Comcast Forced Netflix With Clever Traffic Clogging

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I guess you could consider what Comcast did "clever" if your definition of the word means "screwing over paying customers." :rolleyes:

Thursday, Cogent Chief Executive Dave Schaeffer said Comcast has been "very clever" to avoid interfering with traffic on its own network by instead interfering with traffic before it enters its network. Ports -- or connections between Cogent's network and Comcast's -- became full when Cogent tried to deliver Netflix traffic Comcast customers were requesting, he said, adding that Comcast refused when Cogent and other backbone providers asked the company to upgrade.
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Exactly why the internet should be regulated like our phone service across the USA.
 
I had to drop Netflix because of this. And their lack of rotating movies, especially kids ones, like they stated they would have. The deal with Disney was a few years ago and the same big name kids movies are on there, there was no rotation with current or older flicks as they explained would happen.

IMO, both companies can suck it.
 
Two solutions:

1. Level3, Cogent, etc stop accepting Comcast traffic through their pipes until Comcast stops their bullshit.

2. EMP bombs on Comcast facilities.
 
Red Machine D said:
Two solutions:

1. Level3, Cogent, etc stop accepting Comcast traffic through their pipes until Comcast stops their bullshit.

2. EMP bombs on Comcast facilities.
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I like the way you jiggle weatherman!
 
All peers should drop com cast because of this shit. Let see what happens then.
 
CRaschNet said:
All peers should drop com cast because of this shit. Let see what happens then.
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I have considered dropping Comcast because they throttle YouTube and Netflix. The problem is CenturyLink is my only other option and they can't get it through their stupid head that they need to upgrade their nodes and the upstream speeds are horrible. The unfortunate thing is I feel CenturyLink has a superior connection with no throttling.
 
TraptPatriot said:
I had to drop Netflix because of this. And their lack of rotating movies, especially kids ones, like they stated they would have. The deal with Disney was a few years ago and the same big name kids movies are on there, there was no rotation with current or older flicks as they explained would happen.

IMO, both companies can suck it.
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Lack of rotating movies? A whole lot better selection then amazon prime selection
 
Cogent is a pretty cheap company, this isn't the first Internet war they've been involved in. Amazing since their HQ is in Georgetown.
 
Keep up the good work Comcast. Maybe we'll be back on dialup in 5 years.
 
caddys83 said:
Lack of rotating movies? A whole lot better selection then amazon prime selection
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Read my post. I said rotating Disney movies. I have kids. They like to watch Disney movies. Hercules, Pocahontas, Mulan, Hunchback, and a few others are on there but have been on there for a few years now. Sure, some of that is on Disney, but then Netflix should not have said the big movies would rotate.
 
TangledThorns said:
Cogent is a pretty cheap company, this isn't the first Internet war they've been involved in. Amazing since their HQ is in Georgetown.
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Competitors hate it when you come in and undercut them with a better, more cost-effective solution that deprives them of huge markups and profits.
 
Maaan, trying to stream espn's NFL draft coverage and the pauses are horrible even on a ~600x400 window. Comcast is far from being done with their games. They cheated their customers and won, now they will keep doing this.
 
All I know is I'm on Comcast.. Despite really fast speeds, for about a month and a half before the deal was announced, Netflix would constantly play at low quality or sit there and buffer until it errored out.

Then they announced the deal, and a few days later, Netflix was running great, with everything streaming in HD.

Something funky was going on.
 
I guess the USA should open its ISP market to real competition. It's weird that such a developed country has as many options as we have in Brazil, sometimes even less - I hear some areas have only 1 provider because of city-wide regulations? That is insane.
 
cdr_74_premium said:
I guess the USA should open its ISP market to real competition. It's weird that such a developed country has as many options as we have in Brazil, sometimes even less - I hear some areas have only 1 provider because of city-wide regulations? That is insane.
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Municipalitities sold off the rights that way for either personal kickbacks for the cash on city coffers so the typical government fiscal irresponsibility could go on another day.

At this point, state law would have to retroactively re-define those agreements.
 
jpm100 said:
Municipalitities sold off the rights that way for either personal kickbacks for the cash on city coffers so the typical government fiscal irresponsibility could go on another day.

