Comcast engaging in data discrimination, claims AP
By Darren Murph 
posted Oct 19th 2007 2:51PM
posted Oct 19th 2007 2:51PM
ISPs throttling or downright banning access is certainly not unheard of outside of America, but for Comcast customers fully expecting an unadulterated portal to the intarwebs, the AP's latest findings may cause some serious kvetching. Reportedly, the Associated Press has "confirmed through nationwide tests" that Comcast is indeed "actively interfering with attempts by some of its high-speed internet subscribers to share files online." Deemed the "most drastic example yet of data discrimination by a US internet service provider," the outfit seems to be stifling BitTorrent uploads (but not downloads), and spokesman Charlie Douglas even went so far as to confirm that the company utilizes "sophisticated methods to keep web connections running smoothly." Granted, we're not shocked at all that Comcast is engaging in traffic shaping, but as of now, it has yet to come clean about its apparent involvement in hindering P2P uploads. So, dear Comcast users, have any of you noticed any such shenanigans going on?[Thanks, Jerry]
Ever since the days of suprnova.org I've been torrenting on comcast. I've always kept my upload speed throttled to 40Kb/s which is just slightly under the cap of 44kb/s (IIRC) I've never noticed throttling on my uploads.. they always go at max speed on high-demand torrents and mostly at max speed on low-demand ones.
Gotta say I've seen it differently. Anytime a torrent client opens on my network, speeds drop tremendously, no matter how I throttle it. QoS on my Smoothwall doesn't help, either. I've tried different computers, bypassing the Smoothwall, and in every case, I'm getting smacked. I think there's something to this. I haven't done any testing; maybe I'll do a speedtest with a torrent client opened and throttled tonight and see what I get.
I have Comcast in NJ(Bergen County) and they definitely cap the upload. I connect to my computer from work through a secure SSH tunnel (so they won't know what I'm transferring) and regardless of what kind of file I transfer, it starts off at a nice 180kb/s... then slowly throttles down until I get a steady 40kb/s. Happens every time.
Comcast blows. I needed Fios like yesterday.
In my experience, it works fine if you're up- and downloading, but if you're just seeding, Comcast seems to send a "stop" message every few seconds. However, it seemed easy to get around this last time I tried, by choosing in Azureus "forced seeding" or "forced start" for the seeding-only torrent. At that point Azureus seemed to ignore the stop signals, and chugged along nicely. YMMV.
at speedtest.net my download gets 60% completed then jumps to 100%. I think that has something to do with the 'speedboost' - Comcast probably trying to cheat bandwidth tests.
My upload's okay where I am, old Adelphia backbone maybe? In South FL.
Anybody know if they still use the old Adelphia fiber and routers, equipment to Buffalo, NY. Or are we all going thru Comcast 100% A to Z?
On large public trackers where I am more likely to find a connectble peer, no. But on small private trackers where there aren't as many people to connect to, yes. Basically what me and many others on this small private site are expieriencing is uploading for about 15-30 seconds and then dropping the connection to a peer for a minute and a half or so, and then reconnecting etc, so you get something like a sin wave in the speed section of your torrent client.
All I can say is, bring on the FiOS
Whenever I download a torrent I always just let it seed to at least 100% but about 5 weeks ago we got a call from Comcast are provider saying that they noticed that I was uploading more than 1gb a day they said if I keep doing so that they would flag me which in other words means they will cancel my account.
Nope, everything works fine for me.
i've noticed. i put the cap at 10kbps per task, and it stopped at 8kbps and put my ping for WoW at over 3000ms
Same here. I have comcast and I've never noticed any throttling that wasent my own cap I set.
I have.
i smella lawsuit ?
free money anyone ?
Yeah everything is fine here still, and when/if they implement it I certainly have a backup plan.
All ISP's limit your upload (and download as well to a certain extent) speeds. Not necessarily to prevent P2P, but because they always have this irrational fear that you'll resell your bandwidth and leech from their potential customerbase. (At least this is what I've always been told).
