Comcast blocks some Internet traffic

[Chief]

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21376597/

Tests confirm data discrimination by number 2 U.S. service provider

NEW YORK - Comcast Corp. actively interferes with attempts by some of its high-speed Internet subscribers to share files online, a move that runs counter to the tradition of treating all types of Net traffic equally.

The interference, which The Associated Press confirmed through nationwide tests, is the most drastic example yet of data discrimination by a U.S. Internet service provider. It involves company computers masquerading as those of its users.

If widely applied by other ISPs, the technology Comcast is using would be a crippling blow to the BitTorrent, eDonkey and Gnutella file-sharing networks. While these are mainly known as sources of copyright music, software and movies, BitTorrent in particular is emerging as a legitimate tool for quickly disseminating legal content.

**SCHNIPP**

WB?? I think you're more qualified to explain what this really means than I am...

???

[Waterbuffalo]

What do you want me to explain?

Its been well known for a long time that Comcast uses Sandvine to traffic shape P2P traffic and cut off some of their users who are megadownload hogs. $50 a month for a user plus add all of the other fees that they add is generally not enough to cover all of the traffic that comcast needs on an hourly basis, so they try to cut off or slow down the biggest bandwidth users and make their network speedily for all the rest of the average customer they use.

Comcast all over the internet denies that they use any technology or monitor system to control users bandwidth unless there is some type of Illegal activity going on. (Child porn, libel posting, common variety things.) They do one thing that is pure evil and they won't state anywhere what their monthly bandwidth limits are for their users, amount of transfer allocations are or many other things. If they ever did, it could be used by the other telcos against Comcast and the other Cable Internet companies.

Basically Comcast tries to set things up regionally as to what limits they have but they will never release that information because it would put them at a economic disadvantage.. Basically they want to keep it a trade secret. Though most of the average or above average users know in general what the limits are.

If your downloading 30 Gigs a month of files, movies and other things, your probably going to be put on a watch list or asked to cut down the amount of your information transfer. Or they could use there traffic monitor network to shape you into compliance depending on when you choose to use that much.

A 1 gig file download takes about 1/2 hour or less to do. So imagine a doing that every day for a month. 30 gigs of transfer isn't a lot. And there have been people who have received letters from comcast for 100 gigs or less transfer.. Or booted people off the system for using too much bandwidth but not specifying what the limits are.

I think I was reading some where that someone wants to set up a class action lawsuit to force Comcast to put into writing before people sign up what these limits are.

I wouldn't be surprised Chief if Qwest, AT&T and many other Internet DSL/Cable providers don't use some form of this system on their networks to traffic shape people who are hogging connections, massive downloading, seeding bittorrent/Gnutella/P2P files all over the internet. Most of these providers in the Terms of Service disallow this type of thing in some form or don't allow people to run servers off their DSL connections.

On the average, most people aren't the problem, its those 1 percent that choose to make everyone else's Internet experience hell. DSL is one of those services that used to suffer from this problem worse than Cable internet. But now I think most people are dealt before the average internet connection slows to a crawl for now reason because of some neighbor kid creating is own web host. (Seriously this used to be a problem. Its still being done but most of this stuff gets killed pretty fast unless an ISP isn't monitoring their network that well.)

[Chief]

I recently got giged here at clarkblog by the server company...

I use AwStats becasue it comes with the server package. Originally I could update my stats at any time, and usually did so a couple of times a day. One day without warning the server company pulled the ability to update stats ourselves, because it wa using too much server time. Now they update stats once a day, and at different times every day. The stats are still good, but I can't get them realtime any more. There is a way to run AwStats separately, but I have yet to figure it out...

[Waterbuffalo]

I bet if you googled around awstats you could get that type of information..

[tefen]

For more on this: http://slashdot.org/tags/netneutrality

[Chief]

I've downloaded the program, I just can't figure out how to get it installed properly on the server, so it will work right. AWStats gives a lot of data and slices things a lot of different ways. And since it's freeware, the price is always right...

[tefen]

AWSTATS works off of your site's weblogs. You'll have to have access.log to download from your website.... You will likely also have access.log.1, ...2, ...3 and so on. Those are the old ones, with the highest number being the furthers back in time.

[Chief]

OIC, so I have to download the access logs and feed them into the program somehow??

[Waterbuffalo]

Sounds like he's telling you that the AWstats is just a log interperator. There are probably some other nice programs out there that are freeware if you can get acess to the server logs of clarkblog.

[Waterbuffalo]

Here is an admittal of this going on by the Seattle Times article..

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2003970806_comcast24.html

PS. Love the Kurt Russell motif Chief..