I use Comcast (they took over the local Time Warner monopoly), but I haven't seen this sort of behavior down here, yet. Maybe it's coming.

I've already had problems with them, so I started looking for alternatives.

Turns out that it's still either Comcast or DSL in this market if you want broadband, and many of the big DSL players don't offer service in Texas.

I'm either stuck with Comcast, or I go with DSL at less than half the speed (3Mb vs. 8Mb). I have no other choices at all. None. And this is in the middle of the fourth largest city in the United States.

What fantastic competition.

Oh, I forgot to add one more point:

Comcast says they're going after customers who use a lot of downstream bandwidth because they're "interfering with their neighbors" due to limited, shared capacity. So what did they do? They up their download speed by 2Mb almost to the DAY they started cutting people off who went over seemingly arbitrary bandwidth limits.

I mean, I'm happy about the speed boost, but these two things don't really add up, do they?

I guess they get to advertise the higher speed, though...

I'm fairly sure that when ISP's sell a particular level of service, their usage model does not anticipate a customer who uses 100% of that bandwidth 100% of the time. For dedicated torrent clients, though, 100/100 is the target.

ISP's oversell bandwidth just like the airlines overbook flights. The airlines have managed to get away with it because they know not everyone will show up for their flights. They also have what is, for most people, a reasonable fallback position - offer free flights if you get bumped.

Perhaps Comcast's solution (at least until they get a new pricing model) should be to offer refunds on service that you paid for but cannot use.

the DSL line that I have now has higher pings, a slower upload and a marginally faster download than the cable connection before it

but at least it WORKS

Companies have a right to protect the correct operation of their networks so they can ensure good service to all customers, but this goes too far. Net firms should not have the right to decide who you "talk" to or not; nor how you "talk" to them. If peer to peer traffic slows down their network, they should have a technically feasible solution that isn't disruptive to their customers' needs.

I can understand the need to limit disruption caused by the most ardent of leechers, but to severely handicap legitimate use of internet is questionable, even detestable.

I'm sure some smart, encrypted protocols with unpredictable behaviour to non-initialised clients will pop up though that can't easily be blocked. They can't block it all.

People moaning that government regulation never helps anything need to realize the important role government plays in fostering a competitive environment.

Where I am I can choose from a dozen DSL providers because the government mandated that the incumbent telco open it's doors to competitors. Without that regulation there would only be one DSL provider. I serious doubt I would be getting uncapped DLS for less than $40/month if there were no competition.

Government steps in to keep the RAM suppliers from colluding on price, and thus with have low RAM prices.

Now in this case mandating network neutrality is a great thing and does not impinge on quality of service offerings. It merely stops carriers from stifling the bandwidth that you already paid for becasue they A: don't like what you are using it for, B: think you are using too much, C: A service is being used competes with what they want to offer (ie VOIP), or D: Simply want to extort upstream suppliers (Google, Apple, youtube etc..).

None of these are valid reasons to interfere with your bandwidth. The real issue is that we have been sold much more bandwidth than they have. They sell 10MB/s unlimited to 1000 people. When the backend pipe is really only 1000MB/s or LESS. 10 Times less than what they sold. This is common in all flexible bandwidth environments.

Now they scramble to limit what you can actually use. It doesn't matter what the source, they will throttle whatever is clogging the network to try to cover that shortfall.

Now the fair/decent solution is actually have some decent/honest service agreements with customers and have customer level throttling, not service type throttling that will have to keep changing to throttle whatever new service starts filling the network.

You buy a 10MBs pipe, you should be able to pay to have some portion of that guaranteed, say 1MBs that they will not hinder, the rest is best effort. They engineer the network to provide the guaranteed rate. You can pay more for for a higher guaranteed rate.

But that requires fine grained QOS control of users. A simpler solution is to simply have Monthly bandwidth caps. You can pay to have a bigger cap and you self regulate. The effect is the same as you can then engineer your network to the capped service users are paying for. They will self regulate to stay within the caps.

The lie of selling "unlimited" bandwidth then under-engineering, then scrambling to throttle down anything that chews bandwidth, has to end.

Most people could live with a 10GB cap, I have gone past 100GB in a month. I have uncapped service right now, but would prefer a capped service that was treated honestly, to this dishonest "unlimited" but throttled service.

Any so-called net neutrality bill that would prevent an ISP from optimizing its customers' experience (which is to say, keeping bittorrent losers from dominating the network and screwing over everyone else) is by definition a taking of property, and thus a violation of the Bill of Rights.

Any jackass who would prefer government mandates over the status quo ante deserves the jackboot he'll get on his face from creating the sort of thugs who would implement such policies. Criminal morons.

Aren't we all just wondering if someone is going to take the time, make the effort, and spend the money to stop human desire?

It's amusing to listen to people moan about the status quo even as they fail to understand that it is government regulation--and only government regulation--that has created the present status quo in broadband. Those who think that more government regulation will bring about better economic conditions simply don't understand the role that regulation has played in creating, and more importantly in *sustaining*, the current status quo in broadband delivery.

Government regulation is the very best buddy of all major broadband delivery companies, whether you talk about cable or DSL, it makes no difference. Government regulation is the shield behind which they hide. The effect of more regulation will be to simply solidify and strengthen the position of the entrenched broadband players, contrary to popular mythology and opinion. It is unfortunate that this fact is so poorly understood.

There is misinformation.

Comcast only prevents users from seeding their torrents.

Uploading still occurs during leeching.

hope for illinois people

in illinois it is illegal to conceal the source of a communication, as such, this technology is illegal to use in illinois (the author of LeBrea has talked about this as his reason for discontinuing the software) and anywhere else the media imperialists have passed super-dmca laws (lovely, they are getting bit by themselves, lol)

Why not just dump Comcast already? Hasn't that company been a bit shady anyway?