I have comcast here in NJ, its the old Garden State Cable Company they bought out years ago. I haven't noticed anything weird with my connection speeds and torrents. Comcast are whores and if they don't packet shape in my area now I'm sure they will soon. I'm looking forward to Verizon tv/internet service coming around soon.
Same here. I don't use BT a whole lot, but when I do, the traffic seems to be running normally. I won't doubt them doing it in the future though. Unfortunately, I doubt Fios will be hitting my part of NJ anytime soon.
Ok so Comcast in it's infinite wisdom is protecting the consumer from the RIAA. Think about it. The problem is not downloading the torrent, it's sharing it!
Thanks Comcast!
P.S. if you do have encryption enabled on your torrent proggy then they have no way to help you!
HAHHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHAAAAAAAAAAAA
YES! Comcast is evil.
I hope you Comcast users out there prepare to move your butt and actually make the honest-to-god switch to DSL or HSDPA.
Because any of you out there who continue to pay money to Comcast with full knowledge of their efforts to actively BLOCK, CENSOR, and INTERFERE with your Internet connection are henceforth, because of this news today, officially and publicly supportng Comcast, CHINA, that dark side of the PATRIOT ACT, and ALL other entities and institutions that support the argument that the World Wide Web ought to be monitored, manipulated, and controlled.
If you think this ends with bittorrent, we are all in for a rude awakening. THIS IS JUST BE BEGINNING.
I am a Comcast customer in Chicago. Unfortunately, the company I work for uses Lotus Notes. Even more unfortunate is that Comcast's attempt to put a lid on file sharing prevents my Lotus Notes email client to send anything over 2MB. I raised a trouble ticket with customer service two weeks ago. They said they'd get back to me, but never did. I'm switching back to DSL soon.
how dare you think you can work from home?
Working from home? I'm afraid you'll need to pay for Business class cable.
No, no. Its too late. You already said it. You cant take it back.
i am with a small company in southern NJ... we can almost see the new comcast tower in downtown philly from my office. We are also LOTUS NOTES email users and have been having same problems with emails that have attachments even it is 0.5Mb size. We worked with comcast to resolve but they keep blaming the problem on issues outside of comcast...but now I know for sure that we aren't the only ones and yes, comcast is choking the lifeline of our business by pulling this sort of stunt that affects legitimate internet traffic like business emails running on LOTUS NOTES platform.
after much efforts of 2-3 months, we have switched to DSL ... and now hoping for FIOS to arrive soon !
I live in NW Colorado, and I haven't noticed anything myself -- once my local router was port-mapped properly for uTorrent, I haven't seen any sort of data restriction taking place.
Then again, I use uTorrent for surprisingly legitimate reasons.
so perhaps comcast is not com-cas-tic, more like path-e-tic.
I've never liked comcast anyways...they always bashed Satelite TV...righttt like comcast is so much better.
comcast bashing?
You mean like the old lady in Virginia with the hammer:
/Smacks the comcast office's phone with the hammer/.... "Do I have your attention now?"
Comcast got what they deserved, pitty she had to go to jail...
no jail. Fine, restraining order, and 12months probation for disorderly conduct.
I was listening to her do an interview this morning on the MJ Morning Show out of Tampa, FL (also heard in STL where I am).
I'm on Charter Cable, and within the last month, they have completely shut down torrets.
Yes, I'm sure it's not me. I use utorrent and have tested the server port connection using the built in connection tester. I can connect network wise, it's just that I get no response from any major trackers. I can log onto the trackers in HTTP, but not using a torrent client.
enable your encryption in utorrent. should bypass
encryption enabled.
I was humming along for months, and now I'm not.
Same here - encryption makes no difference.
It took comcast only one week from changing me from a customer to a target. Emule traffic, 200kb/s up... after one week all connections were reset within seconds, no data flow in or out possible. Calling support: not our problem, must be something on your side (of course, I'm stupid). Turned on the protocol obfuscation, seems to work great with comcast routers, no more resets, full speed.
