Comcast throttling p2p traffic!
Independent testing performed by the AP has revealed that Comcast actively interferes with peer-to-peer traffic going to and from its high-speed internet subscribers, by impersonating users’ machines and sending fake disconnect signals. While traffic shaping – the act of throttling a given piece of Internet traffic based on its type, like BitTorrent or VOIP – is becoming increasingly common amongst ISPs interested in preserving quality of service, it seems that Comcast is one of the first companies that actively impersonate individual connections. Most providers will simply slow down some traffic in favor of others, or block a protocol’s port number to prevent it from functioning. According to the report, Comcast’s technology affects users across many different networks, including e-Donkey, Gnutella, and BitTorrent. Robb Topolski, a former software quality engineer at Intel and Comcast subscriber, began to notice unexplainable performance problems with his P2P software. Posting to the popular forum DSLreports.com, he collected similar reports from other Comcast users around the country.
In the case of BitTorrent, Comcast’s technology only kicks in when a user’s client has a complete copy of the file and is uploading it to other users, and not while downloading. Comcast spokesman Charlie Douglas would not comment directly on the matter, instead only saying, “Comcast does not block access to any applications, including BitTorrent.” Comcast’s “traffic discrimination” has important ramifications for the growing number of services that are leveraging P2P as a means to distribute large files quickly and cheaply. A company like Blizzard Entertainment, who relies on BitTorrent for distributing World of Warcraft updates that often measure hundreds of megabytes in size, may have trouble reaching its players if it or they are behind a Comcast internet connection. This problem will only worsen if other ISPs decide on a similar course of action. Time to find a new ISP!
Source: AP, MSNBC
Comments(37)
As a Comcast customer, I can only upload between 40-45 kbs.
@ 1
Whats your download speed?
British telecom do the same thing if your a hardcore downloader, they cap your download speed for bit torrent and soulseek and p2p apps and when you have 100% of the file they keep disconecting you while you try to seed …. tossers
I use comcast and i haven’t had any serious problems yet. I do hear some people say that they download torrents at 1-2 MB per sec. but i have only seen that once on my pc. normally i dl at 300 to 500 Kb p/s and upload at arount 100-150 Kb sometimes more.
GRRRRRRR. Comcast ALWAYS shuts down my router, even when I’m just downloading, or uploading at 1kbps. Time for FiOS
ClearWire is another ISP doing this type of throttling. Speakeasy is the only ISP i’ve used that _does_not_ seem to filter anything.
Comcast has been shutting down my connection too. It seems like whenever my download speed hits around 500kB/s my internet connection goes down. Power cycle modem/router, connection back up. Odd. I’m sick of their meddling.
Have you guys tried the transport encryption/obfuscation options in Azureus?
This is old, old news.
And to add, you can fix this by encrypting or tunneling with ssh.
..”Comcast’s technology only kicks in when a user’s client has a complete copy of the file”.. so if I wanted to seed i would set my client not to download 1 file for a while or get about 90% of the file and drop it to 1k/s download speed?
Switching to another ISP is not the problem. Using torrents is. I would suggest not using torrents or any peer2peer software, but to each his own.
Here in Israel some ISP’s do the “favoring” method and slow down P2P traffic, but as far as i’ve seen in the year ive been with ‘bezeqint’, there is no throttling here, and i max out my 2.5MB/256KBPS connection..
who cares? Comcast have always sucked
Man, the ISP’s in the US really sucks it seems. I mean come on, download/upload-limits, traffic shaping, overall slow speed and high price. Seems to be a problem in parts of Europe as well.
I feel sorry for you guys. I heard somewhere that in the US, they even got tax breaks for planning to deploy fiber, but never ended up doing it.
In the Scandinavian countries, if an ISP tried to pull something like this off, people would just boycott them and then they would either change or go out of business.
In Poland i have max d/l speed in day: 384 kb/s at night (2 a.m. to 10 a.m.) there is 768 kb/s. And u/l all the time at 64 kb/s.
No limits.
I have Comcast myself….dammit…….
Oh well….it not that I have a choice, guess I will be sticking with this sucky service for a loooong time…
hope someone can come up with a walkround with this issue…..
by the way i pay 144 zl mounth.
That is 144/3.5$ = 41 dolars
I like my Comcast connection. I don’t use P2P anything (I use Usenet) and my router still shuts down from time to time. Have to turn it off and turn it back on again to get the connection back. I don’t think your router shutting down has anything to with this.
LoL Nip… that’s funny and sad at the same time.
Here in Europe, Chello is responsible for its owning ISPs, like the one in my country.
I usually get 50 KB/s so around 400 Kbps out of 3 Mbps but full upload of 512 Kbps.
If there are many seeders, like 1:1 ore more seeders than leechers, I get speeds of 1 Mbps or more… but never have gotten past 2 Mbps!
BTW: 1 KB/s = 8 Kbps… if you didn’t knew already!
Ther in North Korea, you dont even have interenet connectiom
.
i feel slightly better about my bandwidth now. on the east coast i pay $45 month for 10 down/2 up. i pretty much always hit 9 down (or 1.2mb/s). seeing that people overseas are paying about the same for dsl style 2 down is crazy. i thought the us was dead last or something in connection vs cost.
i also don’t use any upstream. torrents are for suckers *coughircgopherusenetcough*
Rogers in Canada began doing this and I left them about one year ago because of this and moved to dsl.
I now hear that the rival sympatico will do the same sometime soon.
i’m on cogeco cable here in canada and they are thottling too. If i get an overall 4 kb/s upload on bit torrent , its good.
if i get over 200 k/s on downlaod its extremely good.
Here in Ivory Coast we don’t even have food.It’s a miracle you are reading this.
Using comcast
download up to 300
upload up to 45
if i try to download more than 3 files at a time, i *may* have problems.
also, if comcast can identify which users are using p2p/bittorrent, how long before the anti-download police get ahold of that info???
I have Road Runner and I haven’t had any problems yet. PeerGuardian will block a few IP’s that seem to be associated with Time Warner Cable (My ISP)
I get about 600KB/s D and 47KB/s U
Excellent! P2P is for losers. Contribute to earn.
Switching to another ISP IS a problem when you have service providers who were ORIGINALLY legislated to break up their monopoly and have now reconverged. The service provider you have may be the ONLY one in your area. So if you choose to drop them then you are pretty much without internet or you have to move to a slower service like dialup.
Face it. They have the right to stop people from breaking their user agreement which is ‘to not abuse their service for illicit means’ but to lie and say they are not doing it is worse than people who use the service for downloading anything.
This is somewhat old news but the findings from a particular ISP and confirmation is not.
ugh. i hate you comcast. i’ve been paying so much for a high connection, and don’t even get “fast speed” ninety percent of the time. i wish i could switch… their customer service is a load of B.S. too… death to comcast!
comcast is going down !!
@30, Steve… no ISP is lying!
Most of us pay for a minimum assured bw of 1 KB/s! That’s it!
If however you’ve agreed to a contract where it states that the minimum bw is of 1 Mbps then they’re not allowed to drop below that at any time or they can be sued! It’s all in your contract… but for marketing purposes, that’s not mentioned in their “commercials” and they have the legal right to do so.
Anyway… it’s unfair to the clients. They pay the bill after all!
I also have Comcast and I usually upload at 30-50 kb/s. It can get faster, but only for short periods of time. Usually I lose my connection when I’m uploading very fast.
Evil corporations rule the U.S.
is this the start of the breakdown of Net neutrality?
time will only telll…
well ai have comcast costumer here with abig acct and after reading this posting the costumer wants to cancel the acct after i showed and proved to her she was being cheat by comcast.