Comcast Internet throttling is up and running

This is just another way for Comcast to NOT give you what your paying for. If they aren't allowing you to use your full bandwidth then they are not giving you the service your paying for. They should change there advertisements to "16mb/sec for up to 15 mintues, then you get whatever we give you" I had Comcast for a while and they are a bunch of scum bags, extremely hard to deal with and with 5 people in my house, many gaming and youtubeing, we easily go over the 250GB limit, we did it twice, 2 months in a row. I switched to Verizon and the HD quality is better too.

You have the order incorrect. The first step is to see if the CMTS is approaching a possible time of congestion. Only then do we scan for users that are exceeded certain traffic thresholds.

Good and bad - for me, anyways. I'm glad I'm not a Comca$t user. (does anyone know how to replace a 'C' with a 'cent' symbol?)

The good: why should my bandwith be hurt 'cuz someone is downloading another bootleg copy of Spore just to stick it to the man? Throttle those jerks.

The bad: If I'm working from home and need to download a big file, they might throttle me - even if it's 10 am and not many people are on the net, so I'm not tying up anyone else's traffic.

The ugly: Comcast can't tell the difference between me and the jerks pirating Spore. People with cheap plans may be throttled when watching online movies, etc. I would hope that Comcast sends people an email everytime they throttle them, so people know that Comcast is to blame. IMO it should be based on disrupting other people's traffic only.

I'm no fan of Comcast, but given the nature of cable networks, I'm not sure this is a horrible idea. Other providers have done something similar but with better marchitecture -- only the first 30 seconds or N bytes of an HTTP connection get through unthrottled, giving the fastest response for web browsers around the "background radiation" of large-file downloaders.

It would certainly be nice to see a cable company have the professionalism of a telecom and make guaranteed, no-questions no-bullshit bandwidth an option, but none seem interested in playing that game (or doing anything that would make them liable to provide some basic degree of reliability).

All this extra hardware is just something else that will break. Comcast needs to push for shear bandwidth and stop spending all its money on ways to forcibly reduce congestion. In the long run, what is cheaper, a crazy throttling scheme or a bunch of new WDM fiber? And which will make the customer happier?

Stuff like this really has me thinking about switching to FiOS in my neighborhood.. Vz appears to have gotten their CableCARD act together, and when my promotional price runs out (I got it after a move as a gift when my billing got screwed up royally), I shall have to give a good hard look at migrating off..

Then again, probably won't have a job in a few months, so it hardly matters :/

I loathe Comcast for a whole bunch of reasons. Unfortunately, in my area, internet connection choices boil down to Comcast or dialup. Comcast is a defacto monopoly.

If Comcast's description of what they're doing is accurate, then I suppose that I can live with it. It does, indeed, turn their advertised plan into a lie.

That's the least of Comcast's sins, though, and seems less corrosive to the internet than what they were doing before. So it's not so bad that I'm willing to forgo broadband altogether. Yet.

Thusly: ¢om¢ast

¢ is ALT+0162

not very impressive though

We are the The Inq. We hate Microsoft, Apple, NVIDIA, Comcast, Sun and everything under the sun

i agree with k2_ and not with those that think it is a GOOD thing. i'll bet if they went to the grocery store or the clothing store paid for the merchandise and only came out with a half gallon of milk or half a pair of pants they would not be so happy then. after learning of this i would like to know if a class action suit is forth coming. how long would any other business stay in business charging full price for a service but only providing half of what the customer is paying for?

Heavy use Comcast for years.
Download speed 25mbps and upload - 3mbps (just got from speedtest.net).
I pay for 8mbps down. Not bad? And they promised (in a year or so) ten times more 6 months ago and I see they already started to deliver. And you are saying trottling, twice less bandwidth... This called trolling.
Check the numbers, you may already have 3 times more bandwidth then you are paying for.

All this does is give us new incentive to defeat the system. Anyone know when http p2p is coming out?
They buid it...we kill it.

I noticed about six weeks ago my comcast internet connection would be dropped if there was heavy traffic ( 100k/sec downstream, 50 K/sec upstream.) So I have to limit my transfer speed if I want to dl while away. All this for $55/mo!

Unfortunately the author didn't understand what Comcast are doing.

