Comcast’s BitTorrent Throttling Acceptable? Not Quite!
Written by Ernesto on January 24, 2008Today, Richard Bennett from the Register wrote an article in which he argues that Comcast’s BitTorrent interference is reasonable. Not only does this alleged expert make absurd claims, he also thinks it’s necessary to take on the EFF. Time for a rebuttal.
Last year, we were the first to report that Comcast was actively disconnecting BitTorrent seeds. Comcast of course denied our allegations, and ever since there has been a lot of debate about the rights and wrongs of Comcast’s actions. Today the Register published an article that begs for a reply.
Here’s one of Bennett’s conclusions taken from the article: “It’s acceptable for Comcast, as a matter of reasonable network management, to employ TCP Resets to prevent BitTorrent doing harm to the web browsing, standard file downloading, and VoIP sessions that are the typical behavior of the Comcast customer.”
This is of course a non-argument. The fundamental problem is that Internet providers offered flat-rate all-you-can-eat broadband access without considering that some users would actually use the offered product at full capacity. The providers’ tradition of selling a product at a ten-fold, known as overbooking, is starting to cause them trouble now companies, artists and their consumers start to utilize the benefits BitTorrent offers. But, is that the consumers’ fault?
Comcast, and other ISPs advertise with certain upload and download rates, conforming to simple DOCSIS capacity numbers. However, they miscalculated and found that there is more to the Internet than browsing, gopher, and email. Heavy-users broke their excel return-on-investment predictions and marketing campaign promises. Their flat-rate offers simply became too popular for the capacity that was bought and installed.
Maybe Comcast should start 2-new services “newb Internet”, designed only for emails, and “regular Internet” aimed at every single other person in the world who used the net for more than sending a text-only emails. That should make things more transparent.
Now they are whining and manipulating heavy users to undo the flat-rate contracts, instead of investing in more Internet gateway capacity, 10Gbps interconnect ports, and peering agreements. BitTorrent users do not slow down the Internet experience of others. They simply use the capacity they bought and show that the network capacity planning department screwed up.
There is one quote from the Register article that I agree with though: “Everyone who’s argued with religious fanatics has seen them dig in their heels and flail when confronted with challenges to their belief systems.” But the ISPs are the fanatics here, not the EFF who stands up for network neutrality.
Why?
I see a parallel with the entertainment industry here, clinging to business models that are outdated. Comcast should move on and invest in the future instead of throttling and interfering with the traffic their customers paid for. BitTorrent is here to stay, the files and the number of heavy users will only grow. Don’t fight your customers, think ahead and adapt!
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94 Responses (Add yours or TrackBack)
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[quote comment="270716"]I’m switching to Verizon FIOS, it has better uploading speed, and the same download speed as Comcast Highspeed with no limit :)[/quote]
i’m switching to fios as well. willing to pay more for it too, simply because comcast are a bunch of tools. i hope some higher ups at comcast get this down the grape vine too, suck a dick comcast! u piss ur customers off cause u think u can get away with it, now they just leave for verizon, hahaha. faggots.
I got shut off by Comast for the “top 1/10th of the top 1% in the nation for bandwitch usage”. Anyway, I told the tech rep that Cal Ripken Jr. (for those that know the Comcast commercials) told me I could download as much as I want. They promptly hung up on me.
I don’t understand all this ISP attitude either. They sell this high speed product, but complain if you use it. ?
If you can’t provided the service, change your plans to what you can provide.
If I pay $100 / month i expect to be able to use it how much, how long an do with it whatever I please.
Data should not be counted. You should be paying for a service and set speed and that’s all in your monthly fee.
[quote comment="270744"]bittorrent traffic is a drain on network resources. It’s easy to sit back and demand that sips increase their bandwidth, but as soon as they did, bittorrent would fill it up again because you guys are bottomless pits.
pirates are simply replacing record labels as the new exploiters of the labor and resources of others, contributing nothing yet feeling entitled to everything for free.
Also, that guy from the Register is not a dummy. He is consistently opposed to the RIAA. The fact that you regard the Register as “the enemy” only demonstrates how delusional some of you have become.[/quote]
Simply put. If a customer pays for a certain speed and unlimited bandwidth, the ISP should have enough bandwidth to accommodate the user using their advertised speed 24/7. It’s not the fault of the consumer that the ISP doesn’t have enough bandwidth. They paid for a certain speed and unlimited bandwidth, but when they use it to it’s capacity they get throttled or shut off? That’s not only ridiculous, it’s false advertisement.