At this point, state law would have to retroactively re-define those agreements.
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And that will happen just about as fast as the federal government redefining education in America. I think someone mentioned before but when the ISP's and the FCC are in bed together it nigh impossible to make headway.
 
This all just reminds me of highways and interstates. No matter how many times they get widened, there are always going to be bottlenecks in the system. I honestly don't know who to believe, because it seems that both companies like Cogent and companies like Comcast are at fault.
 
cdr_74_premium said:
I guess the USA should open its ISP market to real competition. It's weird that such a developed country has as many options as we have in Brazil, sometimes even less - I hear some areas have only 1 provider because of city-wide regulations? That is insane.
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In this country, laws are for sale to the highest bidder. We are a democracy of the corporations who have more rights than people (e.g. if an individual caused someone's death by trying to save 57 cents, they would be in jail for murder but if a company like GM does it, they get a slap on the wrist).
 
jpm100 said:
Municipalitities sold off the rights that way for either personal kickbacks for the cash on city coffers so the typical government fiscal irresponsibility could go on another day.

At this point, state law would have to retroactively re-define those agreements.
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In North Carolina, the North Carolina Corporate Assembly passed a law that stripped municipalities of the right to handle complaints from or negotiate deals with the cable companies and telephone companies. Now the state just rubber stamps everything.
 
The following is my firm belief:

1.) I pay comcast for internet service.

2.) As such it is comcasts responsibility to provide me with internet service, anywhere on the international network.

3.) If their peering to another backbone gets congested due to higher demand, it is their responsibility to me as a paying customer for internet service to upgrade the internlinks on their side of the connection.

4.) The other backbone has the responsibility to its paying customers to so the corresponding upgrades on their side of the connection.

5.) Anything else is double dipping by Comcast. Plain and simple. I pay for internet service. I should get it no matter where it goes no matter the demand, and they are responsible to me to make sure that happens.

6.) In a truly free market, where people have choices, the likes of Comcast would never survive with behavior like this. It's time to smash the monopolies.
 
Zarathustra[H];1040819493 said:
The following is my firm belief:

1.) I pay comcast for internet service.

2.) As such it is comcasts responsibility to provide me with internet service, anywhere on the international network.

3.) If their peering to another backbone gets congested due to higher demand, it is their responsibility to me as a paying customer for internet service to upgrade the internlinks on their side of the connection.

4.) The other backbone has the responsibility to its paying customers to so the corresponding upgrades on their side of the connection.

5.) Anything else is double dipping by Comcast. Plain and simple. I pay for internet service. I should get it no matter where it goes no matter the demand, and they are responsible to me to make sure that happens.

6.) In a truly free market, where people have choices, the likes of Comcast would never survive with behavior like this. It's time to smash the monopolies.
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And now Comcast throws up a guest wifi connection on your rented modem without notice... until a month later.
 
Well there's some good news at least:

http://www.theguardian.com/technolo...utrality-open-internet-google-facebook-amazon

Wheeler, a former top cable and wireless industry lobbyist, has called suggestions that the new rules will create a inaccessible fast lane “flat-out wrong”. He has also said any deals would have to be "commercially reasonable”.
...
The tech firms’ move comes as politicians including three Democratic senators – Ron Wyden, Elizabeth Warren and Cory Booker – have also called for the FCC to protect net neutrality.

In a Facebook post, Wyden called net neutrality “an essential principle to the protection of consumers online”.

“When Americans purchase access to the internet,” he wrote, “we purchase access to the entire internet, not just our providers' network. By dividing up the internet into fast and slow lanes – with the fast only accessible by sites who pay the premium, Verizon and Comcast are playing bait and switch with every American consumer.”
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In summary, now that the other first class citizens (Google, Facebook) have come out in opposition to this, I'm now a little more optimistic that us peasant helplessly watching things unfold may potentially have a chance of at least maintaining the current (still poor) level of telco service.

We'll see which group of first class citizens pays more and how much the FCC's ties to the telcos sways the equation soon enough.
 
Also a little taste of EU-like progress for Texans:

http://tech-beta.slashdot.org/story...omise-of-google-fiber-sends-rivals-scrambling

The Mere Promise of Google Fiber Sends Rivals Scrambling
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Marguerite Reardon writes at Cnet that within a week of Google's declaration last spring that it planned to build a fiber network in the city of Austin, AT&T announced its own Austin fiber network and in less than a year's time, AT&T and local cable operator Grande Communications have beaten Google to market with their own ultra-high speed services using newly built fiber networks.

