Meanwhile, Comcast BitTorrent Throttling Continues... → MORE! MORE! MORE!

Id love if we can actually get a story a day about this. At this rate its only the same story reposted every OTHER day...

How is this the same story? Comcast says they will stop throttling - now we find out they have not, and may not.

We can concentrate on their other misdeeds then.

You'd be wetting yourself over an AT&T or Verizon story a day.

If Comcast wants off the front page they should quit doing things that land them there.

They said they would stop thottling BT protocol by end of year.

NO - they said they would stop WHEN they put new methods in place to handle abusers. And they said it would be year end before that happens.

Hey, someone who actually read the Comcast statement where they said they would become protocol agnostic in their bandwidth management in 9 months!

Bingo!

Yeah, that's a prompt response -- seeing as how the AP story that busted this wide-open was only 6 months ago.

If they were serious about fixing this, it wouldn't take 9 hours let alone 9 months.

Re-read what Comcast posted. They didn't state they were going to stop managing their network, they stated they were going to be protocol agnostic in their management. (ie, pick on everyone, not just BT)

If they are implementing an interface into the provisioning system to accomplish this like we talked about a few threads ago, that kind of implementation would indeed take time.

"Fixing it" is not part of their protocol. The delay is to wait out the firestorm so they can keep doing what they are doing, except to expand it to all P2P-type traffic, not just BitTorrent. It'll also be applied to video transfers and streams which compete with their cash-cow video-on-demand offerings. "Fixing it" to Comcast merely means widening the net, not removing it from the water.

OH Great Topolski of BBR fame, emperor of Rome, Ruler of the Worlddddddd!

Whatare they suppose to do about BT protocol sucking up all the bandwith in the meantime. Just because they stop doesn't mean the problem goes away.

Forging the RSTs is a wrongful act. After you get caught in "The Real World," you don't get to keep committing wrongful acts with impunity until you figure out what else to do.

Instead of RSTs, let's say Comcast's P2P throttling involved hitting the user in the head with a mallet (another wrongful act). Should they be allowed to continue doing that?

Nobody can license them to do what they're doing. Not BitTorrent, not PublicKnowledge, not the EFF, nobody. They must stop. They must disclose. They must accept responsibility for lying and under-delivering their service.

Take it offline right now -- today -- and I'll bet that they can figure out a Network Neutral solution before 9 months.

I'm a ham-radio operator. I'm used to the concept of not using more power than I need to communicate effectively.

If I got a polite email from Comcast, asking me to help them curb a temporary neighborhood bandwidth crunch** for a few months, and showing me how to set my P2P client to 33% during prime-time hours -- I know that I'd comply.

There's only one reason that they didn't: it would make them look uncompetitive to Verizon.

Well, they got caught -- very publicly. So now there is no excuse.

Even if half of the P2P guys would not comply, the half that would should make a difference!

**In a recent NCTA interview, Comcast revealed that only 35% of its node splits require anything more than adding equipment at the headend (known as a virtual split). This means that they have the spare capacity in the neighborhoods. Instead of using it, they're creating a false sense of scarcity.

quote:

---

The return bandwidth is not on the worry list right now, for a bunch of reasons. For one, were splitting a lot of nodes based on the success of voice, high-speed Internet, and VOD. In other words, all based on downstream requirements, not upstream.

On HSD (high-speed data), Im using two to three 3.2 MHz carriers (upstream). A lot more than that are sitting fallow in my CMTS cards. In most markets, I still have 12 MHz of bandwidth I can reclaim from circuit switched voice, once we migrate off of those platforms. So for now, the 5-42 MHz to me seems plenty adequate.

...

As we hit 70 percent utilization, we issue a work order to split the node. But it depends on utilization. Usually we set it to split to 250 homes. And for us, 65 percent of our node splits are really decoupling of nodes at the headend."

»www.cedmagazine.com/how- ··· nty.aspx

---

And here they defined agnostic as open and non-discriminatory.

""This new architecture would enable many new and emerging applications and will be based upon an open, non-discriminatory framework ... so we need to have an architecture that can support it with techniques that work over all networks," said (Tony) Werner. (Comcast Cable's Chief Technology Officer)"

Non-discriminatory means NO discrimination.
That means no prioritizing, throttling, packet forging, packet injection, or anything else.
Since you can not make an alteration to the network traffic streams without discrimination (ie:examination and evaluation), Comcast is promising to leave the network traffic fully unaltered.

