ISP traffic throttling scandal escalates
p2pnet news | P2P:- On the US side of what’s becoming an international scandal, Cox Communications has joined ComCast on the list of major ISPs said to be putting caps on bandwidth sold to customers who use P2P file sharing applications.
North of the border, Canadian regulators have just launched a probe into Ma Bell’s traffic throttling activities.
The company is using the claim that a tiny group of users mislabelled ‘bandwidth hogs’ are causing serious online congestion, forcing it to cap bandwidth.
Now new data from the Max Planck Institute say BitTorrent connections for more than half of Comcast and Cox users are being interfered with.
Singapore’s StarHub is also named.
Both Comcast and Bell have been accused of spying on the users.
In Canada, the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC) wants the Privacy Commissioner to investigate Bell’s alleged practice of monitoring subscribers‘ internet activities without their knowledge or consent.
Bell claims it’s respecting the privacy of ISP subscribers, refuses to describe just what its deep packet inspection of subscribers’ activities really uncovers, says clinic executive director Philippa Lawson
She says there’s also evidence other large ISPs such as Rogers, Shaw, and Cogeco, may be similarly spying on their customers.
In the US, “if appearances are correct, Comcast is getting ready to spy on individual users,” said p2pnet, going on >>>
Comcast put out a vague, jargon-filled press release about working to create a ‘Bill of Rights and Responsibilities’ for users of peer-to-peer file-sharing software,” says Saul Hansell in the New York Times, also pointing out, “The release has prompted no shortage of criticism on blogs.”
Hansell says he also spoke to Mitch Bowling, Comcast senior VP and general manger of its Internet service, who, “reiterated the company’s pledge that it will only slow down the network based on a customer’s usage pattern, not what programs are being used.”
But he went further, saying Comcast isn’t going to, “deliberately slow down traffic based on what content is being transmitted or whether the maker of the software being used to exchange files is or isn’t friendly to people trying to get around copyright restrictions.”
Rather, Comcast’s new method for “managing the times when its network gets congested” will be based, “purely on individual consumption by consumers,’ Bowling said. “Anything in addition to that is outside the scope of what our network management goal is.”
The story doesn’t say what technology the company will use to check up on “individual consumption by consumers,” how it’ll do so, or what Comcast’s plans are for users it catches going beyond the bounds, whatever Comcast decides they may.
Says the Institute >>>
All hosts which observed blocking did so in the upstream direction (i.e., when the client host attempted to upload data to one of our Glasnost servers). Only a handful of hosts observed blocking for downstream BitTorrent transfers.
We found widespread blocking of BitTorrent transfers only in the U.S. and Singapore. Interestingly, even within these countries, most of the hosts that observed blocking belonged to a few large ISPs.
Both in the U.S. and in Singapore, all hosts that suffered BitTorrent blocking are located in cable ISPs. We did not see any blocking of BitTorrent transfers from DSL hosts in these countries.
Most (573 of 599) U.S. hosts that observed blocking are located in Comcast and Cox networks. In Singapore, all blocked hosts are connected using the StarHub network. While we did observe blocking for hosts in 10 other ISPs (7 of which are in the U.S.), we did not see widespread blocking of BitTorrent traffic for hosts in those ISPs.
“At a high-level, our test sets up a series of BitTorrent flows between an end user’s host and our Glasnost test servers,” says the institute, adding:
“We collect the packet trace for each flow on the server side, and we closely monitor both end points for any error conditions that might cause a flow to be aborted. If a flow is aborted by a control (RST) packet that was not sent by either of the end points, we report the flow as being blocked by some ISP along its path.”
.
.Stumble It!
Use free p2pnet newsfeeds for your site. It’s really easy!Subscribe to p2pnet.net | | rss feed: http://p2pnet.net/p2p.rss | | Mobile – http://p2pnet.net/index-wml.php
Net access blocked by government restrictions? Use Psiphon from the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto. Go here for details. Download here.
May 16th, 2008 at 11:45 am
Me I have enought with Comcast I am switching to DSL!
May 16th, 2008 at 11:52 am
According to the MAx Plank data the claim that they block some traffic only in case of congestion is another lie.
The BT traffic is half blocked permanetly dys and night and 24 hour a day.
We can not trust Comcast Period! So I am gone! Anyway their speed claim is bogus and the latency is such that in many case it is hard to get a decent videostream that does not freze all the time.
You see speed is not everything. A slower but constant speed is better than super fast bandwich that stall all the time such as with Comcast.
And as far as Internet is concern I preffer a slow open internet (even at dialup speed!) than a restricted fast internet. Sorry Comcast but it seem that DSl will fit my need from now on.
May 16th, 2008 at 11:54 am
Oh and I forgot: I am tired of your overpriced an crapy TV cable too and I am looking for alternatives.
May 16th, 2008 at 2:12 pm
I already switched to DSL.