Comcast Lied to FCC, Blocks BitTorrent Traffic 24/7
Written by Ernesto on May 15, 2008New data on Comcast’s interference with BitTorrent traffic shows that the company misinformed the FCC this February. Comcast has always argued that BitTorrent upstream traffic was only blocked during periods of heavy network traffic, this turns out to be a lie.
BitTorrent throttling is not a new phenomenon, but it is getting more attention lately, because the number of people who use BitTorrent keeps growing. Up until today however, there has been no reliable data that revealed the scope of it.
Last week we reported on a new and reliable tool that tests whether or not your BitTorrent traffic is being limited. The tool is developed by the Max Planck Institute, who have released new data today. The findings reveal that the BitTorrent connections of half of Comcast and Cox’s customers are being cut. In addition, the data shows that these practices take place 24/7, disproving Comcast’s earlier statement to the FCC
“Comcast’s network management practices (1) only affect the protocols that have a demonstrated history of generating excessive burdens on the network; (2) only manage those protocols during periods of heavy network traffic,” Comcast wrote in a filing to the FCC last February.
This is far from the truth. As can be seen for the graph below, there is little difference in the percentage of blocked customers throughout day. Furthermore, the data shows that there is also no difference between weekends and weekdays. BitTorrent is simply blocked all day long, no matter how busy their network is.
The Max Planck Institute tested the connections of 788 Comcast customers, 494 (62%) experienced a slowdown of BitTorrent traffic. Comcast is not alone though, well over 50% of the Cox subscribers that participated in the study were also throttled. The good news is, other ISPs don’t seem to restrict BitTorrent traffic on a wide scale.
Ben Scott, policy director of Free Press, said in a response: “Consumers have no reason left to trust their cable company. This independent study confirms that Comcast is still blocking its customers from using popular applications — despite the FCC’s investigation and widespread public outrage. And worse, the harmful practice appears to be spreading through the marketplace.”
After being pressured by the press and thousands of upset customers, Comcast has announced that it will stop targeting BitTorrent transfers, (somewhere in the future) and promised to invest in its network capacity. For the time being the company will continue to throttle BitTorrent users.
We have asked the FCC for a response, but they had not yet responded at time of going to press
Previously: iSlsk Brings File-Sharing to iPhone
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69 Responses
i still haven’t ever managed to test my connection
“For the time being” … yeah, sure.
What fuckin’ douche bags. It angers me much when our government lets companies like this run ramped and do as they please with little to no regulations. As a pirate, if we were to lie to the FCC or in court, that’d be perjury. If they do it, it seems to be fine and they get away with it. What complete and utter bullshit. I don’t even have Comcast, I have Road Runner amd they don’t throttle at all.
I would ask what time its supposed to be ok to use the bittorrent protocol, then every 10 mins call and complain its not working.. complain enough and you might get free service.. lol.
…and nobody is surprised.
Comcast will fail :)
Virgin Media all the way!
Maybe Senator Arlen Specter wasn’t receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars from Comcast he’d be investigating this instead of that silly NFL cheating thing…
Assman is right, we already knew this, now we have the proof. Hopefully Comcrap will get penalized for this.
comcrap lol
Hopefully is the keyword…I think we all know in the back of our minds how this might turn out.
i have bell and is sucks ass just as much as comcast so hopefuly they will be punished and bell will end their throttling
hmmmm the test servers are still busy…ill try again next week. sigh……
i have comcast and my torrents are ok. and bittorrents are still more or less pirated dowloads which are illegal. you cant penalize a company for blocking illegal trafic that interferes with their network and customers that need the bandwidth for other (legal) things.
besides…if u dont like comcast switch to dial up or DSL…have fun
I have not been able to run a single test they are so busy. Die comcast, die!
