“Months after third parties were able to demonstrate that Comcast was throttling some BitTorrent (and Lotus Notes, since fixed) traffic, the cable giant has quietly changed its terms of service. Comcast updated the ToS on January 25—the first update in two years, according to company spokesperson Charlie Douglas—to more explicitly spell out its policies on traffic management,” Eric Bangeman reports for Ars technica.
“According to Section III of the revised ToS, Comcast ‘uses reasonable network management practices that are consistent with industry standards,'” Bangeman reports.
“Not long after Comcast’s traffic management practices came to light, the company was hit with a class-action lawsuit by a disgruntled subscriber. Online video provider Vuze complained to the FCC, and the Commission officially opened its investigation of the cable company in mid-January,” Bangeman reports.
“Since the investigation began, the FCC has been bombarded with comments from angry users. ‘If you so much as open a BitTorrent client on a computer on the Comcast network, your entire connection drops to almost a crawl,’ says one comment,” Bangeman reports.
“Comcast has denied throttling BitTorrent traffic, saying that the ISP just “delays” or “postpones” it on occasion,” Bangeman reports.
Full article here.
This crap is going to spread to other ISPs!
I say it’s time for those who have it to ditch Comcast. I’m glad Verizon doesn’t do it – at least not yet.
What is the difference between “throttling” traffic and “delaying” it or “postponing” it. It seems like semantics. Is it like saying that we don’t torture, but we might waterboard, but waterboarding may be torture?
hm. I was on Comcast in Utah till about a month ago, and was able to use VUZE and download bittorrents in somewhat decent speeds…
back in Nov and Dec…
ISP’s have been drooling at the RIAA/MPAA model of ‘pay per use’ for a long time. They’re just now figuring out ways to implement it—keep watch for more of the same to pop up from more providers.
Bell Sympatico has been doing this in Canada for a little while:
Bell Sympatico Bittorrent traffic shaping timeline
Really sucks. During peak hours, my torrents slow to a combined maximum of 30KB/s download speed.
Follow the money.
You know if ISPs do a little traffic “shaping” during peak hours in order to keep the internet “snappy”, I think that’s fair. I mean, do torrents really need to be running at top speed during those hours?
If they’re going to throttle back a fast connection, they shouldn’t be allowed to advertise the highest speed.
Their ads need to show the lowest or average speed and not the burst ones they’re so keen to point out.
Agreed. I have no sympathy for people using torrents to download commercial content. They are draining the resources for the rest of us. On the positive side, it is forcing ISPs and network operators to keep improving their networks to keep up with the demand. Not that traffic shaping is an improvement, though.
Thats why I have problems with ichat. Comcast has had ichat problems when both parties use Comcast when they are iChating. Any one else have this problem. Hate Comcast!!!
I have Comcast and so far my torrents have been fine. But if they mess with it, I’ll jump ship pretty quick.
They throttle more than BT traffic. My connection almost always drops when I use my phone (through Vonage). I’ve always seen this and the many other problems associated with their service as the definition for “Comcastic.”
Comcast’s a stupid duche.
It’s more than a “little” traffic shaping – I am not a big Bittorrent user, but I’ve been looking at Linux distros lately, and it’s unbelievable what happens to the Comcrap connection – everything does slow to a literal crawl, and the highest I’ve seen bit rate on any download is 55 kb/s – even with a nice swarm, it usually peaks at 45 kb/s. And, though I have a 4 Mb/s Comcrapstic connection, downloading one torrent at that 40-50 kb/s makes web pages load incredibly slowly – hard to even explain, it’s so bad, plus the Vonage VOIP is unuseable.
So I download overnight only. What used to take a matter of minutes to download now takes all night.
I am torn, though– we have two business-class Comcrap modems at work, and they freakin’ fly on regular downloads – only tried a torrent once (was afraid of getting in trouble), but it had the same speed effect: the normally 20 Mb/s download goes to a putt putt putt.
Comcrap be damned!
P.S. iChat video is terrible through Comcast even when it’s the only thing running. They mess with that, too. Running it through my neighbor’s much slower Qwest DSL works much better.
What about legitimate uses of file sharing? A lot of game patches, which can be quite large, are moving to torrent-based updates like World of Warcraft.
I say vote with your dollar and switch to the competition. Oh, that’s right, they are a cable company, I bet there IS no competition for cable services in the areas they are in…
I’ve already noticed that when I open a single torrent on my Time Warner service, my connection to the net grinds to a crawl.
it also screws up iChat as well. It will run fine but then crap out in a few minutes. It used to be fine.
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COMCAST SUCKS!!!!! Apple TV movie downloads are as good as dead!!
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http://comcastmustdie.blogspot.com/
All the ISPs are going to do it before the Bushies are forced from office. Once the Dems get in they wouldn’t stand a chance.
If only I had a real choice. My choice is Comcast with all the trouble identified here at a hefty price premium or Qwest with abysmal choices in DSL modem/routers and, at least to my house, really, REALLY slow connections. There is no third choice – unfortunately.
Comcast customers should not let them get away with this. If they do, this will just be the beginning. Today, throttled torrents, tomorrow, throttled everything. This can seriously affect things like streaming video.
When Road Runner announced that they would start this nonsense, I switched immediately.
Shaw Cable (in Canada) has been manipulating packets and throttling traffic for some time also.
I set myself up to use Vonage VOIP sevice and it worked well enough until Shaw introduced their own “digital phone”. After that, packets were dropping left, right and center. Vonage became unusable. The whole time Shaw denied managing the raffic in any way, but they offerred me thei newly introduced Quality of Service (QoS) guarantee is I paid them an extra $10 a month.
I ended up switching to a dry ADSL connection from my local Telco (Telus) and Vonage works very well.
Bye Bye Shaw
Wake Up America..
We’re living in a 3rd rate county.. no doubt about it.