Comcast Wrongfully Denies Interfering with BitTorrent
Written by Ernesto on August 22, 2007Last week we reported that Comcast is making it impossible for its customers to seed files on BitTorrent. Not surprisingly, Comcast’s PR department does all it can to deny there allegations, but we - and with us some of the leading BitTorrent developers - know better.
So who’s right here? The hundreds of people that seem to have the same seeding problem, or the Comcast spokesman Charlie Douglas, who denies that Comcast is monkeying with BitTorrent bandwidth. Apparently Comcast want people to believe the latter, even though all evidence points in the other direction. Decide for yourself.
Moxie, a Comcast customer who replied to a post on Silicon Alley, points out that when you log your network activity with an application like Wireshark, you’ll notice that Comcast servers start sending reset messages as soon as a download is finished, exactly as we described it.
With Wireshark in the background run your BitTorrent application. Wait until completed and watch Wireshark, notice when it finishes seeding Comcast servers send out a reset command every second to your computer noted by the highlighted red line in Wireshark. It is 8:30 pm Monday pst and Comcast is still resting my BitTorrent connections. Maybe the PR guy didn’t get the email from the VP of Networking.
It might be that not every Comcast customer is equally affected, but a significant percentage is. Not only the 10+ users we talked to before we first reported this issue, but also hundreds of additional commenters here on TorrentFreak, and elsewhere. Some users even captured the throttling in progress on video (download), and anyone has to agree that this does look very suspicious.
More evidence comes from Robb Topolski, a networking and protocol expert with more than 25 years of experience, who first wrote about this issue on DSLReports. He told TorrentFreak: “We have had two Comcast techs confirm Sandvine in use, but neither confirmed or denied its connection with the RST interference. For me, seeding is possible. I can reach my upload speed limit, but there sure is a lot of interference. Since your article came out, I too have received many reports of seeding being impossible. I’m not sure if it’s regional, or what!”
For the networking savvy people among us, here’s an example of real RST interference on an unencrypted BitTorrent connection. In this case, it happens right after the bitfields are exchanged
Nevertheless Comcast spokesman Charlie Douglas said in a response to Light Reading: “We’re not blocking access to any application, and we don’t throttle any traffic”. He might be right here semantically speaking, they are not throttling anything, they just kill all outgoing connections when a clients starts to seed a file. But the fact is that Comcast is making it impossible for (at least some) customers to share files with non-Comcast users over BitTorrent.
Luckily there is a fix for this problem, and we know that at least two BitTorrent client developers are including this fix in their next update.
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Ted Stevens was right. The internet IS a series of tubes. Problem is, they’re trying to limit how much is going thru the tubes instead of doing what they SHOULD do and widening the tubes. Effectively, by limiting traffic on the internet, they are CONTRACTING our internet capabilities as opposed to expanding them. its going to eventually cripple this entire nation. In the “Series of Tubes” speech, Sen. Ted Stevens also mentioned how Deutsche Telekom and Telecom Italia are working on building a fiberoptic network with “25 times the speed of today’s broadband” …ok, so how come we can’t do that? they’re widening the tubes. shouldn’t we do the same?
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Comcast in South Florida was throttling my connections, and tried a few VPN’s. I had some success but it was not steady. I’m now with http://www.strongvpn.com and they give me access to a 1Gb connection with no throttles. Everything seems ok now. I have seen others post similar success with other VPN providers like Relax.
You have to get around their Sandvine, I use a OpenVPN solution from them but I know their regular VPN account works for some.
Maybe if enough of us use VPN they will just give up?
Best of luck, I really hate what Comcast is doing to their customers.
For starters anyone who claims that they work for ComCast and says that they aren’t interfering with bandwidth or that Sandvine isnt a reality is full of shit.
I did work for them and I can recall several tech meetings where they advised us of what was going on and seeing several techs going postal about it and telling them they were nuts for implementing such a thing because the customers would be irate.
Many of those techs of course ended up in “Private Meetings” with the manager” Of course at those meetings we were told that this was proprietary Com-Cast information and not to share it with the public etc.Well I’m not bound to their bullshit anymore and I can tell you that they are throttling back speeds and it has nothing to do with”Power Boost” which only favors legitimate downloads like from that crappy company they own Rhapsody or Microsoft etc.There are several articles in the news about ComCast and Net Neutrality as well as their bit shaping programs that cut your speed way down.If you believe them then your blind.
I got sick of working for those thieves for many many reasons much of which was their disdain for the customer which the corporation swears to help with their “Stop the trouble calls” campaign etc.If you as a tech go to bat for the customer you will find yourself in the unemployment line.
They also set up installations all the time and make promises to customers they cant keep.They in the appointment center will deliberately set up the install date and send a tech out only to find out they have no cable etc when they knew this already.The main thing of course is to bullshit the prospective client into thinking they will get service and then have the poor tech try and smooth the customers nerves and try and resolve the issue and hope for the best.
I used to work for TCI and then it became AT&T which many people hated but left before the ComCast take over and later went back to what was definitely a different company which was so greedy it made me sick.
I’m not gong to address the morals of downloading or uploading illegal music etc but I do feel that Com-Cast has overstepped its boundaries and has been lying for way too long.They are already in deep water on a few issues -Dont believe me ? Check for yourself.
One example would be a lawsuit that took place in Seattle over a customer who’s private information RE: PASSWORD ETC was published on paper for many to read.Com-Cast once again claimed they never knew of this which was total horse manure because as a tech I used to see it on my work orders everyday.
I could have easily hacked peoples accounts if I chose to which is why I always advised the customer to be involved with the installation and change the password before I left their home.Of course this didn’t stop those morons in the appointment center from republishing it on another work order for the next tech to come out which on many occasions was myself.
When I saw this I was totally pissed that the customers privacy was published like this.I could rant all day on this one but I will stop now and save my breath..
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I’m in Charleston, SC and no computer using Comcast in the area can seed more than 40kbps.
I thought this was absurd until I read that some folks can’t seed more than a few kbps.
I can’t even guess how many stress-filled hours I’ve wasted tweaking router and torrent configuration settings trying to resolve the issue, come to find out there was never a solution.
Good thing I chose the “upgraded” package. I will cancel this immediately and demand a refund of the additional $10. Unfortunately, Comcast is the only option downtown so I don’t have any alternative.
Is anyone else having issues with uploading to web storage sits as well?
I’m a musician and I setup an account with one to join in on exchanging original music files with friends around the world in order to collaborate and tweak each others projects. They can upload their large project files(up to 1 gig) in about an hour and I can download them very quickly but my uploads are limited to 6.6-26kbps!!! It’s almost unbearable and effectively negates my ability to collaborate with my friends.
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I have to report this because it is too funny…
So I have had one helluva time dealing with torrent downloads… They effectively blast resets to all ports across the board every 2 minutes or less… IM gets disconnected, VoIP dies, etc.
So finally I complete a download… now guess what? I’m seeding on Comcast at 80kbit… WTF? It seems like perhaps they are mixing up the interference between seeding at some points and leeching on others?
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What the COMCAST “MORONS” seem to lack understanding of is- that a LOT of legal and totally legitimate software distributers ARE using bittorrent to make their software available for download. And I do SO hope the Comcrap officials see this message so the DUHHHH nerve in their brains can kick in..
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