“i have comcast and my torrents are ok. and bittorrents are still more or less pirated dowloads which are illegal. you cant penalize a company for blocking illegal trafic that interferes with their network and customers that need the bandwidth for other (legal) things.
besides…if u dont like comcast switch to dial up or DSL…have fun”
You are an idiot – it isnt about what is in the pipes but simply getting what you pay for – if they block torrents what will be next – what happens when they begin blocking everything IMs, emails, posts, etc – simply because they can and people like you let them with your scracasm “besides… if u dont like comcast switch to dial up or DSL” bite me
To be fair, Comcast HAS seemed to “stop targeting BitTorrent transfers,” at least on my Minneapolis connection. As of around a month ago, I can upload reliably again, and according to that test I’m not being throttled. Hope it’s not just a fluke.
..and in the end we all know that no matter what comcast says it’s total bullshit….
@Annon
Actually no, it’s not OK for Comcrap to LIE to the FCC.
The content of the bittorrent traffic doesn’t matter, Comcast’s problem is that they have LIED to THE Federal agency that regulates their business.
Ouch!
If they had been honest and told the FCC that they were blocking all upstream bittorent traffic, fair enough. Bad business, but at least it would have been the truth.
But Comcrap didn’t do this.
Comcast told the FCC that they were only blocking traffic at peak periods. LIE
Comcast then told the FCC that they were halting the bittorent blocking. LIE
It doesn’t have anything to do with pirated content, it has to do with lying to the Feds. A very, very, big no no.
People have Gone To JAIL for lies like this. Although in this case, Comcast will probably just suffer financially.
I suspect the reason Comcrap “claimed” they were stopping the blocking was to defuse calls for Net Neutrality. But by lying about their blocking to the FCC, they have actually given a MASSIVE amount of ammunition to the pro Net Neutrality forces.
Nice aim Comcrap, you just blew off your big toe.
Thx to The Max Planck Institute!
I will say this when I left this morning for work I was downloading a large file at 10 Kb/s and when I came back it was downloading at 500 kb/s so maybe they took the blockage out now that they got negative press?
” Comcast will fail :)
Virgin Media all the way!”
???
right… You’re aware that they both seem to be anti net-neutrality, right? At least Comcast recognizes that in order to please its customers it has to at least appear to support net neutrality.
“Cough” Rogers…
Yet another reason I refuse to support corporations like Comcast. Local business FTMFW! Click! > Comcast.
annon: you cant penalize a company for blocking illegal trafic that interferes with their network and customers that need the bandwidth for other (legal) things.
Except that…
A. BitTorrent traffic is no more or less illegal than HTTP traffic.
And B, BitTorrent doesn’t interfere with their network. But please, keep on believing it does. You just drink that Kool-Aid right up, son.
In the mean time, everyone else should feel no less than dutified to penalize Comcast until that fat sack of corruption begs for mercy.
annon: besides…if u dont like comcast switch to dial up or DSL…have fun
You may be a sockpuppet, but that’s the first sensible advice I’ve heard all day.
If you don’t like having your torrents crippled, or you don’t like supporting corporate ghouls who are all too happy to violate the rights of their own customers just so they can kowtow to the MAFIAA crime-ring, then stop using Comcast.
Even if your only alternatives are DSL or motherfucking dial-up, stop rewarding Comcast with your monthly Internet bills. All these hypocrites who decry torrent throttling, and yet refuse to leave Comcast because “the alternatives are slower, boo hoo” are the reason why they’ve been able to get away with this for so long.
And don’t for a second pretend that it wouldn’t hurt Comcast if they left. I know it would, you know it would, and even Comcast knows it would. That’s why they decided to lie that they’re going upgrade their network and stop interfering with BitTorrent traffic at some unspecified point in the future. They realise it would damage their revenue stream.
It seems like my cable company (Charter) isn’t blocking BitTorrent. We will see how that goes.
is there any data released about verizon? DSL or FiOS, if there’s a difference in blocking
I will leave some torrents running all night and get up in the morning to see that maybe 1mb is uploaded, absolutely pathetic.
crybabies, in australia 80% of ISPs throttle p2p in some way or another.
Do you have Cox at Home? We get Cox at Work. People who use Cox are suckers, unless they have no choice (like us). Those poor Cox suckers.
Translation:
“This just in: the rest of the world knows what every goddamn BitTorrent user on the planet has known for ages.”
If Comcast is lying about this, that’s unacceptable. If Comcast is violating regulation, that’s unacceptable. If either of these is true, then they should be severely spanked.