I have recently switched to Comcast (from Suddenlink).
The first few days went without a single hiccup, and downloads with my modderate protection (PG2 Squid etc) implemented were cruising around 900 KB/s.
Then the throttleing domino effect started. All my friends (with Comcast) noticed a large difference ranging from 25 KB/s to max of 60 KB/s down and 10 KB/s up.
Of course I had no issues with my encrypted VPN connections availiable, 8 avaliable wireless networks (I live in an apartment, and no I don't pay for 8 connections) and firewall to firewall heavy encryption if I decide to go that far.
Wesburl: 1
Comcast: 0
By the way, for those less fortunate Comcast users, I suggest paying for a VPN connection from another ISP or service not in the USA.
The RIAA and MPAA have much less authority outside of the US. For a service I may or may not be using, that I may or may not use for legal or sudo illegal activities... I suggest Relakks.
Do some research on how VPN tunnel encryption works and how it will affect P2P or torrent activites. If your lazy, or inept in the computer area, summarized it is the Staples Easy button for DLing for 5 Euro a month. Check it out after the break!!
Also just so you all know, if you force your torrent client to encrypt it's transmissions then you should be able to bypass Comcast's traffic shaper.
Oh yeah. It's killed my ability to torrent anything. It even shuts off my entire web connection if I'm not encrypted while downloading.
So my friend got a letter from Comcast and HBO for downloading Entourage and he has to go to court. Apparantly they are cracking down so watch out!
As much as I hate time warner's TV service, I can't complain about their internet. No issues since they took over adelphia and I'm averaging 480 Kbps.
Yes, not only torrents but they also filter out xbox live. I was told by a service technician after being disconnected many times (and having Open NAT per xbl) and he said they only stop filtering out xbl when you get the higher priced 16mbps gaming tier.
That is against the law...
@Fady
We have the exact same problem here in Tallahassee!
We had no problems with Comcast throttling the bandwidth until this week, but it's made it virtually impossible to play a single match in Halo 3.
I'm really upset to hear that others are experiencing the same problem, but I'm glad to hear that we are not the only ones.
How is that illegal? You're using a private company's network and they're telling you how you can and cannot use it per your service contract...
"confirmed through nationwide tests" that Comcast is indeed "actively interfering with attempts by some of its high-speed internet subscribers to share files online."
This is due to "ZOMG C0p3sr1tez" aka file sharing.
There is a reason that not many people are reporting xbox360 incompatibilities within Comcast... it’s because they (that particular individual Comcast near Fady) are service scalping (on their own).
Monitoring individual services and disallowing them is similar to a system implemented in China, but until the past few years has been unheard of in the US (except for file sharing).
I highly doubt they had the manpower (that individual Comcast area) to subsidize itself and revamp its legal documents to reflect the necessity of a higher package just to connect to the internet with an Xbox360. I (like I stated above) have Comcraptic and I have 0 problems with Xbox live (FYI using lowest cost internet package). Same with everyone I have come into contact with.
Point being that is an individualized attempt to crank out some extra money... You could most likely hold a strong case, and ask about key things including, what exactly defines your particular usage agreement per service... and also why other Comcast areas do not have the same mentality of "Pay me more to do normal things that are not illegal". The quote below says it all.
“i smella lawsuit ?
free money anyone ?”
This does not bode well for Comcast indeed...
I have definitely noticed this. if you can ditch cable and go for Fios it is 10 times better. My folks have it and xfr rates are 3x faster than cable and its actually cheaper! Comcast sorta has a monopoly and they feel they can abuse their customers. I know several people who were cut off because they were downloading too much. so much for "unlimited internet access".
