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Comcast Hinders BitTorrent Traffic
Posted by
CowboyNeal
on Sat Aug 18, 2007 08:05 AM
from the whoa-there-fella dept.
from the whoa-there-fella dept.
FsG writes "Over the past few weeks, more and more Comcast users have reported that their BitTorrent traffic is severely throttled and they are totally unable to seed. Comcast doesn't seem to discriminate between legitimate and infringing torrent traffic, and most of the BitTorrent encryption techniques in use today aren't helping. If more ISPs adopt their strategy, could this mean the end of BitTorrent?"
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solution (Score:5, Informative)
iptables -A INPUT -p tcp -dport $TORRENT_CLIENT_PORT -tcp-flags RST RST -j DROP
it's not mine so don't blame me. it's ugly, don't blame me. if it doesn't work, don't blame me. blame Canada.
Doesn't quite work (Score:5, Informative)
My choices:
- Only seed torrents from my server
- Switch to AT&T (yuck, and they'll no doubt be doing the same crap)
- Switch to Speakeasy (the Best Buy deal gives me the creeps)
- Switch to Covad (expensive)
- Switch to a local fixed wireless provider (my employer has this, and it sucks for VoIP)
- More cat & mouse games with Comcast
Parent
Re:Doesn't quite work (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re:Doesn't quite work (Score:4, Informative)
SBC's President was one of the first to stand up against Net Neutrality and argue that popular site operators should be paying them, and has been long before the AT&T and BS acquisitions.
And btw, you have the order all wrong.
SBC bought AT&T for over 16 billion in Jan 2005, almost a year after merger talks with BellSouth went sour. In Dec of 2006 they bought Bellsouth (there was no merger, it was completely acquisition in both cases)
SBC decided to take advantage of the AT&T brand and renamed itself.
Bellsouth was the remaining partner in Cingular, NOT AT&T, and that acquisition enabled them to make the rebrand of all the services they owned as the AT&T brand they had already acquired.
Nearly the entire modern AT&T board is nothing but the same former SBC board members, including the Chairman and CEO.
AT&T itself before acquisition was opposed to Net Neutrality, but never as loudly and adamantly as SBC was before.
Just making sure some facts are laid out in this discussion.
Parent
Re:solution (Score:4, Insightful)
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Fraud is a weak manager's way of doing business. (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:solution (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:solution (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:solution (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, this is the case for a lot of us in the US. If you're lucky, you have one of the other megalithic cable providers as an alternative, and maybe a DSL provider or two.
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Re:solution (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Why not charge by the GB delivered? (Score:5, Insightful)
Give all your customers your fastest residential speed. Set your rate so 90% of your customers don't exceed the "monthly allowance" for your low-end rate plan.
For the other 10%, bill them on a pro-rated basis based on how much they use. If they use 2x the allowance, they pay 2x. If they use 100x, they pay 100x.
To prevent runaway bills, allow customers to set their own "caps" and "throttle-down speeds" that would kick in after the cap was reached. If a customer never wanted to pay more than $20, he could set his "monthly cap" at 80% of what $20 would buy, and set the throttle-down rate low enough that he could never use up the remaining 20% even if he was maxing out his connection.
This seems a lot simpler and fairer than traffic shaping by protocol.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Why not charge by the GB delivered? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Phone companies and electrical companies do it (Score:5, Insightful)
The other features, like giving the customer control of monthly caps and throttling, will take a bit of work.
One unintended side-effect is the effect on home users who run wireless networks. "Stealing" bandwidth from an inadvertently unsecured or under-secured wireless connection without permission will now be literally stealing, as the poor subscriber will be stuck with the bill. Expect a few prosecutions under theft or fraud statutes if this becomes commonplace.
Parent
Re:Phone companies and electrical companies do it (Score:5, Insightful)
Little of which is the problem of the ISP. Internet access is now low in cost compared to most of our bills, but it's come to be regarded as a necessity by most of us. Therefore the market is ripe for a profit-hiking on the part of the telcos. But there are two things that prevent them all just simply bumping the prices up by a whopping margin. The first is that there may be issues in terms of price-fixing and anti-competitiveness if everyone just gets together and agrees to up prices. Secondly, there is the backlash from the customer at the sort of outrageous price increases that these ISPs would like.
