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Comcast's New Terms of Service Disclose Traffic Management
Posted by
Soulskill
on Thu Feb 07, 2008 09:15 PM
from the thanks-for-the-retroactive-heads-up dept.
from the thanks-for-the-retroactive-heads-up dept.
cremou brings us word that Comcast has changed its Terms of Service to include policies on traffic management. This comes after the FCC's recent decision to investigate Comcast's P2P throttling. The language in the updated Terms of Service, according to Ars Technica, mirrors the FCC's 2005 Internet Policy Statement[PDF].
"According to Section III of the revised ToS, Comcast 'uses reasonable network management practices that are consistent with industry standards.' The company points out that it is not alone in the practice, saying that 'all major' ISPs engage in some form of traffic shaping. Comcast does it to keep its subscribers from suffering the heartaches of 'spam, viruses, security attacks, network congestion, and other risks and degradations of service' and to 'deliver the best possible Internet experience to all of its customers.'"
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Technology: FCC Seeks Comment In Comcast P2P Investigation 82 comments
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "The FCC has officially opened proceedings investigating Comcast's use of Sandvine to send RST packets and 'throttle' P2P connections by disconnecting them. The petitioner, Vuze, Inc. is asking the FCC to rule that Comcast's measures do not constitute 'reasonable network management' per the FCC rules and to forbid Comcast from unreasonably discriminating against lawful Internet applications, content, and technologies. If you want to weigh in on these proceedings, you can use the Electronic Comment Filing System to comment on WC Docket no. 07-52 any time before February 13th."
Submission: Comcast's new ToS discloses traffic management by Anonymous Coward
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In other news... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:In other news... (Score:4, Insightful)
I have never used a major ISP, and to this day my bandwidth is not shaped (unless I exceed a soft limit of 100 GB of bandwidth per month); something that was introduce long after the major ISPs started to secretly introduced bandwidth shaping. Spam controls and firewalls, etc are most effective on the client side, not the server side. Yes there are arguments for the latter, but the downsides of letting an outside agency control your connection outweigh the upsides of users having control of what type of email they accept, or the trojens they so naively install. As with everything good comes bad; let people learn from their experiences and keep the Nanny out of my bandwidth.
And no please don't ask me what my ISP is; it's small and regional and not much use to most ppl here.
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Re:In other news... (Score:5, Informative)
I have never used a major ISP
Unfortunately, most people in the U.S. don't have the luxury of a choice in internet providers. They generally have one or maybe two options (if they're lucky). I have three "options", myself. I can either get Comcast (see story above), Covad DSL (resold by a number of companies, but limited to 512k and never cheaper than $100/month), or SBC DSL at 6Mb.
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Internet access from mobile phone companies is a joke. They charge absurdly high rates.
Re:In other news... (Score:4, Informative)
It may not be 8-10Mb you can get from cable or FiOS, but it's certainly comparable to many ADSL offerings.
The price is certainly higher at about $65/mo, probably about $20/mo higher then I pay for a 10Mb/s cable modem connection from my local provider (not comcast)
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Re:In other news... (Score:4, Informative)
Broadband is extremely lucrative, but it also has a high startup cost. That explains why Verizon is spending $Billions on rolling out fiber across the country. It partially explains why Comcast has revenues of almost $27B in 2006, with almost $6B of that coming from the broadband business (http://www.telecommagazine.com/newsglobe/article.asp?HH_ID=AR_2806). That represented an 18% increase over the year before.
The ISP business is very lucrative, but you have to convince someone to loan you a couple $Billion and grow. It's not easy to make any business grow to this size. Very similar to starting a cell phone business.
As to your price argument, it seems nice in theory, but the reality is that the price of broadband is related to what you will pay, and what the competition is charging. Thus, the guy down the street downloading 500G per month might be slightly raising some cost to the ISP, but your bill is not related to that. Trust me, if your ISP thought he wouldn't lose too much business raising his rates by $10/month, he would raise it in an instant, regardless of his costs.
Moreover, I still don't get why I would buy a 15Mb connection from Verizon (yes, very common) and then limit myself to a few gigabytes per month. A fast connection doesn't help my web pages load faster. Overall, why would you get a fast connection just to do the occasional download and a lot of surfing? If that's your profile, that's not a problem, get the cheap DSL packages that you can now get from Verizon for around $20 when they run promotions.
My point is that it doesn't make sense to offer people a big fat pipe and then tell them "Don't use it, because you're abusing the network".
