Comcast Makes a Deal with BitTorrent

Notice the fine print: They aren't saying they are ending interference with P2P, they are saying they will stop treating BitTorrent differently then other heavy transfers.

Which is a Good Thing, IMO, and I'm happy to have been proven wrong (I thought the P2P vs ISP war was going to heat up further.)

However, a guess: it may be a consequence of improved traffic shaping: they are already starting to prioritize short connections ("Speed boost", which is being very heavily advertised in this area).

You don't NEED to do RST injections if you can take the 1% heavy-users and traffic shape them down to a reasonable level when there's congestion. RST injection is very crude traffic management compared to the alternatives.

It also allows the ISP to deal with the cost externalities indirectly, because now the 90% don't complain as much about bad performance when they want to surf the net.

Finally, there is NOTHING in this that says they have to treat BitTorrent UPLOADS as special, just "not different from youtube".

Comcast has repeatedly claimed that they are only killing "leeches/seeds", flows which upload vastly more than they download. If Comcast instead just shapes all large uploads, this will have effectively the same effect, without the visible political repercussions.

Likewise, if ALL ISPs agressively shape uploads, this kills the P2P business model nearly as sure as anything else.

Also, the lack of topological awareness does hurt BitTorrent, as well as the lack of cacheability. If the ISP is able to say that
a) BitTorrent-type protocols can stay in my local loop and
b) These flows are ones I CAN cache without being sued

BitTorrent type flows become far less objectionable.

Speed boost is almost as much of a problem as the way they treat torrents. I couldn't download anything past that initial boost, which is 20 megs. I've heard some people say that if you don't use Comcast's software, you don't have to worry about it, but I think it depends on your location. I actually went to DSL. It may be slower, but at least it finishes.

Eh, I stay away from Comcast.. Sure sometime you get some blazing speed out of it but its highly dependant on your local area traffic.. No matter what anyone says. When i had Comcast transfer flucuated dramatically during peak hours and then eventually even during late night. I'm currently using AT&T's professional grade DSL and can get a solid 2-3Mb all the time. Comcast peaked around 2.5Mb and during the day ran under 1Mb. Both services cost about $50. As for torrent traffic I have never had any problems with either service.

Yet another pro-con-cast article that spreads the LIES that con-cast wants spread. Forging TCP RESET packets to terminate a protocol is NOT "traffic shaping", "network management" or anything like that. It's forgery to terminate a legal protocol at the behest of the MPAA/RIAA, who consider all their customers "pirates" who should have paid more for the trash they were stupid enough to have overpaid for to begin with. Slime. Now they dare to say net neutrality isn't necessary because they're "fixing" it? THEY'RE ONLY DOING THIS BECAUSE OF THE THREAT OF FCC INVOLVEMENT! Con-cast should be forcibly shut down and have all profits made throughout the company history redistributed to all their customers.

I'm not even sure its MPAA/RIAA involvement. It's purely money. Their network is likely underbuilt for any new, bandwidth-heavy applications that emerge. They like to discount upstream traffic rates, and place large concentration ratios on downstream traffic, assuming it comes only in bursts. For example, Verizon FiOS started off with 1600 subscribers off a single OC3.. 155Mb/sec. If they have indeed underestimated new uses for all this bandwidth they're selling, they need to upgrade the hardware in their networks to compensate. Comcast thought they could just get away with cutting off the traffic since most people associate "P2P" with "Illegal", when the real issue is their traffic modeling didn't account for people actually -using- the bandwidth they were sold for long periods of time.

Of course, they also want to cut off anything that's legit but competes with their own services. If they think they can get away with it, I'd expect them to start causing stalls in streaming video from places like netflix.com and hbo.com, to try and keep you using their video on demand services and not other people.

You can bet the other ISPs out there are watching Comcast to see what happens. They'll all follow suit and probably start throttling bandwidth.

Whatever this deal means, it does not mean that Comcast is out of the throttling business. We at Public Knowledge are still pushing forward with our petition to the FCC to demand that Comcast abide by the FCC principles of network management. More information about our petition can be found at:

http://www.publicknowledge.org/node/1485

I love when people say things like BitTorrent have legitimate uses. Yes, they most certainly do but is the majority of it used legitimately? It was the same deal with Napster: "oh, people can share all kinds of files and unsigned bands can share their mp3s." Yeah, but 99% of the people were looking for pirated stuff. Just because these tools have a theoretically legitimacy doesn't make them a social revolution.

@Legitamate Uses

The issue isn't what percentage of users do what with what technology or transfer protocol.

The issue is that if this starts a new standard, what will be the line that doesn't get crossed?

If 50.000001% of people who use the internet to XYZ also do something illegal, does XYZ get crippled to the point of uselessness?

This is not punishment for doing illegal things, this is preemptive punishment akin to punishing people before they commit a crime.

Are all the people who patch World of Warcraft doing illegal things? No. But they're being punished with multiple-hour (or day) patches because the other main use of the technology is piracy.

My point is this. Things like this spark widespread change once people accept them. In the end, each step towards censoring the internet will end in a government employee having live 24/7 access to what we do on our computer unless people push back. Sure it sounds hyper-paranoid and is probably an exaggeration, but to some lesser extent it's probably the truth.

let me see, comcast, went to bittorrent and made a deal to change there architecture and that they'd allow bittorent access to this but not anybody else. i know a power play when i see one. this one is to basicly buy out bit torrent by guaranteeing they're the only p2p that will work on comcasts network with any sort of viability. in one fell swoop they disarm bittorent by making it basicly comcasts own personal p2p client, one that won't work very well on any other isp, and wipe out any other p2p technology as an added bonus. i hope the sellouts behind bit torrent can sleep at night