Comcast to Stop Hampering File-Sharing

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Get this, Comcast says it will stop hampering file-sharing and reconfigure its network management systems so that all traffic is treated the same. Changes are expected to take place by the end of the year.

On Thursday, Comcast said that by the end of the year, it will move to a system that manages capacity without favoring one type of traffic over another. "This means that we will have to rapidly reconfigure our network management systems, but the outcome will be a traffic management technique that is more appropriate for today's emerging Internet trends."
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So now they'll just slow everyone down :)
 
ISP's need to wake up to this otherwise people will start taking their demand for fast internet access elsewhere.

We could also do with some highly strict laws about how ISP's advertise their internet packages, using terms like unlimited need to be squashed, people need to know what allowance of bandwidth they get and if any services are artificially slowed down.
 
Frosteh said:
ISP's need to wake up to this otherwise people will start taking their demand for fast internet access elsewhere.
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Where would that be? We don't have many options between carriers... our lines are dominated by single owned carriers.
 
Where I live I have a choice between Qwest DSL or Comcast, I chose DSL because I could bundle it with the other services I already use... but at the expense of 1.5mb speeds :(
 
KrylonArt said:
Where I live I have a choice between Qwest DSL or Comcast, I chose DSL because I could bundle it with the other services I already use... but at the expense of 1.5mb speeds :(
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Don't worry... once Comcast starts slowing everyone down you will be the new king of speeds in the town.
 
I suspect this was nip the pending lawsuits in the bud. Litigation does do good sometimes. Its messy but it works.
 
At least there is some progress down there. Up here in Canada it's getting worse and worse; Bell Canada is full on throttling their connections for P2P as well as those of their DSL wholesalers. Rogers has been throttling to an extent too and is soon introducing bandwidth caps.
 
WTF, end of the year?...I don't know much about networks on this scale, but this seems a little rediculous:confused:
 
PyroHoltz said:
WTF, end of the year?...I don't know much about networks on this scale, but this seems a little rediculous:confused:
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Remember this is Comcast. They schedule a week or two to come out and replace a broken modem... what makes you think they are going to change thier entire network in weeks, months? These guys give AT&T a run for thier money.
 
Their current method was too easily detectable. Probably in the future instead of just resetting connections they'll just make file sharing connections slower overall. Then if anybody questions them they can just say the internet isn't controllable and maybe somewhere else along the line it's getting slowed down. Ultimately you won't be getting stuff at the speed it could run at without tampering; it'll just be less conclusive that Comcast is screwing with the packets.
 
Term-X said:
At least there is some progress down there. Up here in Canada it's getting worse and worse; Bell Canada is full on throttling their connections for P2P as well as those of their DSL wholesalers. Rogers has been throttling to an extent too and is soon introducing bandwidth caps.
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On the other hand CBC is starting to release DRM-free content directly to BitTorrent, which puts ISPs throttling head to head against CBC's Broadcasting Act mandate to make their content available to all Canadians by the most effective means possible. Hopefully Rogers and Bell get taken down a notch someday.
 
They are just taking their time, like "sucking on a teet, before you have to give it up" sorta thing.
 
thejulex said:
Don't worry... once Comcast starts slowing everyone down you will be the new king of speeds in the town.
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It would be alright if Qwest offered their 7mb speeds in Colorado Springs like they do in Denver, or if Verizon would stop laughing at me everytime I mention "FiOS... Colorado... PLEASE!!!"
 
www.dejazzd.com is where I get my internet from.

$20 for 10mb/s (runs at 10.4 all the time) for the first year....

They're very win. I don't think any of you guys will have them unless you live near me (Lancaster County, PA)
 
Can you say "Those that download a lot are gonna get really, really screwed" ?
 
Just to make it more expensive to figure out what is going on, all new apps and p2p should simply use ports 80/443. This would force anyone trying to throttle traffic to use deep packet inspection which is costly (CPU wise, probably software wise as well). Of course, this means you can't use the same machine as a web server...
 
I still have yet to experience any throttling of the sort. and I average about 8 gigs/week.
 
Good to hear they recently purchased my local cable company.... I haven't noticed any changes yet, I assume they won't even apply these things to our network.
 
Dang... in a way bad news for me... Anyone with even the most remote knowledge of Bittorrent uses a client that supports encryption with a simple check mark (uTorrent 1.7.7 anyone?) that bypasses/tricks their throttling. Now all the P2P N00BS will get all my bandwidth!
 
Term-X said:
At least there is some progress down there. Up here in Canada it's getting worse and worse; Bell Canada is full on throttling their connections for P2P as well as those of their DSL wholesalers. Rogers has been throttling to an extent too and is soon introducing bandwidth caps.
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I keep hearing that and reading it,but have yet to see the effects of it (wife and I are on Bell (7 down/1 up).Rogers was always terrible about caps,and has always had them in one form or another.They treat thier employee's well,and thier high speed customers like criminals,and trash.There was an article in the Ottawa Ctizen the other day about smaller ISP's all across Canada,that rent lines from Bell recently finding out they too are hard capped. :eek:

Many of these same companies,are now openly talking lawsuits. :D
 
So I wonder if by the end of the year the RIAA is going to have heavy monitoring in place at comcast to catch all the bad guys in the world, you know instead of just making false accusations.
 
