EFF claims that Comcast is still meddling with data

According to a report released by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Comcast has yet to relinquish its data discriminating habits, and users attempting to share content via P2P could still face slowdowns and unexpected delays. Of course, Comcast's Charlie Douglas proclaimed that the firm "does not, has not, and will not block any web site or online application, including peer-to-peer services," but followed up by stating that it did engage in "reasonable network management to serve all of its customers with a good internet experience." The EFF, however, saw things differently. During its own tests, it was reportedly able to confirm conclusions drawn earlier this year by the AP, and it also exclaimed that Comcast was "essentially deploying against its own customers techniques more typically used by malicious hackers." Pretty strong words, to say the least, but we're curious to know if the continued Comcast bashing is indeed legitimate. So, dear readers / Comcast users, are you still (or have you ever, for that matter) experiencing sketchy P2P performance, or is this all just one overblown mess?

[greg @ Dec 2nd 2007 1:47AM]

yea, my bittorent never really works that well. Even on ones that are pretty well seeded. I think comcast really is messing with it.

[Steven Coakley @ Dec 2nd 2007 1:01PM]

Yup, comcast sucks big time. It takes a week to download top gear, that's not right.

[JTM @ Dec 2nd 2007 10:30PM]

Comcast is messing with seeding. This can have the effect of causing slow downloads too.

I typically get my torrents from a private tracker so seed to peer ratio is very favorable to downloaders. Downloads proceed very fast for me most of the time. The problem becomes obvious when you try to seed back the file you downloaded. Comcast is disconnecting all upload sessions within 30 seconds. I've heard for some people it's a lot quicker. This has the effect of causing peers to avoid you because they keep getting disconnected. I'd say seeding was about 50 times faster before comcast started sending the falsified disconnect packets.

On a side note, I called Comcast yesterday to complain. Got transferred to a supervisor who repeated the official statement "we're not blocking any applications". No duh. Of course you're not blocking any applications. Nobody is accusing you of blocking. What you are doing is interfering with the communications to the point where it's almost too slow to use. I told them I was going to cancel my service if they don't stop the interference. We'll see what happens. I don't think they can keep this up and keep their customers at the same time. If Comcast doesn't stop meddling with bit torrent, they will loose business over this.

[Eran @ Dec 2nd 2007 1:49AM]

That's exactly my experience with comcast. Most of the times I use p2p software, our web connection comes down to a crawl. Also, several months back, they disconnected us, when I called them, I was told that I was downloading too much. When I asked how much was too much, the guy told me he can not give me a number for too much, but the amount I downloaded was too much.

Comcast really sucks, is there any good alternative?

[Constable Odo @ Dec 2nd 2007 1:23PM]

I had the same problem with TimeWarner RoadRunner. Of course I was running my P2P 24/7 as usual, but I think they were most unhappy about me using constant full upload bandwidth. They put me on some sort of a blacklist. I tried asking them questions about limits and such, but never got any firm answers. Only through research did I find out that my using full upload bandwidth seems to affect other users since it must overload TW's servers.

Recently TW is offering new tiers that boost upload and download limits and I suppose that's what they would like me to pay for. I'm not gonna pay for more bandwidth since I don't really need it. I just liked to use the full bandwidth since that was what they said I can use. I've since stopped downloading more movies than I can watch since I don't want to be annoyed by having my connection shut down without notice. I only use about half of my upload bandwidth now and nothing has been said for months.

I'm paying a heck of a lot for my TimeWarner connection with HDTV, three boxes and premium movie channels. Have been for years. And they had the gall to sever my connection without advance notice.

I'm waiting for Verizon FiOS to come to my neighborhood so I can drop TimeWarner in a New York minute. Those chumps. If they tell me I got a certain amount of bandwidth, then let me use it or tell me otherwise.

[Leecher @ Dec 2nd 2007 5:20PM]

I have a Comcast 8mb line. I download about 20-40 GB of stuff a month. I don't use P2P but I was never told I downloaded too much. One month I downloaded 76GB of data with no problem. I average approx 1.3 megabytes (not bits) per second.

[B @ Dec 3rd 2007 1:40PM]

Verizon can't run the optical cable fast enough. There are plenty of comcast customers that are waiting for FiOS and I'm one of them

[lazerusmfh @ Dec 2nd 2007 1:52AM]

I've noticed my (Hacked wifi from across the street) Ahem, "comcast" has done better in the past 2 days in p2p.

[Rand Wacker @ Dec 2nd 2007 1:58AM]

"Long time listener, first time listener."

Torrent had been working great for me for the past six months since I switched to Comcast from Speakeasy DSL (for better speeds), and then in just the past week its taken a turn to the ludicrous, requiring nearly 10 minutes to latch onto any seeds, and then getting cut off at random times. I was eventually able to download the latest Unbuntu image, but it took /forever/.

