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Comcast Throttles BitTorrent Traffic

Posted by Bezhou Feng on 18 August 2007 - 13:23 · 53 comments & 15602 views

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.

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Full name: Bezhou Feng
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(1 reply) #1 Posted by +lylesback2 on 18 Aug 2007 - 13:32: im feeling the blunt end of this on Rogers...

#2 Posted by Express on 18 Aug 2007 - 13:43: Unlimited service with limitations.

#3 Posted by Lasker on 18 Aug 2007 - 14:06: Verizon FTW!!!

(5 replies) #4 Posted by *John* on 18 Aug 2007 - 14:22: 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

#5 Posted by jwjw1 on 18 Aug 2007 - 14:26: I think its false advertistment for a company to offer certain bandwidth (only on the hopes everyone isn't online at the same time)..if you offer certain bandwidth...its should be constant rather one is online or every customer you getting paid from....some companies even re-sale excess bandwidth...but do they offer their customers a credit/refund.....

#6 Posted by DavidM on 18 Aug 2007 - 14:38: Well, I guess I can stop playing with my router settings now. This type of connection problem started a few weeks ago and I was blaming my router. I'm going to call on Monday and if they are doing this I will be moving to another company, lucky for me there are options where I live.

(2 replies) #7 Posted by CrimsonRedMk on 18 Aug 2007 - 14:39: Sad thing for us Comcast users, they've made a practical monopoly here in Chicago...it's either Comcast 8mbps cable, or AT&T 3mbps DSL...but I haven't seen the effect of this. Keeps seeding*

I hope Verizon FiOS comes to save the day!

#8 Posted by Diaboli on 18 Aug 2007 - 14:40: sigh i work for comcast, i can online imagine the whiney customers callin in

#9 Posted by roadwarrior on 18 Aug 2007 - 15:02: I was also wondering why my ratio had been getting so bad, and didn't see much uploading going on. Wonderful!! (not)

#10 Posted by ozzieXP on 18 Aug 2007 - 15:04: works fine here for now i guess

#11 Posted by altermind on 18 Aug 2007 - 15:20: personally.. I'd sue.. I think you'll find there is a case.... look into it ppl....

#12 Posted by +Ferret on 18 Aug 2007 - 15:39: I hope UK ISP's don't start with that crap - I don't want it !

#13 Posted by obsolete_power on 18 Aug 2007 - 15:51: Rogers for some reason doesn't really throttle my torrents anymore...They may be responding to customer complaints, hopefully.

#14 Posted by lnxpro on 18 Aug 2007 - 15:55: oh great.... time to move on. ridiculous how in my area i was with Mediaone, then they got bought over by AT&T, then they sold to Comcast. same cable line in the same house for over 7 years now. now i have to check for other providers in the area.

I'll miss my 8 mbit speed line though!

#15 Posted by Kayden on 18 Aug 2007 - 15:56: #4 Posted by +*John* on 18 Aug 2007 - 07:22
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.

(3 replies) #16 Posted by neufuse on 18 Aug 2007 - 16:09: at work we pay $1300 for a dedicated 3Mbit symetric line a month... that is the only time you will ever get true in monitored, unthrottled and unmeetered bandwidth... when you have a dedicated connection that isn't a residential one

#17 Posted by Croquant on 18 Aug 2007 - 17:03: Ha! My ISP doesn't throttle anything.
Silly Comcast: Kicks are for ribs.

#18 Posted by +Axon on 18 Aug 2007 - 17:31: Heh our cable provider in western Canada (Shaw) made a half-ass attempt that was easily circumvented with encrypted packets. I certainly hope they don't get any new ideas...

#19 Posted by frogger on 18 Aug 2007 - 18:13: i've heard of a iptables command thats supposed to help, can anybody tell me how to use iptables on a dlink di-624 stock firmware?
pm me if you can help,
thanks!

#20 Posted by Notum on 18 Aug 2007 - 18:29: Move to Sweden. None of that crap. 24-100Mb connections with no restrictions or caps for a low monthly cost. Several providers to choose from.

I can't even imagine having to cope with stuff like that.

#21 Posted by fivehorizons on 18 Aug 2007 - 18:39: The day a viable alternative to Comcast shows up in town will be the day I quit using their horrible services forever.

I don't even use torrents, but this is a bad precedent to set.

#22 Posted by excalpius on 18 Aug 2007 - 19:16: Not only do we all get really ****ty upload speeds, but now they are throttled. Ridiculous. The next gen of Internet is going to require us to have two-way connections. What are these providers going to do when that happens? Sigh.

