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
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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
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