[oki @ Dec 2nd 2007 3:05AM]

i kinda got what you got. just first few weeks things were going well than all the sudden goto a crawl on everything.

[Jamal @ Dec 2nd 2007 2:02AM]

yeah its still being slow and torrents never work

[DJ @ Dec 2nd 2007 2:04AM]

I get good download speeds on my torrents, but as soon as its done it will seed for 20 seconds (avg) then cut off. Comcast is throttling and they suck for that.

[MEAT! @ Dec 2nd 2007 6:06AM]

The same thing happens to me! I'll be downloading great, and then twenty seconds after it finishes my seeding just STOPS, dead in its tracks because I've hit the X in the top right. It sure is weird.

[JTM @ Dec 2nd 2007 10:38PM]

@MEAT!

It's people like you that make public torrents slow. If people give as much as they take, everybody benefits. Consider giving something back.

[Keith @ Dec 2nd 2007 2:07AM]

p2p VERY slow IF it ever connects, surfing is fine

[Mark @ Dec 2nd 2007 2:10AM]

Comcast throttles. I couldn't access Google for a few moments. I can't even seed updates, they just timeout. I don't mind companies trying to do their job, but don't invade my privacy.

[Brent @ Dec 2nd 2007 2:10AM]

All of these complaints thus far seem like people have screwed up settings, not that comcast is screwing them. I can't say for sure, I've never had comcast, but the complaints sound a lot like the ones I had back before playing around with my settings. I couldn't be happier with my torrenting since.

[Mike @ Dec 2nd 2007 2:22AM]

I know my setup is correct because I can torrent just fine while I'm on my school's network, but as soon as I get back to my apartment, torrenting, just plain does not work. Comcast has the worst service, but they are the only cable option where I am.

[Carl Vitullo @ Dec 2nd 2007 10:21AM]

i've never messed with my settings, and when i was uploading 1 file it put my WoW ping at 3000+

[Brent @ Dec 2nd 2007 2:36PM]

Yeah, after reading 60+ comments I'm sticking with my original statement. If your uploading at the max then your DL speeds will suck. Your internet activity will crawl to a stop. Go hit the torrent forums. If comcast is the problem then we need to actually know this. But a bunch of people that seemingly don't know what they're doing won't help anything. Set your upload to no more than 70% of your available bandwidth. Frankly, 50% is high. I know the BT community pushes you to upload as much as possible, but get over it. Save the seeding for the people with real connections. 20 of you with 30 kbps up is still nowhere near one guy with 20 mbps up.

Mike, you sound like one of these people, and I have no idea how you get high ranked, other than it's what people want to hear. If you're using the same upload limit at school and home then you are almost certainly trying to upload way too much at home. There is no residential service that would have as much up bandwidth as your school.

All of you that are complaining, go set your upload limit to 15 kbps and then come back and let us know if your dls still suck.

[Wwhat @ Dec 2nd 2007 2:40PM]

I'm guessing brent just enabled encryption so comcast doesn't notice his torrents, hah.

[siddharth s @ Dec 2nd 2007 4:44PM]

Well, Brent, while it sounds like you could have a point (pseudo science), you are technically wrong. IP traffic slows down at 70%-80% link saturation, but you're forgetting this is TCP traffic. TCP is self throttling, and since TCP in turn drives IP traffic (TCP run over IP), you won't hit the 'cliff' of falling performance.

To better understand the Comcast 'attack' (yes, in the security community, this is an 'attack'), please read http://kerneltrap.org/node/3072. Comcast is ACTIVELY interfering with a connection between A and B by sending a TCP reset packet to A, posing as B. 'A' basically follows the standard TCP protocol and resets the connection, which eventually kills the bittorrent speeds. I'm not even sure if this is legal since they are posing as someone else and are actively breaking established standards by the standards committees.

I'd be pretty pissed about this if I was a Comcast customer. Comcast advertises a certain rate, the customer pays for that data rate. What application the customer uses to take advantage of the data rate advertised/paid is really immaterial. There are plenty of traffic shaping techniques employed. In fact every connection IS traffic shaped just so that your 3MBps Comcast connection doesn't suddenly turn wild into neighborhood devouring a 100Mbps connection (or whatever the aggregate link speed for your entire neighborhood may be). That last one once happened to me for a few minutes in the middle of a linux ISO download. I called my ISP and they said one of their servers was down (most likely the traffic shaper/aggregator)

[Brent @ Dec 2nd 2007 5:19PM]

@Wwhat I don't have comcast. I have charter. They may not have noticed my torrents but the MPAA did. I got a notice from charter. Since then I learned the ways to not be so visible. But that wasn't what got me better speeds. Better speeds came when I slowed my upload.