HOWEVER, it’s easy to understand why they would do it. Their network is designed to deliver television to couch potatoes. It’s all about the downstream. When you actually use the upstream, it really does tax their network. Their network is inherently hostile the very notion of “networking” unless you think all the internet is good for is gobbling porn.
Don’t just ditch Comcast — ditch cable! Get DSL. And go with one of the independent providers, NOT your phone company. I did and I’m much happier.
I can’t say I’m surprised.
When, when, WHEN will Verizon FiOS be available where I live!?!?! :-(
Putin 08 is on target. Kick them in the wallet, for they have no balls.
my girlfriends complex is wired with comcast cable and internet as the only allowed provider, they block access to the torrentfreak web site, as well as most major torrent sites.
you need to use an anonymous proxy to access them from her gated community…. so this is hardly surprising
Has anyone thought that they might be having heavy network traffic 24/7, thus still maintaining their statement and still providing this data?
comcastmustdie.com
Use It!!
what ive noticed is that without encryption, my upload speeds sit at the rated speed my connection is supposed to have.
then once i encrypt my torrent client, i start getting the comcast ‘boost’ and my upload speed nearly triples
not sure what all the fuss is about…
It’s unfortunate Cox decided to join this game. They seemed very p2p-friendly for the longest time, and I absolutely loved them and plugged them in every article about Comcast’s chicanery I saw, through the end of last year. In January, I noticed that seeding wasn’t really working anymore… I’m surprised there’s been so little press or complaints about it.
But seriously, I loved this ISP a few short months ago, now they’re next to useless to me, I (used to) distribute my own stuff over BitTorrent, and being able to seed only to other Cox users (who themselves can seed only to other Cox users) is not helpful.
They are just as bad as Comcast at this point… Those of us being Cox-blocked should complain louder.
My ISP doesn’t throttle it, at least at my slow speed, which there’d be no need to. ISPs generally are not the most honest of people to deal with, and it seems they are in breach of their contracts here, and it would be in order for people to cancel and find a better provider. This too can be a hassle and not without extra charges, as I doubt Comcast would be agreeable to cancellation, and would try to prevent churning, besides demand contract payouts. I doubt they’d have legal grounds tho
In Australia they don’t need to throttle bit torrent. The whole Internets’ traffic is throttled in some form.
I fail to se how anyone ever think ´bout using Comcast (Those fuckers!)
Recently I’ve been having problems with my connection. I’m a subscriber to the 8mb plan comcast offers (for pr0n and games). I complained and complained, they told me everything was fine. On my end, when I ran various tests from Comcasts own Speakeasy to figuring out my own throughoutput I saw differences. Thinking back, I noticed recently I’ve started using torrents.
I am under the opinion that Comcast not only filters but punishes users for an extended period of time only then returning them back to normal connection speeds.
So I tested this theory over a period of time since the first incident. Ran some torrents, watched my download speeds drop and then return to normal after 3 days to the dot.
Call me paranoid, but I dropped Comcast and haven’t looked back.
fuck virgin media and yeah comcast blocks all the time and what does the gov. do nothing what do we do comment on a webpage and do nothing >:[
Thank God! It’s about time they start upgrading their backbones to something faster. See how awesome a little public outcry can have on a corporation? We are their masters so long as we have demands. We don’t need the government to get involved. We can do it ourselves.
Up until a few minutes ago (and first noticed at around 9pm PDT) it appeared that Comcast was blocking access to YouTube image servers. Wonder if it’s related…
phuck em
” Comcast will fail :)
Virgin Media all the way!”
?
Not only are VM anti net neutrality, they’ve also agreed to participate in copyright filtering and are signing up with the Phorm deep packet inspection malarky. Yeh, Virgin Media, the peoples friend!
Oh come on! There is no such thing as net neutrality. It doesn’t exist and never has. Why not pretend you have it by staying on your LAN and never go outside your router. ISP’s have GOT to throttle, if they don’t they have no way apart from massively tiered pricing to cover costs of bandwidth used by p2p. Sure move to another ISP, then another as they introduce blocking and throttling and another – as they go under and merge with each other. Finally you get one super ISP that throttles and bans anyone as soon as they sneeze – welcome to your world.
