Amid news reports that the U.S. Federal Communications Commission is moving to prohibit Comcast from throttling BitTorrent traffic on its broadband network, a Comcast official said the agency has provided no guidance on how to deal with network congestion. The Associated Press reported Friday that FCC Chairman Kevin Martin will recommend that Comcast be reprimanded for slowing peer-to-peer BitTorrent traffic. Comcast says it throttles the P-to-P traffic only during times of peak congestion, but Martin and a study from the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems in Germany have contended that Comcast blocks BitTorrent traffic during off-peak hours as well.Martin told The Associated Press that Comcast's actions have violated FCC principles intended to protect Internet users by arbitrarily blocking some traffic and not telling its customers. The so-called net neutrality principles say ISPs (Internet service providers) shouldn't block or impair legal applications unless the blocking is part of "reasonable network management." Comcast does not block any Internet traffic, and only slows a small percentage of P-to-P uploads, said Sena Fitzmaurice, Comcast's senior director of corporate communications and government affairs. In most cases, the upload begins within a minute, she added.
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No, Comcast, you're not going to fix any bandwidth problems by limiting your users. It's called "growth" and the bandwidth usage will continue to do that whether or not your network can handle it.
They're running out of band-aids - soon they'll have to actually make upgrades in order to have a somewhat functional service.
No, Comcast, you're not going to fix any bandwidth problems by limiting your users. It's called "growth" and the bandwidth usage will continue to do that whether or not your network can handle it.
They're running out of band-aids - soon they'll have to actually make upgrades in order to have a somewhat functional service.
I don't think they're really worried about bandwidth. What they're trying to do is set a precedent so they can charge for "premium" content like streaming video, and also so they can eventually control what content their users would have access to. They want it to work like cable TV, where you have to subscribe to content. Imagine if you had to pay Comcast to get access to Youtube--that's what they dream about.
It's the Net Neutrality debate again. Throttling should be illegal because what they're doing is sabotaging traffic that originated outside their network. They have no right to mess with it.
Exactly. Many people don't know that without proper traffic shaping upload kills your download.
You may also want to look into implementing QoS on your router. Then it doesn't matter what your torrent client does your router will always reserve a little and give priority to web traffic.
The issue is with the max number of incoming and outgoing connections. BitTorrent (the client) has 500 incoming (and a lower number outgoing - I forget), which is significantly higher than the max # connections that comcast allows. If you set those numbers to be lower you'll solve your problem. I'm using 300/150, incoming/outgoing, and that works for me, but local comcast networks vary.
Good luck.
The issue is with the max number of incoming and outgoing connections. BitTorrent (the client) has 500 incoming (and a lower number outgoing - I forget), which is significantly higher than the max # connections that comcast allows. If you set those numbers to be lower you'll solve your problem. I'm using 300/150, incoming/outgoing, and that works for me, but local comcast networks vary.
Good luck.
The problem is actually more of Windows XP and Vista limits on the maximum number of half-open connection attempts. With XP the default is 8 I believe, and barely higher with Vista. Torrents will easily saturate the limit and cause browsing to be almost unbearably slow unless you limit the torrent clients max half-open attempts to an even more ridiculously low number than the OS, or hack the tcpip.sys to allow more connection attempts, which can now be done even with Vista x64.
I'm not sure if the XP SP2 fix works for SP3 or not, but its worth a shot: http://www.yaronmaor.net/repair.htm
Also, you dont want your upload limit of the torrent client being set to more than about half of the maximum upload speed. I find that 40% or so of the max upload speed seems to be the sweet spot. Until recently, this was 17k/sec with Comcast. The limit was recently multiplied by 3, so I can comfortably set it up to about 50k/sec.
Last edited by GreyWulf99 on 12 Jul 2008 - 20:51
Also, if you haven't already make sure you're forwarding non-standard (just choose a random #) port for your torrent connections on your router. Use start->run->"cmd"->"ipconfig" and make sure your local ip address matches the forwarded port on your router.
http://www.hughesnet.com
Take a look at their policies, specifically the Fair Access policy, their prices and what happens after you exceed their limit. Also the speeds/latency sucks compared to normal broadband.
However it's my only means to access High Speed despite how crappy it is and despite the restrictions I can browse faster than Dial-Up users and some Youtubing, as well as minimal downloading.
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