Read the link before posting, please. The problem here isn't that Comcast is slowing BitTorrent, it is actually killing connections mid-stream. And, as the guy who was having trouble with Lotus Notes shows, it's not just P2P connections that are being killed. Basically any file upload over a certain size gets reset. It's indiscriminate.
exactly, I transfer files back and forth between work and my home, and i have problems all the time. As well as not having ANY upload capability on BT files
THANK YOU! Jesus, wading through these comments was giving me a headache. I've been following this (and effected by it) in northern Colorado for the past couple of months. Download speeds are fine, since you can still download from all peers and some seeds on different ISPs. But Comcast will disconnect any transfers for files you personally are seeding. To boot, Comcast uses deep packet sniffing to identify uploads, so client-based encryption won't help.
If you're like me, and you either use Bit Torrent for legitimate purposes or through a private tracker that watches your Ul/Dl ratio, this is terrible. With no high-speed alternative in the area, I have to sit back and wait for a workaround... or a class-action suit, whichever comes first ;)
On the other side of things - I got a call from Comcast just a few weeks ago saying I was downloading too much and if I appear on their top downloaders list again, they were going to cancel my service for a year. So much for unlimited internet...
I have definitely noticed it... and with FiOS digging outside my house, I'll be leaving Comcast as soon as FiOS begins offering service here...
This looks like the gateway to ISPs not only discriminating on the basis of services, but also websites.
e.g. Comcast makes a deal with Yahoo! and all of a sudden your search requests to Google take forever to load. So, you start using the now "faster" Yahoo! for you searches.
This is a lose-lose situation for users.
I've been affected for a couple of months now, since pretty soon after the Houston market's forced transition from TW to Comcast. Thankfully, Uverse is now available. Time to stop giving them my money.
Ummh, noticed last night that my upload rate was 0 after getting some new album via torrent. Suspected that noone really wanted it... but perhaps comcast had a hand.
Comcast sucks boycott now...get dsl if you can...get fios if you can, but don't fucking pay comcast. They are just an overly deceitful company, with absolutely no respect for their customers. Burn in hell comcast.
I live in the Detroit suburbs and have been noticing something shady when downloading any files and when trying to use Skype over Comcast. My Skype connections constantly drop (could be a Skype issue, not sure) and when downloading, none of the other PCs in the house can access website - they keep timing out. It doesn't matter if they're wireless or directly connected to a switch. Come to think of it, my downloads over Xbox live have slowed to a crawl as of late, too, although that could be a Microsoft issue. But all of these things at once seem to be more than a coincidence in light of these recent claims.
I've been lucky and I haven't noticed and bandwidth problems w/ bittorrent. Sometimes I even get 900kbs! WOO!
Downstream or upstream?
Comcast in southern NH most definitely does this. I have uTorrent running in the background with uploads capped at 30-35k, downloads at 130k. I use uTorrent's scheduler to turn it off during the hours I'm away and might use remote desktop, and to lower the limits during hours when the rest of the house is home & browsing. We have Comcast's highest plan (16mbps I think) for which we pay dearly.
If I increase either of the limits above 135k or 40k, the connection will soon throttle. To under 20k DOWNLOAD. And it isn't just traffic on those ports. Web browsing crawls to a halt until I adjust or close uTorrent. I use encryption.
Without a doubt, Comcast is guilty of neutering my high speed internet connection. Call it Net Neuterality or whatever - they charge a high premium for their service then they hobble the damn connection. They should let customers freely use the connection. I'd happily switch from Comcast if there was an alternative in my area.
Well if Jon @ Oct 19th 2007 3:33PM is correct I've never seen zero upload speed.
I use Azureus by the way with PeerGuardian to block unwanted connections.
So I have been having lots of problems with this and its not just bit torrent. I find that when i upload a file to a remote server for work it will go fast at first, then slow down to snail speed. The same thing happens with video chat, I download the other person's video fine. When they first see me, my image is fine for a minute or two until it slowly degrades to something that is completely unwatchable.