So is the basic message of this that they will stop chocking BT uploads, but now the overall speed and goodness will degrade due to their new "networking management"???

or will it basically be like they just stoped blocking file sharing and nothing else changes on the customer end? As usual i'm not sure how upfront comcast is about that.

regardless though i modified my bit torrent ports to get past that stupid blocking a long time ago.
 
Manny Calavera said:
I keep hearing that and reading it,but have yet to see the effects of it (wife and I are on Bell (7 down/1 up).Rogers was always terrible about caps,and has always had them in one form or another.They treat thier employee's well,and thier high speed customers like criminals,and trash.There was an article in the Ottawa Ctizen the other day about smaller ISP's all across Canada,that rent lines from Bell recently finding out they too are hard capped. :eek:

Many of these same companies,are now openly talking lawsuits. :D
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I can verify this is happening (I am with a 3rd party DSL in Ottawa), in the evening (throttle hours), if I run a torrent (don't normally do this) is staggers along about about 50KB/s, but the same torrent early in the morning, full bandwidth.

Worse yet, they monkey with anything encrypted, so my VPN to work in the evenings is very unreliable, failed connections, dropped connections, lower bandwidth. Early In the morning it is perfect.

This all started around a month ago for me. Prior to that my VPN connections to work were rock solid. This kind of crap really should be illegal with companies having an essential monopoly on service.
 
Adisharr said:
I do about 60-70 gigs / week so I think you're ok :D
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altron1983 said:
yea im with u on that i do bout 50-100 per week also no throttling here :)
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Whew, good for me. I'm glad I'm on the lower level of bandwidth hogs. I blame mininova and their great front page setup.

danbfree, utorrent after 1.6 has RIAA tracking within the software so using 1.7.7 with encryption is kinda redundant. I use utorrent 1.5 with ipfilter files that get updated every week or so. It's amazing to see the number of blocked peer ip's per torrent.
 
XamediX said:
danbfree, utorrent after 1.6 has RIAA tracking within the software so using 1.7.7 with encryption is kinda redundant. I use utorrent 1.5 with ipfilter files that get updated every week or so. It's amazing to see the number of blocked peer ip's per torrent.
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Any way you can elaborate on this? PM or linkage?
 
Gambit said:
Any way you can elaborate on this? PM or linkage?
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the RIAA isnt' necissarily tracking your utorrent, but they COULD be... bram now owns utorrent (remember the deal when they bought it last year) and he's got all kinds of agreements with the MPAA and RIAA, so it isn't outside the realm of possibility...

the original 1.6 was the last release the the old owner of utorrent came out with, and i think he went public and said that it was the last "known safe" version...

you can't tell what was going to happen... he (dev of utorrent) made no qualms about how he sold out (wouldn't you?), and he's just trying to warn the community...
 
Technically, Comcast has made some sort of deal with BitTorrent, Inc., which by no means precludes future throttling of traffic that uses the BitTorrent protocol. All that's really happened here is that Comcast and the BitTorrent corporation (which is set to open up shop as a content aggregator, if you recall) have agreed to go into business together.
 
We have CableOne internet here in Idaho, and I'm getting sick of it. They are kind of partners with Comcast, at least, that's what I suspect. I hope they follow Comcast's example here because CableOne throttles you seriously. If you download 1.4GB they throttle it for the next 24 hours, and uploads are limited to like 700MB/day, I believe. That means if we rent an iTunes movie for 3.99 that happens to be around 1.4GB, after it downloads our bandwidth will be seriously cut off. We're switching to DSL in the first week of April. 7MB for less money than cable charges for 5, faster uploads, and NO throttling. I verified this with an actual tech over the phone that says they don't throttle a bit. He's actually downloaded 8 or 9 gigs in a day without any throttling after. Plus it will bundle with phone and TV. Seems like a lot better deal than what cable can give us. And cable here jacks up prices after the 6 month promo is over. Sad. :confused:
 
i just wish the phone company would play ball... in our area you have 2 choices.... time warner or sprint (embarq)... which doesn't bode well for competition... while its nearly impossible to get time warner to work on new construction, embarq's pricing and comparable speeds are a joke... plus you gotta get an analog phone, which costs....

just wish there was a couple more cableco/telcos in the area... i think it would drive costs down and bandwidth up
 
I have one of the Comcast package deals, TV, internet and phone. I live in an area where Comcast is basically my only choice for high speed internet. I don't use torrents so this particular issue didn't directly impact me, but on principle I don't like such practices.

It really pisses me off everytime I hear about them doing something like this. Like the latest case, apparently there is some evidence that Comcast recently started running compression on some HDTV channels to the point where the picture quality is noticeably impacted. So I'm paying for high-def and getting medium-def.

Link for those interested:
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=1008271
 
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