Comcast Throttles BitTorrent Traffic

Found on Torrentfreak on Friday, 17 August 2007
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Over the past weeks more and more Comcast users started to notice that their BitTorrent transfers were cut off. Most users report a significant decrease in download speeds, and even worse, they are unable to seed their downloads.

It is reported that Comcast is using an application from Sandvine to throttle BitTorrent traffic. Sandvine breaks every (seed) connection with new peers after a few seconds if it's not a Comcast user.

Although BitTorrent protocol encryption seems to work against most forms of traffic shaping, it doesn't help in this specific case. Setting up a secure connection through VPN or over SSH seems to be the only solution.

One of the ISPs that joined our discussions said: "The fact is, P2P is (from my point of view) a plague - a cancer, that will consume all the bandwidth that I can provide. It's an insatiable appetite.", and another one stated: "P2P applications can cripple a network, they’re like leaches. Just because you pay 49.99 for a 1.5-3.0mbps connection doesn't mean your entitled to use whatever protocols you wish on your ISP's network without them provisioning it to make the network experience good for all users involved."

No, when I pay 49.99 for a connection offered without limitations, this means I can use it without limitations. If the ISP doesn't like Bittorrent or full bandwidth usage, he needs to point that out in his Terms of Service. Then I simply won't sign up with that ISP. But wait, there's the problem for the ISP, right? If he says what users cannot do, users won't sign up. So instead, shut up and cripple their connection once you've got them.