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Comcast P2P blocking spurs calls for Net Neutrality

ISP skulduggery
Friday, 19 October 2007, 23:58

IN LESS THAN A DAY, an Associated Press (AP) story that Comcast blocks its customers Peer-to-Peer (P2P) connections has pinged around the Internet like a pinball, ringing bells at MSNBC and other AP subscribers and provoking hisses and catcalls at Slashdot as well as more boos and calls to action at Salon and even the lefty political activists' bog Daily Kos.

A Comcast subscriber in Hillsboro, Oregon, noticed intermittant interference with P2P file sharing through Gnutella and Edonkey earlier this year. When he saw other Comcast users complaining of similar problems on DSLreports.com forums, he and others figured out that Comcast is intentionally blocking their Internet P2P traffic.

Apparently Comcast accomplishes this using technology from the broadband network traffic management company Sandvine.

The technique Comcast uses at its Internet boundaries to interrupt P2P file transfers is to forge packets to both ends of the session telling them that the other machine closed the link.

Comcast doesn't tell its subscribers that it blocks P2P file transfers but it, like all Internet service providers (ISPs), reserves in the fine print of its contracts the right to "manage" its network. But, in blocking traffic outright, Comcast takes network "management" too far.

In the US, the obvious solution is enactment of Net Neutrality legislation requiring ISPs to treat all traffic equally without discrimination as to source or nature of the communication. However, the Net Neutrality legislation is presently stalled in the US Congress.

What can one do? Aside from the protest of moving your Comcast broadband connection to another ISP, which might also interfere with your online service under the guise of network management anyway, the Daily Kos post provides two links to groups that support the Net Neutrality legislation.

If you live in the US, you can add your voice to the chorus of popular support for the Net Neutrality Act. It now seems to have become even more necessary. ยต

L'INQS
Associated Press
Salon
Daily Kos

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Comments
P2P Blocking

That would be all fin and dandy if I wasn't paying for the service. I started with comcast paying for a (ahem) "Unlimited" inet access "up to" 6mb down, 512mb up connection. It's gone up a bit since then, but looks to me like I'm paying for bandwidth.

O.K. you can have the connection, but can't do blahblahblah? what's this crud? Can we say Class action lawsuit? 

I was in the past, "Banished" for being abusive with my connection. That's when I was informed about their "Unlimited" was for access and not for use... (Course I did over 500gb of traffic in less than 30 days working with the Majestic-12 project.)

If it's an available bandwidth issue on the node, then throttle the connection and upgrade the node. Don't tell customers they can't use part of the service they are paying for. Max up rate I've ever seen on a torrent is only 50k quite a bit lower than what I'm paying for, and therefore not abusive to the network.

Wake up Comcast! and Cut the crap beefore ya wind up in court for failing to provide services the customers are paying for. Managing the network includes throttling the connections so everyone can get a fare share while you work on upgrades, and does not include blocking the use of P2P file transfers.

Net neutrality isn't the issue as I see it, It's an issue of a company not wanting to provide the services (in this case the bandwidth) their customers are paying for.

Well now it's time to go D/L and seed a couple of Linux distros. Give me some more ammo to use when I call to gripe at Comcast Monday morning.

LoCatus

posted by : LoCatus, 20 October 2007 Complain about this comment
Most ISP block certain ports

Here in Canada, 

Telus blocks the standard EDonkey/Emule ports and FTP, unless you buy a server package.

Xplorenet blocks all default P2P sharing ports by default, however a simple port redirection usually gets it working again.

posted by : Glenn, 20 October 2007 Complain about this comment
What kind of neutrality

There is a big difference between discriminating based on the type of communication and the source of communication, which wasn't made apparent by the article. Net Neutrality is typically associated with the latter.

I am a Comcast subscriber and I rarely use BitTorrent (when I do, I don't experience particular slowdowns). So I am glad that trafiic from others downloading illegal DVDs from P2P is not slowing my ordinary http connections.

The only question is whether the kind of throttling which Comcast supposedly does is really transparent - does it only slow down P2P or does it make it altogether impossible ? The latter would be completely unacceptable, but it has not been my experience.,

posted by : t.mikov, 20 October 2007 Complain about this comment
So dump Comcast

Fortunately, most people have a choice. Just switch away from Comcast. In my area (Boston metro) we're lucky enough to have two choices, both of which offer faster (10MB+ vs. 6MB) and unfiltered net: RCN and Verizon FIOS. F*ck Comcast.

posted by : Mike, 20 October 2007 Complain about this comment
not sure about that

If I remember reading about Net-Neutrality a while ago, it did not have much to do with charging average customers flat rates depending on the traffict.

But it did have to do with corporations charging more per high bandwidth users depending on ther content in reference to high defination media. This was aimed to raise the prices per alotment of bandwidth to companies like Google, Microsoft, Youtube, etc.

They claimed it was more 'fair' to charge these guys more money because they used more bandwidth. However, what they are doing instead of charging (hypothetical number) $10 per Mb of bandwidth, they would charge $15 per Mb to Google if media content was used.

Really, its telcomm companies trying to find a way to get a piece of the information highway money pie.

posted by : Stukov, 21 October 2007 Complain about this comment
They're not alone

It's not new or unique, although I believe they were the first.

Netspace here in Australia has been rumoured to be doing the same things (in certain areas/times), but officially deny it.

My BT client begs to differ though. Sending <1k/sec to these peers is not fun.

posted by : J. Random Commenter, 22 October 2007 Complain about this comment
Dump them?

Dump them for what? Lets see the options: expensive, slow satellite; more expensive cell phone access, but with up to 4x the upload I'm contemplating; or DSL which requires me running a network connection to some place that actually gets DSL.

At least I have Road Runner and the only problems I get are having enough bandwidth (out of the 7Mbit I pay for) to stream Google Video.

posted by : jbo5112, 22 October 2007 Complain about this comment
Share NT

Fanatics of the P2P super power gave birth to the devil.
It is the strongest P2P file sharing system <a href="http://2ch.ru/beta/v/kareha.pl/1191659130/">Share NT</a>. 
And, Because UDP is used, even the band limiting that the internet service provider does is exceeded. 

Reference
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Share_(P2P)">Share (P2P) - Wikipedia</a>
<a href="http://2ch.ru/beta/v/kareha.pl/1191659130/">Share NT - 2ch.ru</a>

posted by : news4vip, 23 October 2007 Complain about this comment
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