To bring non-discrimination to practice would involve walking across the net-op center floor and powering off the Sandvine equipment.

Comcast says it may take up to 9 months to accomplish this.

So the Comcast Net-Op manager gets up from his chair. He takes one step. Then he takes another step. He breaths in. He breaths out. Skip 9 months. He reaches out with his right hand, index finger extended.... He depresses the button marked power... And the network upgrade is completed.

Hey Comcast customers. Is this what your service calls are like?

NV

"If I got a polite email from Comcast, asking me to help them curb a temporary neighborhood bandwidth crunch** for a few months, and showing me how to set my P2P client to 33% during prime-time hours -- I know that I'd comply."

Very few would do this. After all they think it's their God given right to do anything now matter what with their connection. That or they would expect 10 years of credits.

Forging RSTs is only about as wrong as cutting in line. It's not a very nice thing to do and it tends to annoy other people in the line, it may violate the social contract but there are no civil or criminal implications.

The RFC examples you love to quote refer to unintended consequences of RST injecting by firewalls on unknown header values. The Comcast deployment is a little more specific -- they know how P2P apps respond to TCP resets, it achieves the desired effect for them, and they appear to be taking reasonable measures to ensure that only their intended application target is affected. (not 100% obviously, but I'm sure they try to make it as close to perfect as possible)They need to get the ass clowns in marketing on board with the rest of the company. The folks that worked to craft the AUP seem to have a clue, and I'm sure there were more than a few "Uhh, guys..." comments that popped up with regards to the advertising.This "SHUT IT DOWN NOW" stance reminds me of the traffic meter study we did here in MN. Lots of people got annoyed with waiting on highway entrance ramps so they convinced the state senate to push the department of transportation into shutting down the meters. As ordered, MNDOT shut down the meters and conducted a survey for a few months. Traffic SUCKED. My normal commute to downtown went from pretty predictable 25 minutes to a range of 20-65 minutes, usually on the upper end of the scale. By the time the study was complete people were writing to the local papers, politicians, and MNDOT requesting the meters be turned back on. Study results were published here: »www.dot.state.mn.us/ramp ··· erstudy/

They should be able to do the things described in the FCC Policy: »hraunfoss.fcc.gov/edocs_ ··· 51A1.pdfIf it's voluntary, it's voluntary. Any credits would be simply goodwill (and good customer-relations).

Uhh.. no. Queue the Sesame Street "Some of these things are not like the others" music. Throttling and prioritization do not modify traffic, and will still very much be a part of any network's traffic management strategy. Per the press release:

"This means that we will have to rapidly reconfigure our network management systems, but the outcome will be a traffic management technique that is more appropriate for today's emerging Internet trends. We have been discussing this migration and its effects with leaders in the Internet community for the last several months, and we will refine, adjust, and publish the technique based upon feedback and initial trial results," said Tony Werner, Comcast Cable's Chief Technology Officer.

Just curious, in your world does the equipment room have a big switch labeled "Internet" that should always remain in the "ON" position?

They can't do that, that actually makes sense.

That's true of all of the RFCs. Enforcement is essentially the missing part.

I'm on the record as saying that the FCC should limit its rulemaking to enforcement of existing rules, it shouldn't put itself into the position of duplicating, adding to, or changing Internet Standards.

But even better would be to restore wholesale competition to Broadband (the crap going on with Bell Canada now, not withstanding).I love to quote the RFCs (those that are the authoritative "Internet Standards") because that's the instruction manual for developers and implementors.

And Comcast didn't know how all P2P apps would respond -- all P2P apps haven't been written yet. And their secret addition to RFC 793 wouldn't give developers the heads up as to why their apps were behaving unexpectedly.

And even for the ones that are out there, they did not get it right. Remember that I found this after two months of investigation as to why I couldn't upload anything via Gnutella -- 24 hours a day, 7 days a week -- 100% blocked.

Their Sandvine "solution" doesn't delay uploads, it blocks them. Comcast's stretched definition of "delay" only works when there multiple copies of all pieces outside of the Comcast.net domain. Comcast, being the 2nd largest ISP in the US, repeatedly prevented a lot of original content from being uploaded. They didn't delay it, they blocked it.