I had comcast's home service for about 6 months, and recently switched to their business service, and they still don't allow uploads on bittorrents here. (I'm in Seattle)
I'm not super-thrilled with them overall, but DSL sucks to my house (thanks qwest) and Fios isn't an option (thanks qwest) and while EVDO is reasonably fast, it has no option for a static IP (which I need for a backup server at the house)
so, as much as I may not like comcast as a company, they are my best option for fast internet.
I haven't had any problems uploading files via ssh, but haven't tried remote mail attachments.
gotta love communist cast. I still love the 75 year old who went to jail for taking a hammer to her local communistcast office and starting destroying phones and computers.
Those that haven't seen it yet, the Sandvine technology is still being rolled out. Also understand that it takes most effect when Seeding only; not when leeching. This kills people on ratio sites, and on the sites' forums it's a major topic. With BT being used for lots of legal distributions now, and as an add on technology for legal video sharing programs this will sonn be affecting lots more people than just illegal downloaders.
Having the choice between Comcast and Comcast for a high-speed ISP, well, I'm pretty pissed about this.
The more customers they can put on a node (over sell the bandwidth), the more money they make. The bit about ensuring fair use for everyone is just BS. If you don't have enough bandwidth to sell, then you can't sell it! Here they are trying to sell people bandwidth that they don't even have, and when people actually want to use it, they say "wait, you cant use that bandwidth you paid us for because it will affect other users" Well, whose fault is that? The customer's, or the comapany that sold bandwidth it didn't have to sell in the first place!
They have *definitely* over-sold their Seattle market. And, they do give priority to their business-level customers over their residental.
I get much much better throughput with business class(pretty regularly around 5Mb/s) than with the residental (would frequently get 500kb/s) during the day)
This happens to me all the damn time. Way to often if you ask me. Whether I'm on the box or trying to share my files with the world, my connection from Comcast always shits out. I've even upgraded to their more expensive account and I still see both download and upload issues. I WISH THERE WAS ANOTHER OPTION BESIDES COMCAST!!!! I HATE COMCAST! May someone sue them for their shenanigans.
I'm on Comcast in the Central Valley in California. I can download through Bittorrent fine and while I'm downloading the upload is normal as well. Once a download is finished the upload speed drops to 0 and never picks up again.
That is exactly my problem as well, I live in the Central Valley too. My upload ratio has gone downhill over the past month or two.
I haven't use bit torrent (I was using Azureus) in a year and I don't recall upload speed being limited. However, about two months ago I tried uploading a 3G file to work and I was clearly being throttled.
I'd gladly switch to DSL if I were closer to a central office!
YES!! Comcast DOES throttle you back. I know it for a fact:
1) Had Comcast for ISP. I ran speed check regularly and generally things were "Close Enough".
2) Use Vonage for phone service.
3) Speed drops and stays there.
4) Swap modems w/ neighbor, speed back up on mine - still low on his.
5) After about 2 weeks speed drops on mine. Neighbors is up to spec.
After they demided it for several weeks, I moved to a new fiber carrier in my area - Now I have 15MBS down and 19MBS up. That's right Mega BYTES Per Second!!!!!
Comcast throttled my connect so bad it was unbearable. I think it was because I had azureus running 24/7 from my p2p server. I know i had to be downloading more than 5gb's a day.
Ive had a cap set on my uploads, they never seem to reach above 40 kb/s with all of my torrents. Downloads are fine though, same speeds as always.
I hate Comcast deeply because my cable tv has visual and audio lags several times daily (which is unacceptable for the super high prices they charge), and the fact that we are paying for 6mbps cable and only receive around 4mbps on a good day.
Comcast's service and ip control is only going to get worse, as past experiences have come to show.
This is why monopolies are bad.
I wouldn't know if Comcast throttles my connection because my damn Comcast never works long enough for me to notice.