#23 Posted by excalpius on 18 Aug 2007 - 19:19: Comcast customers should call Tech Support. Every tech support call costs Comcast MUCH more than they save by throttling upload speeds (think about the cost / hour of a tech support person versus the cost of bandwidth / month).

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.

#24 Posted by ThePitt on 18 Aug 2007 - 19:59: but the ppl pay for the service... The ppl should use the most lethal and effective weapon. Boycott...

#25 Posted by ScottKin on 18 Aug 2007 - 20:00: As to any decision like this from Comcast, there are negatives and positives: the upside is that it limits Comcast's liabilities in connection with warez through the BitTorrent cloud and controls their side of the connection for those who are seeding warez or media content like music or videos. The downside to this is that there are many legitimate uses for BitTorrent, such as 100% legal distribution of various flavors of Linux and other F/OSS bits.

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.

#26 Posted by black_death on 18 Aug 2007 - 20:33: Thats total bull****, the BitTorrent protocol needs to be improved to stop these kinds of things and programs like "ZipTorrent" used by the MPAA to slow down torrents.

#27 Posted by Unwonted on 18 Aug 2007 - 20:42: If downloading from Giganews was like eating at a four-star restaurant, then downloading from torrents would be scraping up some roadkill for dinner.

With that aside, Comcast's business practices are an atrocity (but their speeds are decent).

#28 Posted by SHADOW-XIII on 18 Aug 2007 - 20:46: Sue them for not being able to download Blizzard stuff (patches/vidoes/trailers)!!
Burn them

#29 Posted by rseiler on 18 Aug 2007 - 21:07: This story broke last May:
http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r18323368-...P2P-Connections

#30 Posted by +warwagon on 18 Aug 2007 - 21:22: Rapidshare for the win, hopefully they aren't blocking them too

#31 Posted by -Hiroshi- on 18 Aug 2007 - 21:26: With this you could actually pull Comcast in as a witness against any frivolous RIAA/MPAA case. As Comcast prevents the sharing of illegal copyright content, you are unable to be liable for such content. To be honest, and I know I'll get a reply with a heated "**** YOU YOU SUCK", but I'm kind of glad Comcast did this, but then again I don't use the bittorrent protocol that often.. so..-shrugs-

-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

(1 reply) #32 Posted by RichardK on 18 Aug 2007 - 22:08: No one should be seeding on a residential cable or DSL account. Those accounts were never meant to do any hosting at all, read your Terms of Service and quit crying.

#33 Posted by Xtreme2damax on 18 Aug 2007 - 23:44: Actually you guys are very lucky compared to me. I live in the boonies where there is nothing but two options for internet service Dial-Up or Satellite through Hughesnet.

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

#34 Posted by Slugbait on 19 Aug 2007 - 08:08: Everyone here obviously has no idea why Comcast is doing this.

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.

#35 Posted by tom5 on 19 Aug 2007 - 09:41: The resolution is simple: leave Comcast and go to another provider (if there's such a possibility, of course).

#36 Posted by plastikaa on 19 Aug 2007 - 10:31: I think if you signed up before they put this in place and your minimum contract hasn't run out - and it didnt say anything about limiting what you use the internet for, you could either terminate your contract early without cost on the grounds they arent supplying what they agreed to. If your 12 month contract is up ... leave if it effects you.

#37 Posted by +brandnewfantx on 19 Aug 2007 - 15:55: So where is the real source go to Torrentfreak it directs you to DSL reports, Then DSL Reports re-directs to same story on digg, and then that story takes you back to torrentfreak ?

#38 Posted by SimplyPotatoes on 19 Aug 2007 - 16:04: lets get some net neutrality rofl

#39 Posted by morphen on 19 Aug 2007 - 21:32: well, if this were in norway, you'd see me fleeing to a competitor of my isp if they where to throttle the BT traffic. I guess,well, ALOT of people would flee from the throttling ISP :p since BT is in many ways going commercial, with leagal downloads and everything, it would be a BAD move for any ISP trying to make money of their users...

#40 Posted by -Hiroshi- on 19 Aug 2007 - 22:46: Well to be honest, my download bandwidth has increased to normalcy again after Comcast did this, before it was at the point where I felt like I was being completely ****ed over.... o_O

#41 Posted by EJocys on 20 Aug 2007 - 13:38: BitTorrent Accounts for 35% of All Internet Traffic. BitTorrent service is one of the most useful Internet services today. How ISP can cut most popular Internet service from its customers? Comcast just created another way to loose its customers. Looks like they are going same path as AOL by offering service for newbies who don't know better.

Last edited by EJocys on 20 Aug 2007 - 13:47

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