Confusing the issue by breaking things up and charging extra for service X, is a confusing and obfuscating way of adding artificial value to the service. Especially when with increasingly efficient and expanded infrastructure, bandwidth is getting easier to provide. We pay now for bandwidth and this system works. Establishing the idea that we have to pay extra according to certain types of traffic has no good basis in effort on the part of the ISPs. In fact, it takes additional effort to introduce this monitoring.
It's about squeezing more money out of people and its based on collusion between ISPs. Customers should tell Comcast where to stick it.
Parent
Re:Phone companies and electrical companies do it (Score:4, Insightful)
I pay my hosting bill based on three factors: Bandwidth consumed, disk space used, and CPU used. I can set up in my account panel limits on any of these three. Since I don't want my sites to go dead just because I exceeded my bandwidth I simply throttle my connection speed once the bandwidth hits 80%. Sure my site gets slower, but it's not down. Upstream and downstream bandwidth is set in the modem on most cable and dsl modems, so all you need is a user side app that lets you see where you are in the billable elements and choose how to deal with it: Kill the connection for the last couple days of the month, or slow it down. Set the defaults such that the average customer won't pass the 80% point (so a peak month results in no additional or a minimal bill), but a power user can up the limits as needed. The infrastructure is all there already, all you need is one additional application and you're done.
Tiered plans that have a higher base price but allow more bandwidth are already available, and they change the plans almost monthly for their new customers or for "specials" so it's not like that's an issue either.
All in all it's an ideal technical solution, and like a gp post mentioned, in the long run it's both cheaper and more honest than the current cat and mouse game.
-nB
Parent
Re:Why not charge by the GB delivered? (Score:5, Insightful)
But at least if they were to do something like that, they'd move closer to returning to "common carrier" status. Any interruption or prioritizing risks their losing that status.
Parent
Re:Why not charge by the GB delivered? (Score:5, Insightful)
If they do, throttling all bittorent is a clear violation.
Parent
Re:Why not charge by the GB delivered? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Given that traffic costs are 10-20 times lower in the US than in Australia, this would mean that US ISPs could easily offer "starter" plans with 50-100GB of downloads, and high-end plans with 1000+ GB per month.
That way, big downloaders would pay for their usage, and there would be no need for shaping traffic and other nonsense.
Re:Why not charge by the GB delivered? (Score:5, Insightful)
Timesharing CPU schedulers have been solving this problem better for, what, 45 years now? You don't look at the filename of the executable somebody is running to see if you will schedule it. You don't suddenly kill their process if they exceed 60 seconds of CPU time. Instead, you simply de-prioritize "cpu hogs" - or in this case, bandwidth hogs. If you are a bandwidth hog, your "prime time" bandwidth should fall very low - lower than others who *only* use bandwidth at that time - but at 3am it should ramp up again, since you're only "competing" with other bandwidth hogs.
Parent
Re:Why not charge by the GB delivered? (Score:5, Insightful)
Because, ultimately, the end user has little control over how much bandwidth they use. A Pandora's box was opened when the Internet was targeted as a way to deliver rich multimedia instead of text. Even the links featured on /. are usually a few bytes of content surrounded by many kilobytes of ads, spread over multiple pages. Compared to analog television and telephony, the quality of online video and voice communications is horrendous, but demand is only a tiny fraction of what it's going to be. The ISPs promote multimedia heavily when they sell connectivity, so they're just as culpable as the content providers. Throttling bandwidth at today's poor quality is not going to be a satisfactory solution for consumers. Increasing capacity is the only solution. I have a family of four, and when each of us want to experience the rich content we were promised (like VOIP, online productivity applications, video-on-demand, and streaming music), you're going to call us bandwidth hogs? I don't think so.
Parent
So THAT's what happened... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:So THAT's what happened... (Score:5, Interesting)
Blocking BitTorrent traffic is an easy way to reduce traffic. It doesn't affect anything important (from Comcast's point of view).
It is a short-sighted decision, at best, and is typical of Comcast's damn the customer approach to customer service.
