Afraid of excessive bandwidth usage, ISPs have been throttling BitTorrent traffic for almost two years now. While most ISPs simply limit the available bandwidth for BitTorrent, Comcast has now taken it one step further, and is actively preventing its customers from seeding, if the latest user reports are to be believed. Comcast is not alone in this: Canadian ISPs Cogeco and Rogers use similar methods on a smaller scale. These more aggressive throttling methods can’t be circumvented by simply enabling encryption in a BitTorrent client, as Comcast is reportedly using an application from Sandvine to throttle BitTorrent traffic; the application apparently breaks every (seed) connection with new peers after a few seconds if it’s not a Comcast user, making it virtually impossible to seed a file, especially in small swarms without any Comcast users. Although some users report that they can still connect to a few peers, most of the Comcast customers chiming in have seen a significant drop in upload speed.
Sandvine's throttling works like this: a few seconds after one connects to a peer in the BitTorrent swarm, Sandvine sends a peer reset message (RST flag) and the upload immediately stops. Most vulnerable are users in a relatively small swarm where one only has a few peers to which to upload. However, only seeding seems to be prevented, as most users are able to upload to others while the download is still going; once the download is finished, though, the upload speed drops to 0.
View: Full Story on TorrentFreak
Sandvine's throttling works like this: a few seconds after one connects to a peer in the BitTorrent swarm, Sandvine sends a peer reset message (RST flag) and the upload immediately stops. Most vulnerable are users in a relatively small swarm where one only has a few peers to which to upload. However, only seeding seems to be prevented, as most users are able to upload to others while the download is still going; once the download is finished, though, the upload speed drops to 0.
View: Full Story on TorrentFreak
Not really; if I pay for "Unlimited" I expect to get it.
Otherwise it is a fraud.
Not really; if I pay for "Unlimited" I expect to get it.
Otherwise it is a fraud.
You actually don't pay for unlimited... Comcast doesn't say unlimited anywhere in their ad's or marketing material... they stoped that years ago when they started this process with throttleing and kicking off high bandwidth users...
You actually don't pay for unlimited... Comcast doesn't say unlimited anywhere in their ad's or marketing material... they stoped that years ago when they started this process with throttleing and kicking off high bandwidth users...[/quote]
I was not referring to Comcast specifically; my comment was a general one. Btw I do not use Comcast. I had cable service with them and I ditched.
This isn't about their costs, but their maximizing profits.
In the few areas where people have more choices, no one is throttling, because they lose users as soon as they do.
I hope Verizon FiOS comes to save the day!
I hope Verizon FiOS comes to save the day!
not just chicago, its exactly the same thing here. And this news about comcast is not surprising. They've been doing alot of screwy stuff. They kick me off my connection, for trying to connect with EFNET.
...but then Comcast would counter with 12Mb speeds. Like they do in the southeast. I really hope my internet connection doesn't goto crap now that AT&T has taken over.
What are you paying a month?
I'll miss my 8 mbit speed line though!
Solution seems obvious to me. Increase prices to cope with increasing costs due to customer demand. If people want to use 500GB per month in bandwidth, charge them for it. Simple
Ah no it isn't that simple when you sign up you aren't signed into a contract that say you can on use so much bandwidth per month for a particular internet application. Comcast isn't a corperate network where they can filter what ever they want when ever they want, it's a service to residental people and no one signed up to be censored.
I agree with altermind If any one is on Comcast cable they should fight back there's no reason for that kind of crap, theres a reason you pay almost $50 a month for that service and they shouldn't be allowed to be a bunch whinney pricks just because you use more bandwidth than other customers. It's like saying you can no longer watch espn because you have it on all the time and they can't share that signal to every one, well they need to figure out to make it happen you pay for the service enough said.
Actually, the high cost is for the dedicated upload speed in your symetric line.
Actually, the high cost is for the dedicated upload speed in your symetric line.
The keyword is actually dedicated... symetric doesn't increase the cost much, but when you put the service contract on the line, and get a dedicated line the price skyrockets... we had our choice between a shared symetric line (basically cable type inf.) for only $450 a month or get a dedicated fiber optic line coming in through smart jacks which as an "unlimited" surcharge on it and the symetric fee and monitoring service fee's ontop of Verizon's dedicated line to the CO fee's...