Simply put when a port on a data node becomes “near congested” Comcast look for users on the port consuming higher rates of BW and put their traffic in a lower priority queue. If the port then becomes really congested these users will experience poorer quality of service.

Data node ports are directional and typically service 275 modems on an downstream port and 100 modem on a upstream port. The threshold for a “near congested” port is 70% of total available upstream capacity and 80% of the total available downstream capacity over a 15 min period.

On a congested port any subscribers using 70% of their provisioned upstream or downstream bandwidth within a 15 min periods will have their traffic put into a lower priority queue. Traffic in this queue will only get serviced when all other normal priority traffic has been processed.

Thus if the data port moves from “near congested” to actually congested these users packets will be delayed or even dropped. To get out of this state the subscribers BW utilization needs to fall back beneath 50% for a 15 min sample period.

Dollars...
"Internet packets to and from a specific subscriber are assigned 'Priority Best Effort' (PBE) queueing by default, and the traffic rate is throttled by switching packets to lower priority 'Best Effort' (BE) queueing."
This tells me the queuing is adjustable... what better way to bilk the sites on the internet whose internet infrastructure you don't own into ponying up some cash...
Wow users po'd they cant play... well, blizzard for a few million dollars we will place your traffic in the PBE...
Your Xbox360 not connecting? Well Microsoft.. how about 10 million.

It is a toll booth mentality, you suckers who dont pay more for the smart pass will get stuck looking for change in the slow lane...

swheatle, its sad that you complain about paying $55/mo for internet. Consider how much you save by not paying artists and programmers for their time. I mean come on. Its guys like you who put us in this position. it kills me that most people who pirate stuff have the audacity to complain about anyone trying to stop them. Lets be honest, who wants to go to work and not get paid?

this is the best news verizon's FIOS
ever had. Comcast is slower, more expensive and make speed upgrading ridiculous. I guess the suits running comcast have never used the newsgroups or knows what is going on on the web..

I have comcast, 12mb downstream after powerboost. We've been paying for a 2mb line for a few years now and they just keep increasing the speed for free.

Friend showed me this article and I put it to the test.

Started downloading a 2.44GB file using a download manager called Orbit from 6 differen't mirrors. I stayed at an average 1.48MB/S the entire time. The download completed successfully within 28 minutes.

The file, which you can find on findfiles dot com, is called 7000.0.081212-1400_client_en-us_Ultimate-GB1CULFRE_EN_DVD.iso

This 250GB per 3 months limit is unrealistic as well. I don't see how anyone would break this. Thats downloading 3GB per day, EVERY day. Thats 650 different songs (MP3's) daily. Even if you do pirate music, thats an incredible amount of pirated media. Otherwise, you're spending a fortune on the files anyway.

To everyone who does NOT have comcast, and says how crappy it must be, you should hold your tongue. I have not had any problems that was directly comcast's fault. I've had a couple modems go bad, a few days where we lost connection. EVERY service has these problems from time to time.

I have Roadrunner and they have this "short burst" (name?) upgrade for $10/month that essentially allows you to get above and beyond what they normally provide for short times (~15 minutes). Essentially this is the opposite of the 15-minute timer. The rate is something like 3 times the speed of the highest residential plan. It's a tacit admission that some people need more speed for offsite backups and the like but don't need commercial service levels.

When downloading/uploading at full tilt for more than 30 seconds, the rate drops to about 2/3rds of the maximum speed. This means that I get nearly 8Mb/sec downloads on an 8mbit DL/512kbit UL connection. Uploads go down to about 320Kb/sec when uploading for more than 30 seconds. Compare this to people griping because their 2Mb/sec service barely hits 300Kb/sec. What I should mention is that the technician says that only one other person has Internet service in my building (8 units) and that it's for a phone. I just got lucky.

If the 15-minute thing is accurate, then it's not so bad. It's insane to use more than 70% of your bandwidth around the clock anyways - the congestion would exist at your modem, not the gateway! 25% constant usage with 50% at offpeek hours would be less likely to upset your ISP. The 100% rate is meant for bursts since it's an "upto" service. Too bad that Comcast and all have to be so unclear in their advertisements and TOS. If they just had clear terms written in english, then most of the ISPs would not be having this problem.

