Comcast Traffic Monitoring A Slap In The Face To Net Neutrality

[KevinG]

As we've mentioned before, Comcast does, despite what the company says, limit BitTorrent traffic. The Associated Press recently ran some tests and discovered that, yes, Comcast does throttle BitTorrent traffic. So how can Comcast say it doesn't throttle traffic when in fact it does? The answer is in semantics.

Comcast has previous told Wired News that “we do not block access to any applications,” it does however admit that it uses traffic shaping tools to “manage our network to provide a quality experience for all Comcast subscribers.” In other words, Comcast doesn’t block BitTorrent applications, but it does block BitTorrent traffic.

Now it would seem that the fun doesn’t end there for Comcast subscribers. The EFF reports that Comcast also limits Gnutella traffic and Kevin Kanarski claims that Lotus Notes traffic is similarly choked.

In all three cases Comcast’s limiting technique is quite insidious and would be difficult for the average user to notice. Comcast’s network monitoring tools (most likely Sandvine) sits between your connection and the outside world and sends reset packets to both both ends, disrupting your connection. From the the end user point of view it will merely look like your connection is slow. Very, very slow.

This is more or less the two-tiered internet that net neutrality proponents have long warned about. As the EFF writes:

http://blog.wired.com/monkeybites/20...t-traffic.html

While I am not a proponent of illegal file sharing, I think Comcast should stay the heck out of it.

I use Comcast and have been mostly satisfied with their service for the last 5 years.

It does seems like things have slowed down when I am uploading a lot of content recently, plus I was blocked from a client's site recently and tracked it back to Comcast blocking traffic.

I was able to get to the client's site after contacting the host and having them re-route traffic.

That's pretty obnoxious.