I've never noticed any dip in d/l or u/l speed, though. Always constant, hovering at 2mbit/sec.
Silly Comcast: Kicks are for ribs.
pm me if you can help,
thanks!
I can't even imagine having to cope with stuff like that.
I don't even use torrents, but this is a bad precedent to set.
If every customer called tech support, worked through their troubleshooting, escalated to supervisors, etc., you can be damn sure Comcast bean counters would do the math in your favor in a few months.
It's sad that Comcast (who happens to be my provider) has taken this fairly draconian step, but it was inevitable. Now, if Comcast can take that kind of business decision about the BitTorrent cloud I hope that they will make a similar decision and (somehow) clamp-down on obviously compromized customer's connection that are being used for botnets.
With that aside, Comcast's business practices are an atrocity (but their speeds are decent).
Burn them
http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r18323368-...P2P-Connections
-edit-
Weirdness, I read that this story broke last month, but I've noticed little to no difference when I was downloading Fedora Core via Bittorrent.. I'll try it again, I think I downloaded the wrong CPU type anyways. :/
Last edited by -Hiroshi- on 18 Aug 2007 - 21:33
I don't know if this is all of comcast though. In atlanta I haven't noticed my speeds affected at all. I don't stay on their all day and mostly only download stuff one time a week.
At least with Dial-Up I would have a decent connection and could download a much as I wanted albeit slow 56k speeds.
With Satellite internet through Hughesnet is where we've officially entered into a hellish contract with absolutely ****ty service.
Hughesnet goes by the Fair Access policy which indeed is not fair at least one bit. On the home/consumer plan they can throttle your bandwidth after exceeding 200 Megabytes in 24 hours. If you exceed the 200 Meg cap be it web browsing or downloading they can lower your service speeds/bandwidth to essentially worse than Dial-Up, at about 2 KB/s making web browsing or downloading impossible for a complete 24 hours. Once your Fap'd you're in the fapper crapper for an entire 24 hours with a completely useless service.
Granted they give you a 3 hour window between 3am and 6am EST to download whatever you need without it applying to your usage threshold, it's still not worth it since most people can't stay up that late.
To make matters even worse there are now phantom downloads which no one can explain especially hughesnet's crappy tech support outsourced to india who don't understand anything that's beyond reading from a script or book. That's right, you don't even really have to use the service and sometimes it becomes barely useless in mere minutes due to un-explained phantom downloads which have mysteriously used up the entire 200 Meg threshold even when not using the service.
Torrents, forget torrents. They are nearly impossible due to the heavy IP routing hughesnet does, the fact the modem is esentially a router and that you don't get a static ip address with the home/consumer plan. It's almost impossible to connect to any seeds/peers. When I happen to connect to any seeds/peers as well as get a steady download going the speeds are drastically slow which makes torrenting essentially a PITA and not worthwhile or worth the time.
Also encryption or any other tricks used with other ISP's Do Not work with Hughesnet Satellite Internet.
I know this discussion is about Comcast and other ISP's throttling, but I wanted to say the situation could be much much more worse than what is is right now for you. Consider yourselves at least lucky you go a somewhat decent ISP you can rely on that works much more decently than what I've got and a somewhat usable service. For me it's either Hughes Satellite or Dial-Up which Dial-Up seems to be much more reliable, but I opted for Hughesnet since I wanted/needed to complete downloads and browse a bit faster when not in Fap mode than what Dial-Up offer. Hughes is undoubtedly the most crappy ISP or Fake broadband ISP anyone can have. It's Broadband, Bound and Gagged! Pay no attention to the lying deceiving commercials they dish out
They are a media company. A rather large one.
They are being used by Warner Brothers, another media company, to sell movies. AFAIK, Comcast isn't making a dime off of WB, yet their network has been supporting WB...until now.
Wake up, folks. They don't care about your warez, they don't care about your music or pr0n, they don't care what individuals are doing.
They are trying to stuff their competition. Close them out. Choke them.
When you own the waterway, you decide which ships get to sail thru.
Comcast has decided what you are going to watch on their pipes. And it will not be the competition.
You're not saying goodbye to BitTorrent. You are saying goodbye to choice.
Last edited by EJocys on 20 Aug 2007 - 13:47
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