Were all aware of just how oversubscribed and underdelivered Comcasts network is. So much so that it is likely that in large part it is always under heavy load. Making their statement completely true. Sorry to say but large corporations will always word their PR so it can easily be spun, this is no difference.
Sorry, but the statements about the internet backbone needing upgraded don’t stand. Ars Technica covered this a little while ago, the entire bandwidth problem is in the last mile so to speak, basically everything between you and the fiber backbone of the internet.
The ISP’s were already paid (in the form of actual government cash investments, lowered taxes, and the right to raise prices without offering more) to start bringing FTTH connections by 2000, instead we’re starting to see a half-arsed attempt in 2008.
While I would love to be able to leave comcast behind, there are no DSL offerings or any other high speed internet offerings in the area and dial up is simply not an option for the household. We would have to pay more than ten times our current bill just to get all our computers online, and even then some things like my room mate running his mining ops in Eve-Online would not be possible as he runs multiple clients (without bots, he actually manages them all) on a single machine. Dial up isn’t really fast enough to even run one client, much less 4. The only way he could continue to play on dial up is to buy 3 more machines capable of running Eve, the extra phone lines, and 3 more dial up accounts which is so far beyond what we can afford it’s ridiculous.
We all dislike comcast, but there is NO other option for internet that we can actually afford right now, think of the people who want to leave but can’t before calling everyone still using comcast cowards and whatnot.
As 39 and others wrote, it’s true with COX. I am one of the subscribers, and it went down hill this year. But there is an easy way to counteract this effect by simply seeding many torrents at once. Using uTorrent, I simply start all the torrents in one of my groups (labels), let’s say some 30, 40 or more torrents at once. Then if I want to focus on individual torrents I review the activity after 30 – 60 minutes and simply stop the other torrents leaving only the ones I want to seed (make sure they have activity). Seems to me, that when the system is overwhelmed it can’t manage all the connections (send TCP resets all the time) and the connections that are already established are maintained. Still, the new connections mostly get reset, but it doesn’t matter if I have established connections that are not affected. And when it’s nicely saturated like this, the UP runs full speed. Only about 66-70kB/s in my case (rated 512kb/s UP), but that’s what you get with crappy “broadband” offerings in the US. I recently read somewhere on the forums that this “approach” worked for someone on Comcast too, so anybody should try it if you haven’t already. This deals with TCP resets pretty neatly and might help you unless you get cap on speed which is another story. If it comes to that, my money will stop flowing to the ISP.
Now if all the morons that forward the same Pics, Jokes, Videos etc to our Email just suddenly stopped. Bet those graphs would drop like a stone on Jupiter. Ahh that would leave more room for “pirates” GRIN give me a break.
“Fuck Virgin media and yeah Comcast blocks all the time; What does the government do, nothing. What do we do, comment on a web page and do nothing. >:[”
Sorry Jay’s post annoyed me, so I punctuated It and sorted out the grammatical errors. XD
Comcast doesn’t block my BitTorrent traffic. :D
I moved a little while ago and had to temporarily switch to Comcrap.
Comcrap has terrible service in general. They were throttling bittorrent, HTTP and FTP uploads. Most of which were actually legit. Not only that but they sandvined some HTTP connections and there were sites I just could not reach.
Not only is their internet terrible but their cable is even worse! Audio artifacts and video freezing have been common occurances. I switched to the local DSL provider and back to DISH for TV
“I don’t even have Comcast, I have Road Runner amd they don’t throttle at all.”
Ya i have roadrunner too. Although they don’t throttle the traffic like comcarp, you should still know they aren’t any better. What they do is reset your modem so your whole connection is just stuck cycling and you end up in same situation anyway with no downloads. Of course once you turn on encryption this is fixed. :)
It happens to others too, so its not just me.
i wish comcast would throttle the animal videos my sister keeps sending me
The average support call costs them around $20. If they are not providing the service you’re paying for, call them and insist that they open a ticket or resolve the problem. The double whammy of the cost of the call and the refund to you and customers like you will end the problem. I guarantee it. If they claim they don’t know what bittorrent is, ask them to google “comcast bittorrent”.