I can attest to this personally. I work for a business that uses Lotus Notes as it's enterprise email system and has users throughout the US. Lotus doesn't use the standard 25/110 to send receive mail, it uses port 1352. Anyway, it seems that any time anyone on Comcast receives or sends more than 1mb of data it drops the connection between the client and the server. This is unbelievably frustrating because small mail (mail under the 1MB) makes it through. After we finally narrowed it down to Comcast we attempted to contact them and fix the problem, they will not admit to the practice. We have now started informing our outside users to drop Comcast and go with either FiOS or DSL.
On a personal note, I don't necessarily think that Comcast is doing this because they have a strong moral stance on piracy. I think they've just oversold their networks to the point they have to do something to manage their limited bandwidth. It just happens to be that the high bandwidth uses tend to be torrents and other file sharing.
I'm in Palo Alto, CA. No problems with throttling on download. I just downloaded an unlicensed (in the US) anime file at 500kbps. But an interesting thing that I do notice is that when it tries to seed (download is complete, purely uploading), I will have 0 connections and 0kbps. This is for any file once it's done downloading.
i have noticed when i'm uploading things overnight, i'll come back in teh morning and have some mysterious error.
i can get ~300 kb/s upload on a agood http site, but on torrents maybe 30kb/s.
Come on class action!!
Mine is throttled to the point of complete and total connection loss EXACTLY 30 minutes after starting any torrent activity. I lose any internet connectivity whatsoever. I have to stop the torrent, reboot the modem and router and then I get the internet back.
Until i start another torrent.
Comcast Technical support confirmed to me that this was the case but were "not entirely sure why".
America? Welcome to Canada.
Rogers has been throttling torrents for ages, now. Nobody likes it, but there's not a whole lot anyone can do about it except going with Bell. Only problem with that is that Bell sucks ass. I don't know if they dabble in traffic shaping, but their Sympatico service is wretched. I had it for over a year. Worst. ISP. Ever.
I flat out cannot download or upload torrents on Comcast anymore. I live in the Detroit area and have a 5mbps download speed (advertised 6mbps). I get a max of about 3kbps download at any time. Uploads just don't start at all.
no shenanigans here....
I've been a comcast customer in Northern, Central and Southern NJ. They have been capping uploads at 40kbs since I've had them. I'm surprised that folks are surprised. I thought everyone knew.
Any torrents running in the background severely limit my internet speed...and it's getting worse.
Uh, yeah, that'll happen if the torrent in the background is using all the bandwidth available including uploading... set your client to autothrottle so you can still browse.
Also, if you have a crappy router, it could be getting overloaded after some time of torrenting because of all the connections.
And it's funny to see all the people comment that haven't read the article to know that it occurs after finishing the Dl and only when seeding...
See my other comment above on how I hate comcast btw.
This is a confirmed thing for many regions, the use of Sandvine on Comcast lines:
http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r18323368-Comcast-is-using-Sandvine-to-manage-P2P-Connections
I usually keep my uploads on uTorrent limited to about 25k up so as to preserve the damage to the 4 other people who use the same connection. If I let the upload go, it shoots up to about 100k, but almost immediately sinks back to 40k and never catches back up.
Somewhere in dslreports.com forums you can find a windows batch file that will tell you how many connections are being killed (which is what sandvine does), and I seem to be being "throttled." It's not REALLY affecting what I do, just making it really hard to upload things as effectively.
But, you know, don't have much of a choice in Denver.
Im a Comcast customer from Central NJ and I've noticed a serious slowdown of uploads. However, my downloads have been highly respectful. I also use the BitTorrent Client from BT.com. I wish I new of a better client to use for a Macintosh, but that's not the case here. Its really ironic too. Just the other day a Comcast Rep. came to my house and offered me better and faster upload speeds. Now, if I were to accept that, would they still discriminate against me using those upload speeds for my Torrent use/sharing? And because of these slowdowns of the upload speeds my Ratio for the BitT site use is lowering and getting worse. That, in the end could get me suspended from the site or IP Banned for good. So I'm not happy about this discrimination situation at all. Not just because of the BT upload speeds, but because of my photography and design sites. Doesn't make things easy for me now. I guess a little research will have to be done in the very near future to bypass this stupid discrimination of upload speeds.
if you're looking for a better client for mac, try transmission [transmission.m0k.org]. or try xtorrent [xtorrentp2p.com].
neither of these are going to get around having a lame isp though.
