure exists because those "morons" are paying the bills, and because the "suits" are so good at "squeezing revenue" out of them. If the internet were built without regard to profit, it would never have grown past a modest network connecting a few academic and government computers. At the very least, we would be paying a heck of a lot more for less bandwidth because we wouldn't be enjoying the economies of scale
Re:Suits don't know (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Comcast is *still* shutting down BitTorrent seeders.
There's nothing random about it.
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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 Tier1 people like ATT and Cogent is to pay them money for each gig of data you send on to their network and vice versa. So you always want people to be sending packets to your network and you hate those pesky uploaders who are sending them out packets out of
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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
In one word... (Score:1)
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--
I will never vote for a candidate that robocalls me, period.
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Surprised? (Score:5, Insightful)
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you need to use Cheetah blood.
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Re:fixed? (Score:4, Insightful)
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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"Blocking" (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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In most cases, yes, you'll have a choice between at most two broadband ISPs: your local cable company (providing cable Internet) and your local telephone company (providing DSL). Note that that's a maximum. In a noticeable number of areas you'll have only one. Sometimes it's because one or the other simply doesn't serve that chunk of real estate. Sometimes in the case of apartments, condominium complexes and newer developments it's because the owner/developer has given one company exclusive rights to provid
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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]
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Whether they're legal or not unfortunately doesn't give you any leverage to force a competitor to serve you. If your complex has an illegal exclusivity agreement with the local telco for broadband Internet, they refuse to lease space on their lines to competing DSL providers (which they can do) and the local cable company refuses to wire up the complex (which they can do), then you're still stuck with only one ISP available.
And it may not be just the ISPs. Local to me the District Attorney is prosecuting t
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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). Amazingly enough, if I tried to make the same request on behalf of a friend who lived too far out to get DSL they would refuse. Never refused when the request was made for someone who had an alternative though.
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People who work for bad companies tend to fit in there.
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What's strange is how the customer service peons take the company's side on this kind of stuff--every single time.
People who work for bad companies tend to fit in there.
It's not so strange... it's called either (a) keeping your job (and they dont have a high retention rate), and/or (b) not knowing much (technically) beyond what the support docs on their screen tell them and thus not even realizing they are facilitating in this.
A perfect example was when I was a tech at CompUSA and we called HP to order a part. No, we didnt call the normal HP support line, we had a "Vendor Only" number.
US: "Hi, I'm calling because we need a new power supply for an HP Pavilion Piece of
Turnover (Score:2)
The last time I heard, call center employees have an average of about 6 months of shelf life - w/ fewer than 10% surviving 2 years. When I did it, I was being paid dick to be yelled at for 8 hours a day & solve an average of 48 tech support calls a day. (3 minutes of mandatory script reading/user verification & 7 minutes to do a full phone diagnosis on why Bambi Bubbles & her 2 braincells can't get on line)
As tech support I got a total of 3 death threats & at least 1 threat of violence week
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...who knows why they went about it this way.
I'm guessing when you dropped service you returned the modem, right? It would require effort to release/reset the MAC address on the modem before it went to a new customer, or they'd get the same bad service they wanted you to have. Sure, it's only one more step, but it's in a different department and these guys don't seem to be the most clever bunch anyway. But I suspect that was the reason - automate the script to ignore modem MACs and automatically shape other MACs, and they don't have to deal with
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Not that I agree with it mind you, it's simply the cheaper alternative when
faced with bandwidth limiting or expanding your infrastructure.
If you can identify what may cause serious headaches for your network
and / or your available bandwidth you are simply one step closer to
making the call to minimize it's effect by whatever means you have available.
In this case, the degradation of the P2P applications in the hope that
the masses ' g
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No. The major ISPs need to have their government-granted monopolies disallowed. In most cases, Comcast or some other company manages to influence local legislation in such a way that they are the only ones in the area permitted to lay wire (or fiber). _That_ is what needs to stop. The pressures of real competition would make these providers work to keep customers, as opposed to deliberately abusin
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If the Comcast higher-ups in your area subscribe to the idea of "churn" (and there's very little reason to doubt they are, since a company of that size most likely has a significant number of Harvard MBAs), then that's exactly what happened. You, a high-traffic user, would most likely go elsewhere if your service smelled worse than a 4-day-old used gym sock. While they use methods to squelch your torrents th
Hey, I have another tag for this article... (Score:1)
FuckingCriminals
This is /. (Score:1)
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Comcast No (does not limit BitTorrent bandwidth)
Which they clearly have bought Sandvine.com equipment specifically to do.