AT&T maintains it has been planning this fiber upgrade for a long time, and that Google's announcement didn't affect the timing of its network but Rondella Hawkins, the telecommunications and regulatory affairs officer for the city of Austin, said she had never heard about AT&T's plans before Google's news came out.

Hawkins was part of the original committee that put together Austin's application to become the first Google Fiber city. 'Our application for Google would have been a good tip-off to the incumbents that we were eager as a community to get fiber built,' says Hawkins. 'But we never heard from them.

Until Google announced that it was going to deploy a fiber network in Austin, I was unaware of AT&T's plans to roll out gigabit fiber to the home.' Grande Communications' CEO Matt Murphy admits that without Google in the market, his company wouldn't have moved so aggressively on offering gigabit speeds. It also wouldn't be offering its service at the modest price of $65 a month, considering that the average broadband download speed sold in the US is between 20Mbps and 25Mbps for about $45 to $50 a month.
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Imagine that.
 
UrielDagda said:
Then they announced the deal, and a few days later, Netflix was running great, with everything streaming in HD.

Something funky was going on.
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Comcast mentioned that negotiations started months before the announcement. It could also be a simple case of before, Netflix data was routed to a few heavily congested settlement-free peering points to now where it is routed to many data centers geographically closer to the end user.
 
UrielDagda said:
All I know is I'm on Comcast.. Despite really fast speeds, for about a month and a half before the deal was announced, Netflix would constantly play at low quality or sit there and buffer until it errored out.

Then they announced the deal, and a few days later, Netflix was running great, with everything streaming in HD.

Something funky was going on.
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This. I stopped watching streaming video on a 50/10 connection, for gods sake, because it was unwatchable - even after buffering for 2-3 minutes, I would get a picture that reminded me of video in the AOL days, where you couldn't even make out people's faces.

A few days later, all the same equipment, and streaming HD! Meanwhile, my Amazon instant video has similar problems, although those too have diminished - almost simultaneously with the announcement of the proposed merger. It's simply incredible the Everest level of bullshit, in the middle of the living room, and Comcast and Congress will shovel it all down our throats while claiming it isn't even there and this is good for us.

It's diabolically evil and genius, because it's so infuriating I just want to smash my monitor and ignore it all because it raises my blood pressure so much just thinking about it.

Fuck them. Fuck them all. /rant (sorry) :mad:
 
Ruoh said:
And now Comcast throws up a guest wifi connection on your rented modem without notice... until a month later.
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If they give it a different public IP so it's on the WAN side of my NAT and they provision it such that there is no impact to my effective bandwidth, I don't have a problem with it...

First thing I always do is disconnect the ISP's router and hook up my pfSense box though.
 
ravx25 said:
And that will happen just about as fast as the federal government redefining education in America. I think someone mentioned before but when the ISP's and the FCC are in bed together it nigh impossible to make headway.
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the FCC chairman is an ex-CEO of Comcast. Comcast CEO is ex-FCC commissioner.

Do the math.
 
xX_Jack_Carver_Xx said:
I DEMAND every community be given direct access to COGENT.

End of "isp's" as we know them.
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Technically this is the way net neutrality is support to work, and it's the ISP's job make the final connection between cogent (and all the other backbone providers) and the individual customer homes, and then bill the customers for the cost of this final connection (which they do).

The problem is that Comcast ALSO wants to charge the backbone and content providers for the privilege of being connected to those homes, which is a bit backwards.

Comcast seems to have lost sight of what their actual product is, they are trying to sell the internet to the customer, AND sell the customer to the internet, at the same time.
 
sir-gold said:
The problem is that Comcast ALSO wants to charge the backbone and content providers for the privilege of being connected to those homes, which is a bit backwards.

Comcast seems to have lost sight of what their actual product is, they are trying to sell the internet to the customer, AND sell the customer to the internet, at the same time.
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If there were legislation to prevent such intrusions and abuses from corporations, those things wouldn't happen. But money is a form of speech now. And let's face it, we as consumers are responsible as well. IF there was a national consensus among Comcast customers and disconnect for a few months, I bet you, Comcast would listen.
Everyone cannot go a day without being online.
 
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