The 250GB/month thing is funny. Some ISPs are so crooked that they charge $10/GB for overage. If you compare the price of say, a Usenet account for 100GB, then you see how this is way out of hand. Even taking into account the added price for the last mile compared to Level 3's raw prices, this is way unfair. This is like the cell phone $xx/MB or $x/minute roaming scams.

You don't understand ONLY one service is directly being throttled by them.....World of Warcraft and P2P programs.....Now all you little fruit cakes saying I have a 2mb line form them and did a speed test and got blah blah blah download and install world of warcraft and try playing....It's near impossible with an 1800ms ping to the server. Just like you can throttle any port or program you want....But whatever let them do it....Kiss that top 10 ISP slot goodbye cause you're about to lose a loooooot of customers comcast.... I myself am now a former comcast customer I'm changing ISP's first thing in the morning and urge all comcast users to teach these throttling bastards a lesson and leave too!!! Hopefully the FCC just shuts them down this time!!!

Everyone who says they are getting a higher speed even though they've been paying for 2 megs or whatever, it doesn't really matter. What matters is what you paid for. If you are being lead to believe that you are going to get 4 megs down and 2 megs up and you attempt to download data for 15 minutes or more at 2.89 or up to and including 4 megs and you are throttled, then it is a fact you have been cheated. That is wrong. So why should you be paying 100% for 70% of goods and services? That is so obviously wrong and if asked anyone explained in more basic terms such as the grocery store example above it’s a no brainer. If Comcast can't handle delivering bandwidth they advertise and contract with customers then they shouldn't be over selling it. But they realized they can make more money by over selling it based on the probability that customers will not all use it at once. It’s not the customers fault that Comcast or some ISP knowingly can't deliver what they are advertising and selling to the customers. This is a case of breach of contract. But here is the kicker .. how would 99% of the customers know they are being throttled (ripped off), the amount of packets sent/received, and bytes used per minute. Comcast should post this in the users account with detailed explanations understandable to the common knowledge of their customers. If a customer doesn’t get what they’ve paid for then Comcast should reduce their bill by the percentage they’ve not delivered to the customer. i.e. if I tried to use 100% of my download bandwidth 100% of the time and Comcast throttled me (by whatever managing methods) then I should have a reduction by on my bill by the cumulative percentage I was throttled (denied services). I call games ISP's play over selling their bandwidth a case of bullcrap. If I plan to use 100% of my bandwidth 100% of the time what I can actually do is use 100% half the time and 50% the other half, what the heck is that? Is that me getting ripped off half the time or all the time?

first they sell you 6meg for $50 a month that they say is 8x faster than dsl (which is a lie, because 6mb dsl is common and $15/month CHEAPER!); second, they try to tell you that it's actually twice as fast as what they're selling you (powerboost! up to 12mbps!!); third, if you actually try to use what you're paying for, then you're stuck at a quarter of the advertised rate (throttled down to 3mb).
lastly, they can't even give you an honest pricing.. they have to rely on specials for the first three months before jacking the price up over $50.

the phone company is slowly catching up on speeds and technologies, but they're playing an honest game. they give you a fair price up front that stays the same, no speed boost and no throttling, just honest-to-goodness what you're paying for. so simple!

and i also wonder.. if the phone company has a decent enough backbone not to have to throttle, maybe they're not as far behind as we think??

K2_ ; Keane, Dr. Kenneth Noisewater; tx_red, Dragos; Joe; not-comcast appear to get it and understand.

Mike; A.Peon; rad; either you do not know the history or have not seen it from this perspective, please check out: “A different perspective” below:

ed whitacre, your first paragraph indicates that you have an idea and almost get it; your next two paragraphs indicate that you do not have a complete picture. Don;t feel bad, there is so much disinformation out there that most Americans are confused. Just like our politicians, the telcos and Cable Companies can not take advantage of a knowledgeable public. Thus they must confuse, divide, spread fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) in order to keep doing what they do. If most Americans knew the truth of the matter, there would be such a public backlash to make their mis-step with the 50GB CAPS seem like a mole hill compared to the mountain they have built up over the last two decades.