And, once discovered, I couldn't even report the problem to anyone at Comcast because Customer Support (truthfully) did not know it existed on their network. My CS notes would probably say "customer sees UFOs and Black Helicopters - ID10T."

What exactly does "wrongful act" mean?

Is forging TCP RST packets illegal? Possibly, in the context of the FCC's current rules, but that's debatable (and rather unlikely, in my view). More likely, Comcast's methods are legal now, but they want to preempt any further regulation.

Is it inconvenient for some users? Definitely true, although as has been pointed out, there are a wide variety of alternatives out there to accomplish whatever task you want to accomplish (assuming that you care more about getting things done rather than particular means of accomplishing them).

In "The Real World", people do "wrongful" stuff all the time. I had someone cut me off while I was driving to work. Hell, the price I paid for the gas I used to get to work ought to be a crime. If I spent all my time throwing hissy fits on the internet over every way I was "wronged", I'd never get anything done.

Comcast has stated that the reason they started throttling P2P in the first place was to manage the network so that everyone could have a reasonably responsive experience. Now I know there are tons of conspiracy theories out there about other ulterior motives they may have, but the fact that only certain people in certain areas are getting throttled tends to make me think that network management truly is the reason for starting this in the first place.

Just "turning off" a major part of their network management without having some kind of alternate method in place really would be negligent.

Actually, for the worthwhile RFCs the enforcement is quite effective. "Do it this way or your shit won't work"There are actually a couple Internet standards bodies: the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF, who picks and chooses certain RFCs to become standards) and the IEEE being the two largest orgs. The difference between RFCs and IEEE standards is like the difference between books and scientific journals. To publish in a scientific journal you need a certain level of detail, research, and peer review whereas any jackass of the street can write a book.

I'm not knocking RFCs, there's a lot of brilliant ideas published in RFC form, but you have to take them for what they are. Many of the proposals are purposefully left open-ended for interpretation; that's why SHOULD vs MUST becomes a huge point of distinction in many RFCs.If the app doesn't exist, how would Sandvine profile it to be able to take action on it?

Comcast should only prioritize according to approved "Internet Standard" RFCs. Any other behavior is not Network Neutral.

Back in the ...-.- day, the rule was "First In, First Out." No message, except for those of the government, would get precedence.

These days, we do have Standards that allow prioritization, but the en-route transit providers do not have carte blanche to prioritize them any way that they want to.

Edit: strikethrough my obviously overbroad statement

Any jackass can write an RFC, but it won't make "Internet Standard" level until its been fully vetted.Sandvine attacked the application protocol, so it recognized all BitTorrent applications. However, how one BitTorrent app responds to RST's resulting Winsock error code might be completely different than how another responds. Some apps might try and reestablish contact right away, others might mark the peer as "bad" and blacklist it.

Sandvine's method doesn't (and probably cannot) recognize which app is actually being used to generate the protocol it is attacking, so therefore it cannot predict what the app will do in response to the RST unless that behavior is also described in the protocol. And for BitTorrent, Gnutella, or ED2K, it is not. (I don't know about the others.)

no wonder people on the commercials cry MORE MORE MORE ith comcast. They cut you down when u use more lol and when they cry for more HD its because comcast only has 20-30 actual HD channels that arent just on demand.

Why Yes it does! Have you seen it too?

That's great, except there are no official standards on how applications should be prioritized.

comcast just said a few days ago it would stop. the change is not going to happen over night. just like sixty store building dont get build over night. comcast needs to get a new network management system in place. every company has a network manager system. so to think they will have it done in little than a week is stupid. it show you dont know anything about network management

In some states where Comcast operates, intercepting private data communicaions is criminally illegal (same thing is applied to hackers as well)
Grabbing your packets and FORGING RST's before passing the packets on sure seems like intercepting to me... Hence they ARE breaking the law in some places.

"Forging RSTs is only about as wrong as cutting in line. "

Since oversimplified examples have been introduced, I'll correct yours:

Forging RSTs is only about as wrong as pulling someone you don't like out of line, punching them in the face and telling them if you see them again you'll do it again.