Comcast Hinders BitTorrent Traffic 537
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?"
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:solution (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Fraud is a weak manager's way of doing business. (Score:5, Informative)
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
Re:Doesn't quite work (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:solution (Score:5, Funny)
Re:solution (Score:4, Funny)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:solution (Score:5, Informative)
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)
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.
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.
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
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
i have ran 100+ ft of cat5 through holes in my rented house before (ghetto method) and, most r
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.
Re:Why not charge by the GB delivered? (Score:5, Insightful)
If they do, throttling all bittorent is a clear violation.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
What "illegal behavior"? The transfers are encrypted, how do they know what's transferred?
Come to think about it, how do they even know it's BT traffic if you use full mandatory encryption? The only way I can think of is to spy on the tracker connections. Which can be also encrypted if the tracker supports HTTPS (why don't they, usually?) or via the Tor network.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Joe Internet (apologies to anyone reading this named Joe) doesn't know or care enough about bandwidth or the Internet to set such an elaborate policy (which means very little gain for rather a lot of work on the ISP's end), and people who want to Torrent lots would just end up paying more for the privilege (which means they'd continue to soak up the bandwidth in spite of the measure). This is probably meant to increase the overall bandwidth for everyone (though it's not the best way per se).
I'm the network
Re:Why not charge by the GB delivered? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
suddenly killing processes (Score:3, Insightful)
ABEND [sc.edu] 322
Re: (Score:2)
WOuldn't it be simplest for the ISPs to not offer "unlimited" service when they obviously have limits?
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.
And, after the top 10 percent are limited by this, re-calculate. Repeat each month until everyone is at dial-up speeds! (and paying for broadband!)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Sure it would be simpler. And even better, it'd give the local netbourhood thugs a really great business opportunity. Either you pay up to them, or they flood your pipe and you get to pay up to your ISP.
Metered access is not something you want when anyone in the world can make your meter run.
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.
red herring pricing (Score:2, Interesting)
*Plus total data volume at 0.1 cents per MB.*
1 dolar for 10MB
Check your math. That's $1/GB, or $4.50 for a DVD.
See my other posts in this thread regarding pricing.
Pricing should be set so less than 10% of the customers pay more, and only a small minority of that pay more than 3-4x more.
One thing I didn't mention:
No user should pay more than some maximum based on the size of the pipe, and that maximum should be significantly less than the per-GB fee low-end users pay.
Let's do some math:
There are 2592000 seconds in 30 days. Suppose for the sake of argument that 90%
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I buy a connection, assuming it's going to be maxxed out at 2000GB/month. I pay $600. I then provide my 4 neighbors a 500GB connection, for a rate of $400 each. (Note, this is a 20% discount off them buying direct from the ISP at $500!). I make $2000, I pay $600. Profit!
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.
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.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The obvious result is psuedo-unlimited services where there are no hard caps but they do everything in thier power to shaft heavy users who live in areas of high demand.
Not only do high traffic users lose out, but in order to maintain a flat-rate across all users they h
ISP vs WAP (Score:2, Interesting)
Maybe it's the start of customers demanding an actual INTERNET Service Provider and not a Web Access provider, which most so called "ISPs" try for today. Subset-Internet Provider. Shit, SIP is taken too. Oh, well.
One can dream.
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.
I'm canceling. (Score:3, Interesting)
We may change our prices, fees, the Services and/or the terms and conditions of this Agreement in the future. Unless this Agreement or applicable law specifies otherwise, we will give you thirty (30) days prior Notice of any significant change to this Agreement. If you find the change unacceptable, you have the right to cancel your Service(s). However, if you continue to receive Service(s) after the end of the notice period (the "Effective Date") of the change, we will consi
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...
if it's an open inbound port, it's a server (Score:2, Informative)
Not much bandwidth there, but it violates the letter of a lot of ISP/customer contracts.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Define 'server'.
If I telnet (I know) into my home PC from work, am I "running a telnet server"??
Technically, YES. But I sincerely doubt the tiny amount of traffic on the few occassions I connect will bankrupt my IPS.
If I FTP into my home PC from work, am I "running a FTP server"??
Same as above. As long as it is for personal use (IE: I'm not running a PUBLIC FTP site, it should be allowed.
If I connect to WOW, and
Most unpopular comment ever (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Most unpopular comment ever (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Re: (Score:2)
Moving to a usage-based pricing model would correct this inversion. The provider would be incentivized to deliver high-bandwidth, low-la
Welcome back to the 1980s. (Score:2)
ISPs should start charging for bandwidth used just like electric, gas, and other utilities.
Charge by the minute ISP sucked, but it's nice of you to compare it to other monopoly services. You might as well tell me the break up of Bell was a bad idea.
Outside of a monopoly, charge per bandwith will fail and drive most people right off the internet. 25% of windoze users are part of a botnet [slashdot.org]. Disconnecting them until their computers are clean is a better idea than serving them a big fat bill. It would al
Re: (Score:2)
Been there, done that in the mid 90's and earlier.
People didn't like it and the ISPs who didn't change to a full whole hog 24/7 access plan died out or got bought by companies who did.
Re: (Score:2)
The OP wasn't saying that Comcast was right to do what they did, he suggested a better method for Comcast to use. There's no arguement going on, merely another option being presented.
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]."