Here are some links that will help others learn more about bandwidth and the state of Internet access in the USA (My comments are in parends), all other statements can be found via the link in the articles. Here are some links to help you learn more:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/28/AR2007082801990_pf.html; Japan's Warp-Speed Ride to Internet Future; By Blaine Harden; August 29, 2007; ”Obviously, without the competition, we would not have done all this at this pace," said Hideki Ohmichi, NTT's senior manager for public relations. Japanese $22 per month for speeds faster than USA; 100/100 for $20 - $35 per month.

http://www.websiteoptimization.com/bw/0711/; U.S. Broadband Penetration Grows to 85.9% (by what definition, the FCC standard is over 9 years out of date and the reality is that most American consumers are not getting realistic broadband speeds) As of November 2007, the United States rated BEHIND 14 other countries. Until I saw this report I was unaware that Japan had been getting the speeds that they were at lower prices then what Americans pay and for less than a 10th of the speed. There is an incredible wealth of information here.

http://paulstamatiou.com/us-internet-access-speeds-paltry-on-global-scale; U.S. Internet Access Speeds Paltry on Global Scale; June 26, 2007; I had always known that high-tech countries like Japan indulged in amazing Internet connection speeds but a recent article in USA Today was a real eye-opener. Take this tidbit for example, the current median download speed in the U.S. is 1.97Mb/s. Compare that to 61Mb/s in Japan, 45Mb/s in South Korea, 17Mb/s in France and 7Mb/s in Canada. The article has a link to the “anti-net neutrality measures that large telecoms are attempting to force on Americans via their elected leaders (politicians). (This is exactly what the citizens of Wilson, North Carolina are experiencing thanks to the large telcos and Cable Companies. And as of 2009, things really have not improved speed, bandwidth and fiber wise in the United States. Unless something is done, two years from now we will still be throttled back to slower than acceptable ~ at higher rates bandwidths, the only difference is in two years we will have higher bandwidth usages that will force most Americans over the very low 250GB Caps set by the Cable companies.) “I also treasure upload speed much more than download speed with all of my Flickr, Amazon S3 and server uploads but there are no real connection plans for people like that. I would love to see an ISP that offers decent upload speeds like 2 megabits or so.” (A person who has lived what I am living, you know your upload speed is too load when your social media sites will not load. When you are throttled back to 0 Kbps even Gmail will not load).

http://www.newnetworks.com/ShortSCANDALSummary.htm; Summary: $200 Billion Broadband Scandal. By 2006, 86 million households should have already been wired with a fiber (and coax), wire, capable of at least 45 Mbps in both directions, and can handle 500+ channels.; Universal Broadband (rich and poor alike); Open to all competition (still waiting on this); Commitments by every state by the year 2006 (It's 2009 and we are no where near those promises:mad by various states for various years: 2000; 2004; 2006); Neither FIOS or Lightspeed can handle 500 channels as the telcos promised; they promised fiber to our homes: Americans have been defrauded; 40 states were defrauded (Where's the fiber? You do not hear about this in the press, but you should. The truth will set us all FREE! )

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/08/06/comcast_lies/; Lies, damn lies, and corporate PR; by Cade Metz; Aug 6, 2008; “...Comcast's BitTorrent throttling in early 2007, and when word of his P2P tests first hit the tech press that August, Comcast flatly denied the practice.”; “But after nearly a year of scrutiny - including a pair of public FCC hearings - Comcast finally acknowledged its throttling had nothing to do with periods of heavy network traffic. As Topolski's tests showed, it was blocking BitTorrents round the clock.”; (The cable companies still throttle everyone around the clock, especially if you do not pay them extra to prevent it.)

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/04/time-warner-cable-to-press-stop-questioning-our-caps.ars; Time Warner tries again, fails to justify caps and charges; by Nate Anderson; April 10, 2009; “US Internet growth has declined into the 40-60 percent per year range (which TWC's own numbers confirm), well below the 100 percent per year numbers used to generate some of the scariest predictions of doom.”; “Even as traffic increases, traffic costs on major Internet backbones have been decreasing by 50 percent a year—an obvious market signal that capacity is plentiful at the core and in no danger of "browning out."; MAKE SURE YOU READ THE COMMENTS!

