Users in our RCN forum are complaining that cable overbuilder RCN is blocking BitTorrent connections. Some RCN technician posts to the forum seem to indicate that this is not a policy change, so this could simply be a technical problem. We're trying to confirm with RCN. At the moment, users say they're using forced encryption and/or Tor to get around the "connection closed by peer" errors.

Last year, RCN Director of Operations Jason Nealis stopped by our forums and was up-front about the company's handling of p2p traffic. "In order to support the recently launched new speed initiatives and future product initiatives we have completed some tuning specifics surrounding the traffic on our network," says Nealis.

At the time, internal metrics indicated that in excess of 90% of upstream traffic was being consumed by p2p. As such, they decided to implement new traffic shaping policies. The company didn't touch the speed at which users can seed via Bit Torrent, but they did limit the total number of upstream connections that could be made.

Since no ISP wants the customer wrath that would accompany blocking a protocol entirely, we'd assume this is just a temporary glitch on the RCN network.