Here’s an analogy. You buy season tickets to your favorite basketball team, which isn’t very good. You go to games every night and for some odd reason the team gets really good one season and people start buying tickets and taking up seats all over the place. Then one night, they tell you they can’t let you in because the game is sold out. You paid for the seats, but they didn’t expect so many season ticket holders to come to the game, so your seat was sold to someone else. You bought the tickets fully expecting that the team would have a seat set aside for you every game, but since the stadium didn’t expect the game to get sold out and it did, you’re screwed.
There’s no way that’s right.
And these are the type of posts and responses that got this site bookmarked and checked daily from me.
Bennett is completely missing the point of the matter. If comcast is offering a flat rate service, they shouldn’t punish their customer for what services they use WITHIN that service, and to its fullest extent.
[quote comment="270744"]bittorrent traffic is a drain on network resources. It’s easy to sit back and demand that ISPs increase their bandwidth, but as soon as they did, bittorrent would fill it up again because you guys are bottomless pits.[/quote]
They are simply saying to their ISPs, “you say I have 5Mbps? then let me use 5Mbps” If they can only offer 2Mbps then tell me (and charge me) for 2Mbps. We just want to be aware, the problem is these ISPs like comcast, doing things without disclosure and squeezing every cent out of $50+ per month contracts where 90% of people use it for email and web browsing.
I have shaw in canada and they activty slow my BitTorrent seeding. I pay for 25m down and 1m up and when i seed un-encrypted torrents my speeds go down to 2m and 512k. Shaw flat out denies cutting my speed, but i have colected enuf ecdence to see if i can go after them for lying about BitTorrent throtoling.
I believe instead of comcast hating filesharers, they need to upgrade their stupid limited connections.
If P2P is growing and slowing down the entire comcast system, why can’t they upgrade their limited network connections to handle all that.
Like this diagram:
- means regular network traffic
= means p2p, streaming media, and downloading
network pipe: before p2p
__________________
- - - - - - - - - - - -
__________________
network pipe: after p2p
__________________
=====-=-=–============ — - -
__________________
network pipe: when comcast upgrades their stupid pipes
__________________
- - - - - - - - - - - -
- - - - - - - - - - - -
=======================
=======================
=======================
=======================
- - - - - - - - - - - -
__________________
See P2P and regular surfing working together :)
it’s not too hard to come up with a technology that can adapt to p2p, heck I heard from a corporate network site that have invented gigabit, Fiber Optics and tokenring ethernet, why hasn’t comcast switched us to more powerful, more demanding, and more super networks that could be more advanced then our technological competitor Japan.
Comcast plz do what Cheneys good-twin says “Upgrade on”, and “Go ‘Upgrade’ Yourself”.
Cheneys evil twin would probably say “Go downgrade yourself”, but thats politics and another story.
So comcast plz upgrade or else your hurting P2P users.
[quote comment="270744"]bittorrent traffic is a drain on network resources. It’s easy to sit back and demand that ISPs increase their bandwidth, but as soon as they did, bittorrent would fill it up again because you guys are bottomless pits.
pirates are simply replacing record labels as the new exploiters of the labor and resources of others, contributing nothing yet feeling entitled to everything for free.
Also, that guy from the Register is not a dummy. He is consistently opposed to the RIAA. The fact that you regard the Register as “the enemy” only demonstrates how delusional some of you have become.[/quote]
We need to stop fighting, stop calling each other enemies.
We seriously need to make P2P Sharing legal, and stop fighting each other.
Fighting isn’t helping our situation. Dammit!
Stop the wars, we are all sharing info, whether P2P, emails, opinions, whatever. We are all sharing, libraries share but do we complain, no so why not leave P2P Users Alone!
Virgin in Austrlaia are offering a ‘great deal’ with their internet deals, read the fine print - 24mb/s except when engaging in p2p, then 32kb/s. wankers.
Lucky I used Whirlpool.com.au which is great for finding the best deal.
[quote]Now they are whining and manipulating heavy users to undo the flat-rate contracts,[/quote]
Would love to see a 3rd-party source for this statement.
~Fransw
[quote comment="270744"]bittorrent traffic is a drain on network resources. It’s easy to sit back and demand that ISPs increase their bandwidth, but as soon as they did, bittorrent would fill it up again because you guys are bottomless pits.
pirates are simply replacing record labels as the new exploiters of the labor and resources of others, contributing nothing yet feeling entitled to everything for free.
Also, that guy from the Register is not a dummy. He is consistently opposed to the RIAA. The fact that you regard the Register as “the enemy” only demonstrates how delusional some of you have become.[/quote]
How about a nice cup of shut the f**k up?