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
[/analogy]
Re:In other news... (Score:4, Funny)
And btw, you forgot to post anonymously
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Traffic Shaping (Score:5, Insightful)
So now forging TCP packets is called traffic shaping and is an industry standard. Yeah right, maybe for the Russian mafia.
Re:Traffic Shaping (Score:5, Informative)
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Yeah whatever (Score:5, Interesting)
I would call throttling the hell out of my connection to be a degradation of my service so obviously they aren't supplying the best possible experience to ALL of their customer, possibly most but certainly not all.
Translation - (Score:5, Insightful)
Define traffic shaping (Score:5, Interesting)
Looks like they can call something "traffic shaping" and then do whatever they want with the traffic, including not meet any of their other commitments.
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cough cough bullcoughshit cough (Score:5, Insightful)
By way of interpretation: We're going to blame the 5% percent of our customers who actually use the amount of bandwidth that they purchased. We know that if you had paid us only 50% of what we robb^H^H^H^H charge you, you would be happy with 1.5 Mbs download speed, but it sounds so much better if we promise you 3Mbs even though 90+ percent of you will never use it. This way we look like a super broadband provider to most of you, and to protect that false image, we're going to punish the few people who actually thought they were getting what they paid for.
It's not that we, Comcast, think our customers are fucking idiots, it's just that we know the damned good money we paid our congressional lobbyists is going to go a lot further than the whiney complaints of less than 5% of our consumer base.
So, we at Comcast want to assure you we are protecting you from the people who want to rob you of bandwidth so they can have the actual bandwidth that they paid for. By protecting you from these greedy bastards you can rest assured that we are doing all we can to keep your cash falling into our pockets every month. Thank you for being a Comcast customer.
Comcast access stinks (to be blunt) (Score:4, Interesting)
Remember office environments a few years ago... with a T1 (ideally) or xDSL (better than ISDN)?
And you would track down the one or two users that consumed the entire pipe 24/7? And no matter where, there was always one or two of 'em?
Comcast oversold their capacity. They did not count on the number of subscribers who would exceed their ill-prepared estimates. Now they want to deny service to those subscribers... induce them to find another provider. They can do what they want, you can always choose to not do business with them.
Take their bait. Comcast is at best a reasonable solution to light users (or maybe people who swallow the entire Comcast pill-- VIOP + web hosting + email hosting, etc?). Get Fios if you can, or even a fast DSL. It is "better" access.
Comcast says Internet is not for Pr0n (Score:5, Interesting)
I. Prohibited Uses and Activities What uses and activities does Comcast prohibit? [...]
Conduct and information restrictions
.. Snip
Call customer service (Score:5, Funny)
"Hi Angela. I was looking through the terms of service and wanted to make sure I am not in violation of my agreement. Is it true that I'm not allowed to view or download pornographic material?"
"Uhmm..."
"I have downloaded a LOT of porn through the Comcast service. Everything is legal-- everyone over 18, and amateur material only rather than pirated commercial material. I prefer the amateur work anyway, it's more real, you know? Have you viewed or published anything pornographic using Comcast service? I'd feel a little more comfortable if I knew I was in good company. Also, do you want to trade?"
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Comcast forgets that customers never forget (Score:5, Insightful)
Unfortunately, I recently moved back under comcast's umbrella and had no other options for internet within my budget. And now I'm suffering latencies as high as three seconds whenever I download a torrent. As soon as I stop torrent downloads, my latency returns to 25ms.
This is not traffic shaping. This is crap.
Shaping involves prioritizing and queing packets so that every process gets fed, regardless of what's running. You can also force downloads like BT, FTP, and even HTTP to take the slow path, moving icmp and ssh to the front of the line. This is quite easy with tc and other professional tools.
However, what comcastic seems to be doing is more akin to load leveling back in the days of mainframes. In those situations, you find that a user is hogging the resource and you would load level ALL of that users processes, regardless of function. As a result, if I'm downloading a torrent, my ssh sessions take 30 seconds to establish and keystroke confirmation lags three seconds behind my typing. Since I type about 60 words per minute, that's about three words or more behind my fingers. Wow.
Nice way to show your colors comcast. Once again, you are guaranteeing that:
1. as soon as I can, I'm dumping you.
2. I'm already telling EVERYONE to avoid you
3. I will go out of my way to starve you of customers
4. I will seek out and endorse your competitors
Good luck. May you soon die a well deserved and early death.