Parent
Re:So THAT's what happened... (Score:5, Insightful)
They sold internet connections at lower than cost of the bandwidth, betting on the customers not using anywhere near their bandwidth entitlement. Then the BBC produced iPlayer, which is encouraging people to use up more of their bandwidth and thus causing the ISPs to make a loss. So the ISPs are demanding that the BBC pay them to cover the shortfall.
To cut a long story short: the ISPs underpriced their connections and advertised them as "unlimited", were caught out when people actually tried to use what they had paid for and are now demanding that a third party bail them out of their mess. I certainly hope the BBC tell them to go screw themselves - I'm not going to be happy if part of my licence fee goes to propping up idiot ISPs who can't deliver on their commitments.
Parent
Bitch, bitch, moan, moan (Score:5, Insightful)
I have no sympathy for ISP that oversell their services and fail to invest profits in infrastructure.
Reminds me of Fight Club (Score:5, Interesting)
God dam it so annoys me when the ISP's bitch and moan about the customers actually using the bandwidth they have signed a contract, and paid for to use.
We're the people who build and run these systems. Comcast...or anyone for that matter...can't win that fight. I've worked with you wankers for 15 years, you're clever, relentless, and infinitely creative in a mischievous kind of way. If Comcast closes off BitTorrent, you'll find another way to disguise the traffic. They'll figure it out after a while and you'll figure out something else or go somewhere else. It may be difficult some days to motivate you at work, but you'll drive yourself until the early hours of the morning figuring out how to get around whatever filters they put in place. I've seen this arms race take place in every type of communication technology out there and you've won every time. Telephones, mainframes, PC networks, the internet. The road of technology is littered with the bodies of people who underestimate the technical genius of people who don't like being regulated.
We run your switches, your networks, firewalls, databases and your web sites. We are root and domain admins, we have the back door passwords to your routers. We run packet sniffers and Snort, know what a clever fella can do with xp_ extended stored procedures and javascript, we grew up on ping and tracert....we don't need no steeking GUI.
You can work with us or spend your life on an endless treadmill fighting a losing battle. But one thing history should have taught you...
....do not fuck with us.
Parent
Re:Bitch, bitch, moan, moan (Score:5, Insightful)
ISPs have got themselves into a bad spot by overselling and under cutting and the only way they can deal with it is by making their customers suffer...
Parent
Most unpopular comment ever (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Most unpopular comment ever (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't like your suggestion. If telecoms begin to charge for the amount of bandwidth used, the way we all use the internet will be fundamentally changed. Many of the popular websites and attractions that have sprung up in the past few years (itunes, webcasts, youtube, etc) rely on heavy bandwidth usage. Personally, I don't want to be thinking about my monthly budget when checking out videos on youtube.
Secondly, I have little doubt that the p
False advertising (Score:5, Interesting)
Someone should sue Comcast for false advertising. I constantly hear commercials on the radio about how much faster their Internet connections are than DSL's, about how "the other guys" sell you slow connections and make you pay extra for higher speed connections, and all sorts of other crap.
Of course, they don't bother telling you that if you get Comcast, you might not even be able to use your connection, or that they're going to play mommy and tell you what you can and can't do, and punish you for doing things they don't like.
If they're going to do this kind of shit, the FCC and/or the FTC needs to make them disclose it in their commercials. It's a substantial factor in the decision whether or not someone might want to subscribe. And I'd love to see what happens to their subscription numbers when they have to say something like, "We will restrict or forbid some popular services you might want to use on the Internet. Oh, and we require you to use the browser that we prefer [slashdot.org], even if you have a Mac and don't have access to it. And last, but not least, if you actually use the Internet, we'll cut you off entirely [slashdot.org]."
Bittorrent encryption is flawed and too much. (Score:5, Insightful)
It is flawed because the ISP just needs to look at your HTTP usage and see you connect to a tracker. They can even get the port you are listening on from there! Even if you connect to the tracker via HTTPS, they can still see you connecting to a known tracker IP. Once they know you are on a tracker they can start limiting all traffic that looks like it's encrypted with RC4, because apparently this is identifiable.
