Comcast's New Terms of Service Disclose Traffic Management 302
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.'"
Re:Traffic Shaping (Score:5, Informative)
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
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.
Re:Mail Server (Score:3, Informative)
No Real Choices (Score:2, Informative)
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.
Re:So... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:So... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:*All* ISPs? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Define traffic shaping (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:Okay. (Score:2, Informative)
Maybe you can't get it at your specific address, but to try to claim the entire metro Atlanta market is devoid of Speakeasy coverage is absurd. Got another reply? I'm sure you could make a bigger ass out of yourself if you try a little harder.
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?
Re:Okay. (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Time to grow up (Score:3, Informative)
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" for $40-$50 a month under the current system is the assumption that you're, like most web browsers, not using it more than about 10% of the time. They could charge less, but that wouldn't fund their system upgrades without everybody in their company taking a pay cut (whether their CEO deserves to make however much he does or not is a whole different story).
So the options are: Complain until they price the service for 24/7 operation, complain until they lower the quality of the service to what they can afford to sell for $40 a month and guarentee 24/7 bandwidth, or just accept that $40 a month doesn't get you a guarenteed 1900 gigabytes of traffic per month. Yes, 1.9 terabytes. There is a reason (a multitude of reasons actually) why 45 mbits on a T3 line costs a LOT MORE than $300 when 6 mbits on a cable line costs "only $40-$50." Yes, comcast sucks. No, broadband providers can't realistically be expected to cater to the Homer Simpsons sort that would sue an all you can eat buffet for kicking him out after consuming every bit of food in the establishment. You're paying for a connection that is unlimited with connection time, but its NATURALLY limited with respect to data speed/total data transferrable in a month/number of customers sharing your coax loop.
Re:In other news... (Score:3, Informative)
Internet access from mobile phone companies is a joke. They charge absurdly high rates.
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".
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)
They don't block port 25 by default (Score:1, Informative)
Contradictory (Score:2, Informative)
From Comcast's FAQ [comcast.com]
Do you block access to peer-to-peer applications like BitTorrent?
No. We do not block access to any Web site or applications, including BitTorrent. Our customers use the Internet for downloading and uploading files, watching movies and videos, streaming music, sharing digital photos, accessing numerous peer-to-peer sites, VOIP applications like Vonage, and thousands of other applications online.