http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/04/time-warner-cab; Time Warner Cable Earnings Refute Bandwidth Cap Economics; By Ryan Singel; April 9, 2009; “For 2008, the most recent period available, Time Warner Cable reported that its high-speed data costs actually declined by 12 percent to $146 million. Meanwhile subscribers increased by more than 10 percent to 8.4 million, and high-speed data revenues climbed to more than $4 billion.”; “One reasonable theory making the rounds is that bandwidth itself is a red herring, and the real concern is cannibalization. As more broadband customers shift video viewing to the web, cable companies fear a steep drop in TV revenues” (If you have not checked out Hulu, Boxee, CBS, ABC, NBC The SciFi Channel and others to stream shows over the Internet you do not know what you are missing. With the Cable companies getting crazy with caps and fees, I never want to use them again. DSL here I come, DSL is better than Cable as you will not be throttled as hard nor as low as the Cable TV providers do.)

http://www.frankston.com/public/?name=assuringscarcity; Assuring Scarcity; Jan 31, 2006; They use the word “Quality” but they do not tell you how it is measured.

http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2008/06/jokes-over-fcc-establishes-new-broadband-measurement-system.ars; Joke's over: FCC adopts new broadband penetration metrics; by Matthew Lasar; June 15, 2008; READ THE COMMENTS.

http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/01/24/1549202;l; Comcast's Congestion Catch -22; Jan 24, 2009; “...the occasional bandwidth limits on high-usage customers interferes with those customers' VOIP, yet Comcast's own Digital Voice is unaffected.”

http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/10/04/2032222; Verizon Refuses to Provide Complete Ipv6; October 4, 2009;

http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/08/05/1926257; Comcast the Latest ISP to Try DNS Hijacking; Aug 05, 2009;

I will have to work on a blog and coordinate this information in one place for everyone as there is

Comcast's PowerBoost kicks in for only the first 10mb of your download. Unfortunately speed tests send files smaller than this trying to determine your line speed. Yes, I also see 25mb download speed ratings when I test my connection, but that isn't reality - its' because PowerBoost (also known as burst) kicked in and provided a completely temporary artificial inflation of my true download speed. Now, it looks like they will throttle your true speed if you hit 70%, so you can further downgrade "what you thought you were paying for". A real shame.

Just get Comcast Business. No cap, all your traffic always gets priority over regular Comcast traffic, and it's not that much more expensive.

Ok,

First of all. This argument is not about bandwidth. Comcast is deathly afraid that IPTV is going to kill their ability to sell you TV at their premium prices. No more $175 a month revenues from subscribers if it gets popular. So they whine about the bandwidth and throttle customers so you have to pay them for their overpriced content since you can't download or watch video streams with their throttling.

If this was really about the technology they would be looking into local caching like many other ISP's have already. Technologies like bit torrent and P2P look for local users with content first before going to slower external sources anyway so their transit costs are essentially non exisistant.

This is just another business looking to limit consumer choices so they can profit. And they are using bandwidth as a diversion to prevent people from looking at the real issues. How many DSL providers throttle and use Sandvine to kill their customers downloads? And how many of those DSL providers are also content providers as their primary business?

America has the largest backbone network in the world yet we have the slowest and most expensive internet access because of companies like Comcast. There's plenty of bandwidth out there and miles and miles of unused dark fibre. Companies like Comcast are toll trolls on the information superhighway.

The internet is not a bus! Its a series of tubes!

curious how this affects paid streaming services. We watch a couple netflix movies a week online. We use espn360 that comcast now allows. Mlb.tv (when in season).
Are we only going to be able to enjoy decent quality for about 15mins? When things get congested, are they looking at me cause I'm streaming a movie or game?

Is this part of an unspoken plan to get us off the net and back on the tube?

Just doesn't sit right with me.

ComCrap IS way more STUPID than they look. This proves it, as an on-going moronic battle to blame it's network short-comings and poor business models on customers TRYING to get what they pay for.

I do acknowledge that unless your on a dedicated line, your not always going to connect to "everything" at that maximum speed.
However, ANY ISP that doesn't allow you to use your maximum allowed bandwidth consistently, is not giving you what you pay for. And on that note.. It doesn't matter how much bandwidth they're giving you. They are ripping you off.

I would NEVER be ComCrap customer.
THEY SUCK! They always will.... };

;)

So you're saying my packets will need to ride in the back of the bus, and might be kicked off entirely if more privileged packets come along? I love that this is the best analogy they can come up with.

In my area, it's either Comcast or Qwest. That's a simple choice: 30mbit with Comcast cable, or 5-10mbit with Qwest DSL. Even if they throttle me, it's 2-3 times *faster* than the only other alternative.