It is too much because you don't actually need strong encryption to stop traffic limiting. Simply adding some random padding and XORing the protocol with the torrent's infohash would be enough - it is a private key random enough that they couldn't check them all. The RC4 encryption was seriously over-thought, and what did it give us? Nothing, because apparently it is still identifiable as bittorrent (or at least as RC4 encrypted traffic).
The only solution is to replace the current encryption and always connect to trackers via Tor or some other encrypted proxy. And even then it wouldn't be perfect, because it's plausible they could start limiting traffic on listening ports that get a lot of traffic.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Drop Comcast (Score:3, Interesting)
Now, I only get data from them. I'm not interested in TV or phone, but as far as data pipe, I'm saving $20/mo and the connection speeds are faster.
UDP for no reset? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:UDP for no reset? (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re:UDP for no reset? (Score:5, Interesting)
Thankfully that will likely never happen since it would kill VOIP and many online game protocols use UDP. Killing UDP won't happen, since it would kill too many legitimate uses.
This can, theoretically, already be done. (Sort of...) Since BitTorrent already runs over TCP and SSL (actually, TLS now) is simply a presentation-layer protocol, there's no reason BitTorrent can't be run over TLS.
The problem is the "sort of." Since BitTorrent involves a lot more back-and-forth than HTTPS would (HTTPS would be small upload followed by large download), it's still almost certainly possible to block BitTorrent traffic that runs over TLS. There's really no way around this - the send/receive ratios for BitTorrent will always be different from HTTPS ratios.
Besides, the ISP doesn't even really need that to throttle BitTorrent or P2P in general. All they really need to do is start blocking SYN packets from reaching their subscribers, or at the very least, throttle the number of SYN packets their subscribers can receive to, say, five every 30 minutes. About the only "legitimate" uses for subscribers accepting connections are active-mode FTP and various chat protocols. And even then, the only times chat protocols generally require the client to accept a connection is for direct peer-to-peer transfers, and the ISP won't care to kill those.
Parent
Inflated fears. (Score:5, Informative)
As a guide,Europe has more internet users [internetworldstats.com] than the entire population of America itself. Oh, and then there's the other billion or so internet users in those other countries [iso.org].
America is certainly a fairly big country but it's far from being a lone influence of the world's technological development and trends.
End of Comcast? (Score:4, Interesting)
If more ISPs adopt this strategy,shouldn't it mean (Score:3, Interesting)
Unless there is a legal loophole allowing them to unilaterally change the terms of consumer contracts from Internet to Throttled Censornet, only customers having no other choice would stay with companies trying to force them back to the days of scary time- or traffic-based metering (especially given the risk of excessive traffic due to botnets these days) and/or walled gardens with little content exclusively picked at the mercy of one's provider.
Around here... (Score:4, Informative)
Business account (Score:5, Interesting)
Look, I'm not totally happy about it, but this is how it works today. You want a restrictive, "client only" connection to the internet you can do that for $20-$60 a month. You want a real internet connection you are going to have to pay $100+ a month in most places (in the US).
Frankly, I am hoping the ISPs finally just come clean and admit that their bottom tier service is client only, practically web/email only. There is a market for that and there is nothing really wrong with them selling it that way.
Verizon's FIOS service supposedly has a comparably priced business tier as well, and they are laying fiber on my street as we speak. I might check that out when it lights up (although I generally find Verizon slightly more evil than Comcast).
Finkployd
Reasoning and how they do it (Score:4, Informative)
24/7 modem users back in '80s = similar (Score:5, Informative)
The telephone companies do the same thing. Dating back for decades, they've price the "unlimited local calling" plans knowing some users will under-utilize and some will over-utilize.
When a shift in usage happens faster than they can adjust, as happened during the BBS era of the '80s and early '90s, their expenses go up and their revenue remains constant.
Back in the '80s, telcos in some states put a dent in the problem by limiting the number of lines you could have in your house without paying higher "business" rates. Some multi-line BBS owners paid out of pocket, others charged their users or solicited donations, others reduced their number of lines.
There was also talk of a "modem tax" but thankfully that never went anywhere.
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Re:So don't use them. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Is this strictly legal? (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:Eh (Score:4, Insightful)
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