Surprisingly, this traffic shaping even disrupts normal web browsing and e-mail applications...Users may find it extremely difficult to establish new TCP connections while using any application that has a relatively high rate of TCP connection establishment on a Comcast link.

I can confirm that we have not made any shift in our network management policy yet and have not implemented the protocol agnostic approach that we announced two weeks ago. At that time, we said we would migrate to this new system before the end of the year. We are currently attempting to contact the PhD students and associate professors at the University of Colorado to better understand their analysis.

A note regarding our findings: Further experiments have led us to believe that our initial conclusions that indicated Comcast's responsibility for dropping TCP SYN packets and forging TCP SYN, ACK and RST (reset) packets was incorrect. Our experiments were conducted from behind a network address translator (NAT). The anomalous packets were generated when the outbound TCP SYN packets exceeded the NAT's resources available in it's state table. In this case, TCP SYN, ACK and RST packets were sent. We would like to thank Don Bowman, Robb Topolski, Neal Krawetz, and Comcast engineers for bringing this to our attention. We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience that this posting may have caused.