What’s the point of advertising say 8mbit line if they expect most people to just web surf and check email? when I first joined Pipex I had speeds of 600KB/s which i think is max on my line. It’s nowhere near that now. Also when they compare their different packages they say you can d/l so and so songs on basic, a few tv shows and movies on next one up etc. But when we do, we get throttled! It really is false advertising!
Dear Comcast:
Aside from your pixilated images coming to my t.v. EVERY SINGLE DAY, aside from the fact that you hold an illegal monopoly on cable and internet services where i live and aside from the fact that i almost had to beat the living shit out of one of your technicians when he threatened to turn off my cable because i refused to sign his work sheet when he arrived 3 HOURS AFTER THE TIME YOU TOLD ME HE WOULD ARRIVE effectively wasting a work day and WASTING even more of my money… wait, there is no aside. YOU ARE A BUNCH OF WHINING, HALF RETARDED PRETENTIOUS ASSCLOWNS.
damn it all i hate america. only in this country can people treat each other like complete shit, sell each other complete shit in the name of money and get away with it.
Religious fanatics? Same with any fanatics. Including atheists ones. Generally when you hear an atheist and a religious person arguing the atheist appears the more fanatical.
you say atheists appear more fanatical and yet, the top 2 countries in the world for lowest crime rate are by far atheist states. btw, those two countries are Japan and Sweden.
you had better tell two of the most intelligent and civilized countries in the world that they are ‘ fanatics ‘ because they obviously dont know about it.
Good article.
There are technologies, like P2P caching, that can help accelerate P2P traffic vs. degrading it.
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P2P_caching
IANAL, but I would think it reasonable to assume that if Comcast is monitoring the TYPE of traffic coming from a SPECIFIC USER, in order to ABORT that traffic then they are monitoring communications on some level, and may have lost their “common carrier” status by doing so. That would have to come out in a court of law, so Comcast better hope that the *AA doesn’t have the same idea and decide it’s worth a few million to find out for sure, it could be a giant shakedown. And then, all the Comcast customers who have been harrased by the *AA lawyers can simply say “I was just using the content provided to me by Comcast. If it was wrong, their monitoring should have caught it.” ISP’s want to add values to their service, and reduce their costs, so they can make money, but it make come back to shoot them in the foot.
No throttling in Norway, but slow speed. My dad pay about $65 for 2,5 Mbit/0.350 Mbit. Then consider the fact that I bring about $20-35 to school everyday. Actually pretty cheap connection.
I have no proof but I think Time Warner does the same sorta thing, I swear my download speeds really improved when I enabled encryption.. could just be a coincidence but im not one to make misjudgments like that.
[quote comment="270934"]you say atheists appear more fanatical and yet, the top 2 countries in the world for lowest crime rate are by far atheist states. btw, those two countries are Japan and Sweden.
you had better tell two of the most intelligent and civilized countries in the world that they are ‘ fanatics ‘ because they obviously dont know about it.[/quote]
Hmm, Sweden is far from being an atheist country. Supposedly only 23% are atheist. It’s not even officially atheist since by default every adult must pay tax to the church. (This is something you can opt out of of course, but many people don’t). In any case there is not necessarily any link between fanaticism of any kind and crime. There might be a link, but it could be pure coincidence.
This is a very well written, supported, and logical rebuttal. Bravo.
I’ve got to agree. I have Comcast, I pay for unlimited service at a certain speed. UN-LIMI-TED. If they can’t handle the traffic load because they have too many customers actually using the product they sell, advertise and make money off of, then that’s their fault, not the customers.
@Barse
lets put some links together for you:
MILLIONS died in the crusades, ever hear of those? you know, the religious indoctrine set upon the unwilling by christian zealots, or ‘fanaticism’ on their part if you will? contributing to the fall of entire empires and slavery for thousands of year? have you ever taken a history class?
since then, religions fanatics ( i.e. islamic extremists, christian right wing literalitsts and dominionists, catholic zealots, various muslim stances ) have waged almost ALL major wars resulting in the deaths of even MORE MILLIONS. ALL of the above mentioned belief systems promote bigotry, racism, killing of the innocent, unequal rights for women and those who dont ‘believe’, pedophilia and fraud, all the while praying on the gullability of the weak of mind. some of these practices are clearly stated in not only the bible, but the quran as well.
read.
a.
book.
23% may not seem like a big number to you, but it is HUGE considering that a little over 90% of the people in the world believe in or belong to one religion or another.
now, how could it possibly be a coincidence that the top two countries for lowest crime rate are also the top two countries in the athiesm belief?
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