@siddharth I have no idea the science behind it, I draw only on my experience and others in a lot of different forums. For that matter utorrent will put a cap in speed optimizer. Even that was too high for my connection. Lowering it another 10k opened things up and I regularly download above 300kbps.

The behavior a lot of people are describing sounds a lot like what I had when I set upload to unlimited. I don't deny what you're saying, nor the EFF, but we need to know just how widespread the use is, and I think that's being skewed by people that just tried to be logical thinking allowing higher uploads would get them better downloads. But in practice it just doesn't seem to work.

[JTM @ Dec 2nd 2007 10:46PM]

Brent,

You obviously have no idea what's going on here. People aren't experiencing upload saturation. That's almost the opposite of what's happening. The problem is, people can't upload at any kind of decent rate because of the reset packets (as explained by siddharth s above) being forged by Comcast.

[Brent @ Dec 2nd 2007 11:55PM]

JTM I understand what the complaint is. But the guys saying they upload at 35k and are only downloading at 20k are NOT having problems with reset packets. You yourself in other places in this thread have said some of the people claiming comcast is screwing with them are wrong. Hell, most of the complaints here are about download speeds, which it would seem shouldn't be affected at all. I'm not saying all of the people commenting here are wrong. I'm saying we'll never know how big a problem this is if we rely on people who are wrong. People are in such a hurry to nail comcast to a cross they aren't really looking for the cause of their problems.

[JTM @ Dec 3rd 2007 12:56AM]

Fair enough. Your initial comment sounded like you were blaming all problems on user error. That is just not the case. While the download problems people are having are not all due to comcast's forged reset packets, I think the majority of them are.

However, when people complain that their web browsing starts going slow while they're bit-torrenting, they should probably look elsewhere for the problem since it does not seem related to the spoofed reset packets comcast has been generating.

[Wesburl @ Dec 3rd 2007 5:44PM]

I hate to be as straightforward as this, but Brent.... you are wrong. I have been a Network Administrator for several large corporations over the past 3 years, and I currently still am. Comcast is the root of 90% of the problems listed, if not more.

I have used Cox cable, Suddenlink, Verison, Roger, and currently Comcast (and a few lesser knowns) all with the same torrent "settings" you keep referring to. The difference is Comcast actively interferes with both download and upload transmissions by flagged resets frames and other network congestion "Solutions" according to Comcast...

Like I said... they throttle the download on torrents as well, and to this comment "But the guys saying they upload at 35k and are only downloading at 20k are NOT having problems with reset packets." that might not necessarily be true.

Regardless, simply applying encryption... or setting your client in obfuscation mode will not resolve the problem either (not to say it won't work for some). I have tested all of these simple fixes to no avail.

I have not been defeated by Comcrap though... I have easily circumvented their security and have explained to many how to do so. I just hope they (Comcackle) are taken down swiftly, and justly.

[Miles @ Dec 2nd 2007 2:24AM]

Absolutely! P2P on Comcast has been a problem for years. Downloads start of at a mediocre clip and them slow to a crawl and eventually timeout.

[Fastfreddy7 @ Dec 2nd 2007 2:30AM]

I m still getting hardly any seeding speeds on my torrents, sandvine sucks!

[Kyle P. @ Dec 2nd 2007 1:32PM]

Same here, unfortunately.

[kevinm @ Dec 2nd 2007 2:31AM]

Guess they will never learn.

[Josh @ Dec 2nd 2007 2:33AM]

I get an average of 24Kb/s down and 35Kb/s up...that doesn't seem right to me...

[Mike @ Dec 2nd 2007 2:53AM]

I regularly get download speeds of 380 Kb/s on my 3 Mb Verizon Dsl. Over the past 2-3 months, I have downloaded about 55 Gb of torrents and Verizon still hasn't cut me off. Right now I am just waiting for them to install Fios in my area.

[BananaBoat @ Dec 2nd 2007 2:33AM]

I thought it was just seeding (uploading) that was being filtered? That should mean downloading would still work, just that without uploading, your download speed would suffer (since that is the nature of BT). Either way, while I do blame Comcast for what they are doing, I think that anyone that doesn't know to check that little "Require encryption" box in their torrent app, doesn't really need to be downloading anything anyway. I'd be more annoyed, but I don't have comcast anyway, and I get my linux distros from lightning fast uni FTP's.

[Willie @ Dec 2nd 2007 3:12AM]

Uploading once the torrent is finished downloading is filtered. I'm on Comcast and I have that "require encryption" box checked and I still get hit by whatever they are doing.

Basically here's what happens: File downloads and while it's downloading it will upload just fine. Once the download finishes if I leave it going it will continue to upload fine. If I close out of my torrent program, Azureus, and start it up again later the file that was uploading fine earlier will never start uploading again.