Fun with TOS! (Score:5, Funny)
# restrict, inhibit, interfere with, or otherwise disrupt or cause a performance degradation, regardless of intent, purpose or knowledge, to the Service or any Comcast (or Comcast supplier) host, server, backbone network, node or service, or otherwise cause a performance degradation to any Comcast (or Comcast supplier) facilities used to deliver the Service;
This and even more fun @ http://www6.comcast.net/terms/use/ [comcast.net],the linked article
It should be noted... (Score:3, Informative)
This isn't to say "buy a higher tier service, or suck it," but perhaps comcast should just put hard speed caps in place and only advertise up to that speed, and not outrageous speed 'but only for what we approve.' Not only that, but where are a lot of their problems happening? Is it on the nodes in local areas or is it in their back end connection to the whole of the internet. I don't know much about the super technical workings of TCP/IP but isn't there a way that they could route p2p traffic between their customers inside their network and infrastructure without jamming up traffic to external sources with little to no impact to other services?
One thing I'd like to know is, how are Comcast and other cable ISPs connected to the internet? Are they all networked together through a cable system with endpoints at telcos?
I did not speak up... (Score:4, Insightful)
Comcast's New Terms (Score:4, Funny)
Re:So... (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:So... (Score:5, Interesting)
No, you won't. They block port 25, forcing you to use them for mail relays. This affects those who don't want Comcast to see their mails, and where the recipient can't receive encrypted email but is behind a mail server that supports TLS, so the emails will be sent encrypted over the internet. That won't work -- Comcast forces you to relay through them, and they get to copy and read your outgoing mail (and hand it over to who knows).
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:So... (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:So... (Score:5, Interesting)
Give it time - they'll get to you.
I used to do the same thing (using exim instead of sendmail), until I got this letter from Comcast claiming that I was sending spam. They claimed to have proof:
I knew this to be bogus, as there is only one way out of my home network and every email is logged. Despite this, they stuck to their guns and refused to unblock port 25, and refused to even discuss the possibility of sending me the proof they claimed to have, or even reveal anything about the email, the IP in question, etc.The worst part of this was not the block on outgoing. I just had to use a different port and authenticate each time, which was a pretty simple configuration change in Exim. A lot of ISPs refused email directly from me anyway, indicating that they don't accept email from a network unless it's from an "official" email relay on that network. The list of host names that I had to send through Comcast was getting rather long.
The worst part was that they also blocked port 25 for all incoming traffic. What is that supposed to do for anybody? How is it even justified? But of course their TOS already prohibits "servers", so they felt justified to block mail from reaching me. I had to set up a RollerNet account to get around it. Very annoying.
Yea, yea, I know "switch providers if they treat you like that" you say. Well my only other option is Verizon FIOS (can't even get DSL), and they block 25 by default as well as any incoming port 80 traffic. So that's just a non-starter.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:So... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:So... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm not complaining, though. As far as I can tell, none of my bittorrent traffic is being throttled (though I impose a restriction on the upload rate myself--a modest 35 KiB/s--, else the link gets saturated and games start seeing o
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Name one. No, seriously. Name a broadband ISP in Atlanta that doesn't screw with their customers' connections. I dare you!
Re:So... (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Traffic shaping is fine, but... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:So... (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course there is at least one up side to this all and that is once you have defined download limits you the consumer are directly paying for x amount of bandwidth. Opponents to net neutrality find their arguments fail completely because people en mass start to understand that it means they'd be paying for the same bandwidth twice. So far in Australia any attempts to start the debate on net neutrality have fallen on deaf ears and even out rage.
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Re:So... (Score:4, Informative)
Either way, it's a shit site for fighting back. The only avenue of dispute is, AND ALWAYS WILL BE, the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman. I have, over the past 12 months, lodged a total of 3 complaints with the TIO. 2 of them didn't even make it to Level 1 complaint before the ISP changed their policy/dropped charges. The 3rd case is currently at Level 3, which is the final level before the case is refered to the Austrlian Communications & Media Authority. Once it reaches them, fines & possible revoking of communications lisence/trading rights can ensue.
All my complaints on whirlpool.net.au have done is serve to fuel trolling, not serve to be an open forum where you can stage a consumer "fight back". So yes, stop smoking crack and get with the real world, Australia has VERY strict laws with regards to communication - it's just ISPs & Telcos decide to try and blindside customers with illegitimate T&Cs.
Parent
Re:Better quality for games/voice? (Score:5, Informative)
It should be noted, however, that this is *not* what comcast is doing.