What corporation is paying Comcast to do this?
someone asked about fios and blocking bitTorrent traffic. All I can relate is my own experience. I have had fios for about 1.5 years. About 2 weeks ago I upgraded to their 15/15 plan (as well as fios TV). I have noticed 0 traffic shaping or blocking or whatever. I keep my torrent client open 24/7. So for whatever that is worth.
Kilgore Trout
No one is paying comcrap to do this.
Other than their customers. They have a broadband monopoly in many many many areas. Thus they do this (bitTorrent traffic shaping/blocking) in order to avoid improving their network capacity. If they let everyone do p2p who wanted to their network would bog down and they would receive many many complaints. So some genius figured out that they could:
a) Improve their network at great cost thus minimizing profits.
b) Limit bitTorrent traffic and leave their network as is thus pissing off the more serious p2p customers.
c) Do nothing and piss off way way way more customers.
At least that is my supposition.
Cheers!
Keep in mind not all torrents are illegal. You know how aggravating it is when im downloading a work torrent and the connection to everything else drops? IM, Mail, IRC, WEB… So like I don’t do anything illegal, and i get my connection shut reset. Why I paid for this connection so why should it be turned off if i did nothing illegal? There were no limits to how much i can download….. OPTIMUM ONLINE not so ‘OPTIMUM’
(Ive been trying to download americas army for a few days now.)
I could have told you that. My upstream is capped at 30k for bittorrent on my comcast connection. I can get 50 but then browse at dial up speeds. When uploading with any other application I get over 200K with no browsing slowdown at all.
all cable companys do this if you want good movies check out filmfo.com, divxxx.com, divxlix.com and there are a ton more
I beat ‘em – yeah ubuntu & iptables
Virgin Media are better how???
Virgin Media are the worse at this in the UK. Now, O2 owned be is a different story.
As a Comcast Tech, I have stuck with the company for 5 years and can honestly say that in most cases I feel that Comcast is one of the most ethical Companies out there (which isn’t saying much for the US, but still, I feel it’s one of the best options I got in this pathetic world). Torrent throttling is definitely an exception to their ethics policies. Comcast needs to step above the competition and extend it’s “customer first” approach to it’s internet users. 1/3 of all internet usage is torrent traffic, to throttle it is to provide falsely advertised “unlimited internet”. Either clearly state that it is NOT unlimited, or remove throttling at the CMTS.
I submitted a complaint through an internal ethics complaint department regarding torrent throttling and was essentially told that I didn’t understand the issue (the guy was a total tool).
I’d say it’s sad when you get free internet through your employer and still use a different provider to get your torrents through but I guess I could be starving to death in another country.
Guess the only thing I can do while I we wait for them to hone up to the FCC is work my way up to the headend and remove the throttling software my self. I would be like the nerdiest super hero ever!
Well since Vuze built an encryption into Azureus to get around Comcast’s throttling a few months back, my downloads/uploads have been fine. Prior to that, the speeds were crap. They’re still throttling other p2p apps like emule. When my roommate runs emule, the entire network is throttled to hell.
In my area, there is only Comcast cable internet and dial-up. I need the phone open for my business, so my only option is Comcast. Comcast was great up until about 6 months ago. Now no torrents will upload. Not a single one. Previously, I was able to upload several files at good speeds (usually 100KB/s or more), now nothing.
Because of this, I can’t use private torrent sites, since a zero upload ratio doesn’t fly there, and I am being forced to be an asshole leecher and not share on public ones.
Comcast claims to do this because torrents put a heavy burden on the network and disrupt their traffic. But since they started killing all their torrents, has my internet gotten any faster at all?
No. It is exactly the same as it was before.
Comcast is lying about their business practices and no one is doing anything about it.
To the FCC: Get off of your asses and fix this. I hate you for censoring my TV and radio, the least you could do is make my internet free.
I have comcast and today i cannot connect to TPB at all. My browser opens “connection reset”.
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