Sigh (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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I was stating nothing about how they were used in the case. I don't know if they configured it to perform as you state, but they could have. Which is opposite to what he stated.
What he says the box cannot do is one of the reasons the box was sold. If I were sandvine, I'd make sure he corrected that issue.
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If the box wasn't configured in such a way, why would the chairman need to tiptoe through the tulips? As deployed at Comcast, apparently, Sandvine isn't aware of congestion, instead filtering certain protocols. Not having enough information to know what methods Sandvine uses to determine congestion, relying on snmp alerts or whatnot, one comes to the conclusion that Comcast either wanted widespread filtering or was too lazy to
Comcast is actually doing just what has been...... (Score:2)
Obvious!!! (Score:2)
Of Course It's Deliberate (Score:5, Funny)
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: (Score:2)
-Mike
P2p blocking is old hat at Comcast (Score:2, Informative)
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
Frame Relay (Score:1)
Comcast blocks others VoIP as well! (Score:1)
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Native american history and ancient middle east history can not be compared. native american history is a history of migrations, whereas ancient middle east history is a history of cultural changes
So conquest of wandering nomads is ok?
this should give an idea why proto jews were there as nomadic tribes already, LONG before 1800 BC.
And this is relevant to the present day situation because....?
jews were there more than 2 millenia ago, they controlled it aroun 500 years
More than two millennia ago, modern day England was controlled by the Roman empire for about 400 years. Should London be returned to it's rightful owners in Italy?
with your argument you could totally justify israeli occupation of palestinian lands - nobody owes any palestinian anything because early muslim empire arabs were able to take those lands from byzantine empire, but then lost it.
Why did you draw the conclusion that my argument was only directed at the Jews?
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So conquest of wandering nomads is ok?
you got what i meant. if you didnt, let me explain plainly ; native american history is incomparable to ancient middle east history when concerning rights of ownership to a piece of land.
And this is relevant to the present day situation because....?
if you havent read and took time to asses what i wrote, i cant go over explaining everything again and again, apologies.
Why did you draw the conclusion that my argument was only directed at the Jews?
you are debating by questions i presume. regardless of who your argument was directed at, it justifies any and all occupation.
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Why? I can't see this as anything other than a blatantly racist statement.
This is accurate, though.
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And the Old Testament explicitly orders the stoning of adulterers, those who work on the Sabbath and Homosexuals.
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Relevance? A response to this remark:
Please explain why pulling a random quote out of the Koran is any more 'relevant' then someone doing the same thing to your holy book?
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Please explain why pulling a random quote out of the Koran is any more 'relevant' then someone doing the same thing to your holy book?
there is this difference ; we know that any version of bible was written and edited by men, heavily so, and if you see any uncivil orders you can just attribute them to human error and discard. there exist no controversy in regard to bible's history of being written by men, not even catholic church denies that, first major council happening in AD 400 or so to decide 4 major bible versions, and edit them appropriately. in islam, koran is said to be unchanged word of god, never edited, never changed, so what
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in islam, koran is said to be unchanged word of god, never edited, never changed, so whatever contained in it is undeniable, impossible to ignore for any muslim
if something is there, it is ordered directly by god, according to islam. thats the difference.
Really? Are you a Muslim yourself? Do you personally know all one billion of them? Because otherwise I find it pretty amazing that you can claim that something is 'impossible to ignore' for 'any Muslim'. The Muslims that I know don't feel particularly compelled to live under the Sharia. I would imagine that there are just as many Muslims who ignore the more extremist interpretations of their faith as there are Catholics who do the same. How many Catholics do you know that use birth control? Or
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Really? Are you a Muslim yourself? Do you personally know all one billion of them? Because otherwise I find it pretty amazing that you can claim that something is 'impossible to ignore' for 'any Muslim'. The Muslims that I know don't feel particularly compelled to live under the Sharia. I would imagine that there are just as many Muslims who ignore the more extremist interpretations of their faith as there are Catholics who do the same. How many Catholics do you know that use birth control? Or engage in pre-martial sex? Or who get divorced?
i was a muslim, and studied koran thoroughly, each reading run of koran took 3-4 months to complete by cross referencing to hadith (mohammad's sayings) and sunna (mohammad's way of life). that was the way back then.
let me tell you that in islam there is not the 'option' of choosing what to believe, what not. islam's book sets what to believe and what not straight. and sharia is not optional. you are ordered to live what koran says. there cant be any 'interpretations' of koran, because ;
- koran is sen
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