Re: (Score:2)
Now I have Speakeasy DSL, and while one could make an argument that Speakeasy is not like other DSL providers, regarless it's just as fast as my Comcast was if not faster, and far, far more reliable. Also no ridiculous, arbitrary restrictions on how I use it.
My Comcast is faster with Torrent/eMule both on (Score:2)
Jonah HEX
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)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
If only such a thing existed. [freenetproject.org]
Re: (Score:2)
Isn't that overkill? They'd be much better off just capping the overall speed/amount downloaded whenever a certain speed or amount are exceeded.
The way I see it, they're not sure how far to push this themselves. Right now ISP's rely on identifying BT and limit BT alone claiming "it's illegal". It's stupid, for a lot of reasons. To name just 2, there's perfectly legal BT
So use IPsec (Score:2)
So use IPsec in ESP mode.
Ironically, I've hated IPsec since its inception. I always though security should be end-to-end on the connections, since in theory it was just the data, and the end point authentications, that were important. Now it appears that IPsec actually has a valid use. One problem is that it won't completely protect from provider abuses, since once they determine some IP address on the network is a Torrent or Tor site, they can throttle based on that IP address (source IP). And we also
So don't use them. (Score:2, Insightful)
But please, don't get the government involved. They'll bury the Internet providers under a mountain of red tape, until customer service will be the last thing on their minds.
Re:So don't use them. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The government allowed what to happen? That only one ISP chose to put the infrastructure in your area for broadband?
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
`
That infrastructure was put there using government subsidies. It is simple too expensive to provide physical cabling to everyone except in dense metropolitan areas to be able to enter into that market as a new business (and what you see in the US is that only dense metropolitan areas get decent competition).
Network cabling is just the same as electricity lines, water mains, gas mains, sewer s
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
then reverse to return and how high up is geosyncronous orbit?? (just found a nasa source that puts it as 35,768 kilometers and each leg of the bounce nets you 0.11 seconds so each trip has an added 0.44 seconds)
so no WoW or chats or anything "real time"
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: (Score:2)
That's great, until the ISP decides that they can block any UDP traffic that isn't DNS to their servers.
A much better idea would be to simply make the connections look as much like HTTP over SSL as possible. They can't block that.
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.
Re:UDP for no reset? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
So would moving the bittorrent protocol to UDP solve this specific problem? UDP doesn't have a reset bit
IMHO that would be terrible and not advisable. UDP doesn't have flow-control; and you can easily get overwhelmed with misbehaving UDP clients endlessly sending layer-7 connection-request packets at a mind-boggling rate. Even ICMP source quench packets back to those misbehaving hosts won't help because they're often blocked on the path due to the increasingly firewalled nature of the backbones themselv
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.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The big ISPs are certainly complaining ("oops, we underpriced our product and are now making a loss - we'll demand that some random 3rd party bail us out of our mess"). Notably many of the smaller [ukfsn.org] ISPs [plus.net] are now very explicit about their limits rather than selling everything as "unlimited". The smaller ISPs are showing that if you charge people appropriately and make it clear what t
Server (Score:2)
Does comcast have a no-server policy? Many residential ISP's do. If they do, this just seems like it's enforcing that policy.
Does it suck, yeah. Does it make comcast evil? I'm not so sure.
Re: (Score:2)
End of Comcast? (Score:4, Interesting)
Eh (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Eh (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
I'm not sure what you mean by ISP's accepting abusers, but dumping bad service companies isn't abusing them. Nor is expecting them to give you the download speed you paid for, regardless of its use, unless they made it clear they were throttling up-front before you signed.
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.
Re:If more ISPs adopt this strategy,shouldn't it m (Score:2)
Common Carrier status? (Score:2)
wtf?? (Score:2)
Around here... (Score:4, Informative)
my comcast connection (Score:2, Insightful)
I use bit torrent to get game demos and betas, Linux distros, and to share music that I have composed and hold copyrights for.
I can seed just fine. You have to find that sweet spot. (the point at which your upstream starts to impact your downstream). for me, it's about 80KBps.
That being said, I am forced to use peer guardian 2 and alternative ports to see to it that my traffic gets to its intended loc
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Reasoning and how they do it (Score:4, Informative)
I call bullshit (Score:3, Interesting)
Here's the thing:
- You folks want common carrier status
- You want subsidies from taxpayers instead of spending your own money on infrastructure
- You advertise your services as always on and unlimited
And yet, when customers actually take you up on that offer you want to reneg after the fact.
When you advertise a service, accept payment for it, and refuse to deliver on it, that, my friend, is called fraud. Considering that you mail bills to your customers charging them for unlimited services, isn't each and every statement you mail one count of mail fraud? Isn't that what took down several mafia families, if the reference in The Firm is to be believed?
Charter's been throttling BitTorrent for years (Score:3, Interesting)
It sucks because WoW updates and several of Microsoft's large downloads are sent via BitTorrent. I have to hunt and seek every time I want to update a new WoW installation.
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Is this strictly legal? (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Evidently you've never heard of the "fair usage guidelines" which are mentioned in pretty much every broadband contract, yet aren't actually available to read if you want to see whether your usage is 'fair'. Personally I would say 'fair usage' would mean not exceeding the bandwidth I am paying for, whereas my ISP seems to think differently based on the emails I have received from them about getting put on a list of 'high usage users' and subsequent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)