DSL? FiOS? there are too many options to even bother with cable. I don't like sharing my bandwidth, and I sure as hell don't like a company throttling everything I do. They will learn when they start losing customers by the boatload. Rogers here in Canada does exactly the same thing and then some.

If only someone did an article on Rogers and made the people realize how bad a monopoly can get. Rogers' traffic shaping is the most aggressive I've ever seen...

See, this is why I don't believe every vote should be equal. There are far too many consumers -- people who have never taken a professional risk in their life. Peolpe who have never taken a life-risk, or dedicated themselves to hundreds of others.

Whether it's Comcast, another internet service provider, a sports team, or any other business, why the hell would you want your government to cotrol their business? As a consumer, you can always stop buying the product. You can switch ISPs, you can pay more, you can start your own.

Don't say that you can't, you can. I did. And the last thing that I would ever accept, as a business owner, wolud be my clients voting to have my government control what I can sell.

Incidentally, all of you consumers are just plain hypocrits. If you goverment were mandating that you buy one product over another, you'd scream. But you want your government to mandate that someone else's business only sell one product over another.

Incidently, these companies -- Comcast included -- are either PRIVATE companies, with which your government has no right to interfere, or PUBLIC companies run by their SHARE-HOLDERS. If you want to control a public company, buy a share and vote at the meetings. Still the government has no right to interfere in the procedures determined by share-holders with regard to their own company.

Stop controlling other people by using the government, just because you don't have the money to do so legitimately.

How to beat Comcast's Sandvine.

http://redhatcat.blogspot.com/2007/09/beating-sandvine-on-windows-w... -- Beating Sandvine on Windows with WIPFW

http://redhatcat.blogspot.com/2007/09/beating-sandvine-with-linux-i... -- Beating Sandvine on Linux with iptables

I can completely understand that Comcast might not be able to provide enough bandwidth to meet the demands of people who are constantly seeding torrents. But the solution is to use metered billing instead of arbitrarily blocking people (and lying about it).

After first reading about this, the first thing that started going through my mind was not how bad comcast was, net nuetrality, but the lack of encryption on the internet. In this day and age, why is it that the HUGE majority of our internet traffic in unencrypted?

Why is it that almost of all of our email is sent in plain text across the internet? Why does every application that wants to encrypt data it sends have to re-invent the wheel? Why isn't something like IPSec turned on by default, for all users, for all connections?

The amount of unencrypted data that's flowing across the internet, quite frankly, scares the shit out of me. People are so concerned about their IP address becoming public, and it's because the only layer of security that they have is people not finding it out. Wide-spread use of IP-Layer encryption would remove a lot of the problems with net neutrality for consumers (but would have the telcos going ape-shit, and the government wondering how the hell it could do it's electronic surveillance).

I'm not saying that it would be something that could be turned on over night. But PGP was being looked at in 1991, so the issue was considered. 15 years later, nothing has been done about it. There no "secure" was for me to browse the majority of the internet, or email the majority of the people in the world.

Precisely the sort of behaviour the Network Neutrality bill would have prevented, if passed. I wonder whether this will finally give the bill the push it needs to pass through the legislature (thus going in the face of the telcos' intentions), or stick and leave American consumers with not only comparably slow broadband speeds, but a subset of internet services, too. Seven years ago the rest of the Western world (barring Scandinavia) looked in awe at the advanced state of broadband in the United States. Nowadays, America is the one lagging behind, and by quite the margin, too. As I'm writing this from my 30$/month 24Mbit ADSL2 connection in Greece (as late as 2003 we had no broadband of any kind!), I can only think that's one hell of a decline. I hope combined lobbying by the consumers, EFF and other organizations will defeat this sad state of affairs.

Bizzard's updater for WoW is a bit torrent type program. I wonder if that gets blocked as well?

My last ISP (@Home, the cable provider in my area) decided this summer to start neutering my connection as soon as bittorrent-related upload exceeded 10kb/s. Other upload traffic worked flawlessly, but a torrent would render the connection completely unusable.

I switched.

Any encryption scheme that uses a known algorithm with a secret key is vulnerable to a brute force attack. In fact, any encryption scheme is vulnerable to some form of brute force, including brute forcing the encryption algorithm itself.

With enough time and effort, any encryption can be broken. But with things like SSL, its not the risk factor that prevents hackers from doing it, it is far easier to perform phishing attacks against users, or find security vulnerabilities in other areas to get access to the information you need.

I applaud the AP writer; trying to explain TCP to laymen can be tough, but I think they did a pretty good job of it.

They've been doing the same thing in Canada on Rogers Cable internet for a couple of years now...

That is nothing compared to Rogers in Canada. They have throttled all encrypted traffic( unencrypted BT as well of course). Playing havoc with things as simple as secure remote access to email.

This is a perfect example what Net Neutrality legislation is needed, to keep what are essentially common carriers from interfering with carried traffic to suit their own purposes.

"Oh you want to do VOIP, well you better sign up for our service as we are going to block all competing services."

I am shocked how easily some people get confused into thinking that net neutrality is somehow a bad thing and that it is a good idea to let the carriers control the content after we pay for the bandwidth.

It's only a matter of time before corporations make their own decisions that greatly influence our lives and nothing happens and the gub'ment is behind the corporations

well, I'm glad I don't have them. I download a lot of stuff via bit torrent, all of it legal AFIAK. Some of it could be illegal, but the company that produces it encourages sharing because they like having hype in the US.