Thanks for the info xenolon. I'll give them a look.
I'm from Pennsylvania and haven't had any problems with Comcast and their speed. I am currently playing for the 16mb/1mb service. However, they always give me speeds higher than this for some reason, usually 21mb/s down and 1.5mb/s up. I have had downstream hit 32mb/s for a whole day once. Also, I regularly upload 200mb+ files with no problems.
Well, seeing as how I CAN NOT upload, yes. Yes comcast is not indeed comcastic and is more craptastic. Who do I write to, where do I go, what can I do. A friend of mine had a comcast repairman fall asleep on his couch once (ON THE JOB!) and it looked like he was on his cell, he was using his arm to prop up his head!
GRRR I HATE COMCAST! This fucks us all over (who the hell can upload to me?) and really fucks those on private trackers with ratios to maintain. I remember reading this on IsoHunt a while ago.
It's running on about 3 months now. Comcast does it, even if they won't admit it. I've used torrents on other (non-comcast) connections and they upload fine, but once I start using a comcast connection there is a marked difference.
Basically they are controlling what I do with my internet.
Sadly there are not other options where I live. If there were (read Verizon FIOS) I'd switch in a heartbeat.
I've been limited to using VPN connections to deal with uploading - since Comcast hasn't figured out how to control that traffic - though VPN itself controls traffic to a degree.
I've noticed for the past month or more that everytime I tried to upload pictures to myspace, like a batch of pictures.. or something else that size, my internet will freeze/stop in the middle of it and I have to restart everything. Central Valley/Cali here too
Yes... keep in mind that all of these companies serve to gain from a new business model.. They want to serve you content that you would could potentially purchase rather than share with each other.
Too bad network neutrality was a flop cuz of all of their lobbyists.
Anyone who's played World of Warcraft and has suffered through those downloads over the past 4 years knows that Comcast plays games with bittorrent. This isn't news, just wonder why its taken so long for the media to catch on.
All of you are forgetting something:
Comcast operates as a franchise granted by your CITY government.
Start complaining to the city that Comcast may be violating the spirit if not the letter of it's agreements; and if not the City needs to add net neutrality / non blocking of traffic into the next agreement or get another Cable TV /Internet Franchisee.
Start writing letters to the editor to get others to complain as well. You CAN take action to stop this; just a couple of large cities do this and it will be too expensive to Comcast to try and target only some areas while banned from it in others.
Raise a stink! Complain! Do it in Mainstream Media for effect. Do it Now!
Comcast has invisible caps and they will terminate your account if you exceed those caps (after being given a warning first). Google "comcast invisible caps" and you'll get some interesting results.
Down here in Miami, FL they have been doing this for about 2 months now. Upload speeds are fine while downloading a torrent but as soon as it finishes the upload drops down to 0-10. FIOS come to me please, please!
I was talking to the guy who installed my dish who also use to work for communistcast, And he says communistcast hasn't spent any money into their infrastructure in years, and it is falling apart. I can tell you this 4th of july me and about 10 of my neighbors lost service for 4 days because of faulty lines and all I got a a $15 credit and I paid almost $145 a mnth. Communistcast can try screwing someone else not taking their crap anymore.
YES! In answer to the question at the end, I HAVE witnessed some of these shenanigans. My roommate actually received a letter from Comcast saying they had been monitoring his activity due to a complaint from a 'copyright owner' about a movie he had downloaded/seeded via BitTorrent. He downloaded the movie in January, received the letter in May, and has not done any such downloading since. Frankly I'm tired of this big-brother behavior from a shitty company like Comcast. I sure hope they don't see my comment here, they'll probably unlawfully cancel my subscription to their mediocre service.