[tricky5500 @ Dec 2nd 2007 6:31AM]

everything I've read about what Comcast is doing seems to say checking "required encryption" makes no difference. Anyway, I have Comcast in Atlanta and I too have noticed a slow down. The other day I did an experiment while downloading a torrent. On my straight Comcast connection a torrent I was downloading was topping out around 50 Kb/s so I stopped it down and opened up my Relakks VPN account and restarted the torrent. The download speed almost instantly jumped up to 128Kb/2+.

[BigD145 @ Dec 2nd 2007 2:35AM]

Yes, they are still doing it.

[contractcooker @ Dec 2nd 2007 2:43AM]

I have had nothing but bad experiences with Comcast. My speeds are never fast no matter how I throttle Bittorrent everything comes to a crawl when I have uTorrent running. I think that comcast is completely screwing me over just like their other customers. If there was ANY viable alternative I would ditch them in a heartbeat

[CubeGuy @ Dec 2nd 2007 2:43AM]

Lessee...

700 MB File...
973 Seeders...
87 Leechers...

...

19 Days left.

[kastonie @ Dec 2nd 2007 10:18AM]

This is exactly the problem im seeing all the time. The best thing about it is, when bittorrent is on, everything gets super ghetto slow on the internet. I can hardly load any websites... it totally kills my vonage and xbox live... it takes me over a minute to go to www.google.com sometimes. Teh moment i exit out of bittorrent, everything returns to normal. Its pretty freaking obvious they mess with torrents. I used to have time warner road runner, but comcast bought the houston market out so i guess now im screwerdz.

[JTM @ Dec 2nd 2007 10:53PM]

Kastonie,

What you describe doesn't sound related to the disconnect packets that Comcast has been spoofing. That sounds more like you need to reduce the maximum number of connections in your bit torrent program. For example, set "Max Global Connections" to 100 or even 50.

Also, if you're using Azureus, you can try the Auto-Speed feature. It can automatically reduce your upload speed before it starts effecting other internet traffic.

[CubeGuy @ Dec 2nd 2007 11:12PM]

I use Auto-Speed. I have the same problem.

[Josh @ Dec 2nd 2007 2:59PM]

That's exactly what I mean...

My comcast is suposta "burst" at 12Mb and average at 6Mb. Speakeasy shows me at 6.5Mb right now. There is no reason my torrents shouldn't get at least 500Kb/s down. Upload seems a bit sluggish to when my upload on speakeasy is 2.5Mb.

To bad there isn't Verizon option in my town. Comcast and at&t have the monopoly here. Fios would be awesome too...

[Invisiblemoose @ Dec 2nd 2007 2:56AM]

Yep; same issue with Comcast here. Torrenting just isn't what it used to be... No viable service alternatives available...

[Justin @ Dec 2nd 2007 3:06AM]

If you read the EFF pdf release, you'd see that they're popping in reset commands into BOTH the upload and download streams, screwing people out of (over-priced)services that they PAY for. The moment that Verizon gets they're FIOS service in my neighborhood, I'm getting it. Comcast's practices are BS. My neighbor is getting 720 Kbps. download on his 1.2 Mbps DSL. On Comcasts 8 Mbps "Lightning Fast Service", I get a lousy 80 Kbps. All my settings are correct. I switch to his network (with consent) and I rocket up to over 1 Mbps. Can't wait till someone successfully sues Comcast for breach of contract or ANYTHING that would slap them down and make them stop this vulgar practice.
(steps off soapbox) NEXT. (ushers next commenter to the box)

[kevinm @ Dec 2nd 2007 3:15AM]

EFF is trying to do just that. I hope Comcast get nailed to the ground for this atrocity.

[AlexL @ Dec 2nd 2007 3:17AM]

A lot of the problems with BitTorrent on Comcast can be fixed by enabling protocol header encryption, a built-in feature of most modern BitTorrent clients.

[JTM @ Dec 2nd 2007 10:58PM]

I think you're on to something here.

One article I read said to enable encryption but to also allow unencrypted connections. When I did this, nothing changed. My uploads were still cut off after 30 seconds.

Later, I went back and disabled unencrypted connections. It seems like it's working now. I don't see any uploads being disconnected. (keeps fingers crossed)

Give it a try people, let us know if it works for you.

[kevinm @ Dec 2nd 2007 3:22AM]

Does anyone think that the Powerboost(TM) service might to be at blame here, just a side affect of the momentary speed boost then it scaling back down. I don't think any other cable company has that type of feature just Comcast.

[JTM @ Dec 2nd 2007 11:01PM]

No, powerboost has been around for a long time. This torrent problem has been only within the last few weeks, maybe a month, at least as far as I can tell.