Comcast are deliberately cutting connections when a user attempts to seed bittorrent. Most users can still download, but they can no longer upload, without encrypting the tracker's traffic and individual connections. (I was able to get mine working again, after a fashion, once i setup a tunnel for the tracker (not all) traffic was able to go through)
This sucks for people trying to distribute stuff, like, say, linux ISO's, or their own music/media, etc.
I now use verizon as a direct result of these pathetic practices.
ash
Parent
Re:Better quality for games/voice? (Score:5, Interesting)
That's not exactly what they're doing, either. They might be able to justify dropping certain connections in favor of the collective good. What they're actually doing is impersonating the system your software is in communication with, and sending a reset.
In any normal sense of the word this is fraud. In any normal sense of the phrase this is not traffic shaping.
I'm not an expert on these matters, but I don't see any reason for an ISP to send fraudulent resets instead of using normal traffic shaping techniques other than an attempt to conceal what they are doing. Detecting this behavior requires simultaneous monitoring of both ends of the communication.
-Peter
PS: I'm posting this on Comcast. I can't understand why they don't offer a service package they feel is fair instead of subverting our agreement.
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Re:Better quality for games/voice? (Score:4, Interesting)
All I know is that I'm a Comcast subscriber, and I can't play any games because I get huge lag spikes (and/or dropped packets) every few minutes, depending on the time of day. Specifically, it'll be consistently fine (e.g. 50 ms or so) and then drop every packet it sends in a several-second-long interval.
Now, I don't think this has anything to do with the RST packets. However, it's really pissing me off because I've had two techs out so far (plus one who failed to show up) and it's not fixed yet, so I'm going to use it as fuel for the "let's bitch about Comcast" fire anyway.
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Re:Better quality for games/voice? (Score:5, Informative)
The techs dont know squat. They typically tell you what you want to hear if they can get online, lag is a non issue they will not fix. The Lag at comcast is huge, as well as the Jitter. It's gotten worse over the past 2 years because of the equipment they install. Most people have voip quality issues because of the sniffer they have installed in every 2nd point OTN that all traffic goes through.
Also your modem is set to cache a large chunk fo your traffic before sending. this plays HELL with games and Voip as well.
If you want to do anything but surf the internet and email, Comcast will suck for you. and it's gonna get worse. They want to oversell the connectivity even further. they already are at a 13 to 1 ratio and want to push it to a 15 to 1. Stable is 10 to 1.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
If you want to do anything but surf the internet and email, Comcast will suck for you. and it's gonna get worse. They want to oversell the connectivity even further. they already are at a 13 to 1 ratio and want to push it to a 15 to 1. Stable is 10 to 1.
You know they have every right to do this but it is surely already biting them in the ass. In most markets they do have DSL as competition so if they oversell too much they ought to expect to lose customers.
What I don't really understand is what advantage they see to this practice. I have no idea how oversold Cox is but I have very little trouble with my cable modem. Then again, I do mostly do web surfing and e-mail but anytime I've used iChat AV or Skype it has worked flawlessly as well. When my br
Re:Better quality for games/voice? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm not even a Comcast customer, and I'm EXTREMELY pissed off at them for actively breaking protocols. They sell Internet access, not "some of the Internet" access. I've had to deal with many, many friends and family member who were pissed off at their service. I get the feeling that they're trying to turn "OMG the pirating downloaders!!!" into some sort of blanket excuse for their technical issues.
New marketing slogan: "Comcast Internet Servi
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Re:Time to grow up (Score:4, Insightful)
One, it's not the ISPs business to determine what is or is not acceptable traffic. That's a moral/legal judgment that they have no authority to make, are not equipped to make, and could not under any conditions be trusted to make. I don't pay them to monitor my communications and tell me what is right and what is wrong. Let the copyright holder go after me if he or she really believes that I've infringed upon any of their legal rights.
Two, owning up to copyright infringement may or may not be the right thing to do from an ethical perspective, but it's the exact wrong thing to do if you don't want to end up penniless. Keep firmly in mind that the media companies (not all, just the majors that are funding the likes of the RIAA) have no interest whatsoever in redress of grievance. They have no concern with such niceties as "right" and "wrong", as most of us understand the terms. They want deterrence. That means they need to destroy as many people as they can before they're stopped, because that's what they've determined is their best course of action.
Go check out this blog [blogspot.com] if you want to learn more about what's really going on, and why the infringers are not the real evil here.
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What comcast is doing is screwed up (the exact way they're killing bittorrent traffic) but the only reason they can sell you a "6mbit connection" f
Re:*All* ISPs? (Score:4, Informative)
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