“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.
@ HSNetworkGuy
Transmission > Preferences > Ignore encrypted peers.
I routinely get 300 to 400 kb/s on Comcast.
Waterboarding = Saves US and others lives
Comcast = Governing our online freedom
@Waterboarding
Torture is morally wrong. And even more it is useless. Things said when people are being tortured are often unreliable, misleading or just plain wrong. People will say anything to stop being tortured. You want to know where the nukes are hidden? I’ll tell you. Where do you want them to be hidden? That’s where they are. Now will you stop waterboarding me?
@Waterboarding. You suck. Get with the program or else please get out of my country.
@Bill,
Same here. I just thought I was imagining things.
Say bye,bye to comcast as an internet provider. SEE YA!
fuck Comcast.
Their anti-spam measures are draconian too to the point of ridiculous.
Dump ’em for a smarter ISP!
We have been told by all the go-go free marketeers that consolidation would bring us better service. The people warning us were derided as tin-foil-hat wearing tree huggers.
Now Time Warner is testing metered bandwidth billing.
Now Comcast is ‘shaping’ traffic by killing traffic it doesn’t like.
Now AT&T;is suing municipal utilities that try to offer high speed internet in competition with AT&T;’s slower DSL.
All three are trying to kill Net Neutrality.
The answer is a breakup of geographic monopolies and a repeal of Federal Laws banning local regulation of cable & broadband data telecommunication companies.
They obviously will not behave when left alone. Their greed knows no bounds.
I’m not an expert in these matters, but as I understand it there are some fundamental differences in Cable and DSL when we talk about speed/bandwidth/etc.
DSL is dedicated per line, so if you have a 3meg line, then 3meg is what you’ll get (minus few 100k or so for any ‘overhead/parity-check code’).
Cable, however, is shared per node between you and your neighbors. To talk about 8meg, for example, is merely a ‘poetential peak’ that depends on which of your neighbors is downloading what at any given time. So be prepared for give and take with the guy next door, no matter what the ‘cable guys’ do.
Caveat Emptor
BC
Just use protocol obustification and encryption problem solved.
If it spreads to other isps than encryption will become popular in p2p and torrent apps.
Shogun=naive child
Answers can be verified. They aren’t being asked “YES or NO” or “TRUE or FALSE” questions. They are asked names, locations, times, etc… these things can be confirmed. Ex: Where did you plant the bomb? hmmm….. so if they lie and say the wrong location we don’t find it and it blows. Well, we tried but if they crack and do tell we can disarm it. No foul no harm. Torture sucks. But this is a war. Does getting shot between the eyes not suck? That seems to be OK in war but making people feel like they are drowning isn’t, even though, at the end of day, they are still alive. So Shogun, if your mama was being held hostage and the only way you could find her is torture, I’d be willing to bet you’d torture.. I know I would. Hell, after becoming a father, I’d kill to keep my child alive. I wouldn’t be happy about it and It would haunt me forever, but I’d sure as hell do it. On a bigger scale, we have to do things that we’d rather not to protect ourselves. These guys we are torturing aren’t innocent bystander we just randomly grab.
This Comcast time, bend over.
Think again. Should this happen to you for you to understand how wrong this is?
http://www.cnn.com/2005/POLITICS/12/06/cia.rendition/index.html
Imagicom.
Nice try.
The ISP’s have been emboldened by the Worst Congress Ever, and they see increased opportunities to screw consumers in a the future of either Clinton or Obama.
I hear you. Perhaps I would hurt someone to get them to tell me where my child was taken. Like you I wouldn’t be proud of it. But I think this is different than a first world nation training tortureds, investing in torture infrastructure, having the people who are torturing not know anything about how these people were marked by torture, etc. I think its not the same at all. And if I’m wrong and it is the same, just because in my weakness I would do it does not refute that it is morally wrong. And if morally wrong for an individual, how much more wrong for a nation that calls itself a city on a hill?
BTW, do unto others… Look forward to being tortured some day for information you may not even have by some revenge-seeking child of a US tortured dad. There’s a nice twist on the “my child” theme.
(No hard feelings.
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Corrections (&$@# iPhone)
“torturers” and “marked for torture”.
Comcast has very poor Mac support.
Get off Comcast, cancel your TV service as well. Show the other internet providers we want full service ALL THE TIME BECAUSE WE ARE PAYING FOR IT! Everyone write to your own service providers and let them know if they follow Comcast with this crap that we will cancel are service too! If we let one of them get away with this crap then they will all do the same thing and NONE OF US WILL HAVE HIGH SPEED INTERNET ANYMORE!!!! Yet we will still be PAYING FOR IT!!!
@BC Kelly
Most cable providers offer much higher bandwidth than DSL providers. My TimeWarner connection is 14mb/s down and about 2.0mb/s up. Fairly consistently.
I’ve yet to see the DSL provider that can match that. All Internet connections are subject to conditions on the Internet as well as the whims of the provider. Even though I have 14mb/s down, I still often wait indefinitely for some slow websites {cough}MDN{cough}. The number of routers or “hops” you have to pass through to get to another point on the net is also a larger factor. The net is affected by geography. I can get blazing speed to a site in the same city I’m in and mediocre speed to a site that’s on the other side of the country.
While cable is still subject to the usage patterns of other nearby users, this is no longer the problem it was 10 or even 5 years ago since the actual “pipe” to the neighborhood is so large.
DSL on the other hand is starting to seem tapped. I have clients that are jumping off DSL all the time to go to cable as DSL companies constant promise 3.0mb/s and deliver an abysmal 600kb/s {cough}Verizon{cough}, even to the closest router on their own networks!
Yeah, well Comcast charged me for 7 MBps and I got 700 Kbps. I wanted to drop my cable TV service to get satellite and they said if I dropped TV they’d cut my internet speed in half and the price would go up $10/month. I told them I’d keep the cable TV service until I could find a total replacement for all their services. I now have Dish Network and Verizon DSL and *NO* Comcast services.
In the UK, we qre now getting 24Mbps DSL, although the actual speed will rarely be that. I have a 16Mbps DSL just but only get download speeds of around 800k/sec but that means i can still download a 1gb movie from iTunes in around 20 mins
. . . and it costs £10/month which is about $20
The price of internet service is really getting to me. $40 a month, plus cable TV etc. I’m looking for an alternative. DSL is now available in my area but then I will need a landline.
Throttling will be a big issue in the future. Bittorrents are mostly for pirating so Comcast could argue that they want to discorage its use on their network.
But what if they don’t like all the bandwidth demand for iTunes DLs? Then they will be trying to make a competing service less competitive.
@Shogun and Jimbo,
Let’s say somebody has information on a plot to commit mass murder of innocent people in your neighborhood. Should the authorities be allowed to use whatever means necessary to extract that information and prevent the attack? Or should that person be allowed to smile with glee while your friends and neighbors get maimed and killed? Which is the worse of the evils?
Anyway, comparing ISP throttling to terror and torture is so over the top it’s beyond words. How small your world must be.