Dear Comcast, Here’s The Million Dollar Question: Is You Is, Or Is You Ain’t Blocking My Torrents?

I hate ISP’s and their bullshit. When my ISP (COX) told me to reboot my sytem, I told them “Oh, I don’t have to do that, I’m running a real operating system, Linux” They didn’t know how to react. So far I haven’t seen filtering going on with COX, but uploads are always slower than downloads.

Wayne,

Great post. I am loving your site more and more with each post.

One point you could bring up in future dealings:

People make pirate boxes and ppv filters, are they going to start blocking cable tv and ppv soon too?

🙂

Wayne: Comcast is pretty f’n huge. I’m not sure if a few people getting upset about P2P seeding will worry them. It is a very technical issue and they prefer to serve non-technical people. Could be (and really hope that) I’m wrong. I guess the issue would most likely come to a boil when users cannot download because their ratio has been f’d by Comcast’s policies. But, if tech support is telling them that p2p is only for illegal activity, the non-tech will believe them. Who knows, Comcast Tech Support may start telling people that Linux is illegal as well….

Useless Support Rep> “Don’t you know that LunX got sued by Microsoft?”

| You know the facts will get completely mangled.

A lot of people use torrents for illegal files,that’s what they’re for any way. We should just download and purchase files that people worked hard to program!

Use dial-up.

From here

http://www.sandvine.com/about_us/default.asp

It says

“Publicly Announced Customers Include:

# Adelphia Communications”

Remember Comcast/Time Warner bought up Adelphia. It would be interesting to see if the areas that are seeing the bandwidth throttling are in Former Adelphia service areas.

I’m quite certain that is exactly the device they are using.

Also its normal to pilot these kinds of programs in various areas.

uploading costs ISPs more money than downloading. Thats what this is about. It has nothing to do with ” illegal content “.

A person who uploads constantly can cost them more in bandwidth cost than they bill them for. Also with cable being a shared medium you can also impact others in your node. This wouldn’t be a problem if they didn’t oversubscribed areas.

From a business point of view I don’t think they want heavy uploaders. They want the other 97% of the people who check email, news, and play games.

Honestly I bet they could care less if these people jump ship. They are looking at bandwidth costs. Plain and simple.

It doesn’t very due to area. Unfortunately Comcast IS actively sending RST flags with packets.

Please contact me. Unfortunately, I am at work.

CSR in trust,
John J. Righteous-Hypocrite

Here’s a scary happening on my comcast account. I get a request reset for http://www.google.com. Only, http://www.google.com. Not m.google, not gmail, nor any othersite.
It even responds to ping, and curiously, works in lynx. But in any other browser, the google search page is mysteriously “reset”. I’ve confirmed this on several computers, and without a router. Whoo for net neutrality, and #1 customer service.

I really enjoyed the article (I got to it from Digg, so yay to Comcast getting as much bad press about this as possible.)

I just wanted to say, I really hope that something works out for you guys that have Comcast. I’ve been forced to use this local company, CMS, for the better part of three years because it comes with the townhouses here in my college town. They outright block all P2P traffic and aren’t afraid to say so.

My conversation with the tech went something like this:

Me: So what ports do you block.

Tech: We block all incoming ports.

Me: So…do you block port 80.

Tech: Yes sir, we block all incoming ports.

Me: So you’re telling me you block http and I can’t access any websites whatsoever?

Tech: Uh…

Now, don’t get me wrong, I work in a tech support job too, but at least I don’t flat out lie to the people I support.

Again, good luck in your Comcast crusade.

Dugg.

Seriously man, if this pisses you off that much, just fucking drop the service. People like me need to take your calls and listen to your bullshit. YOU ALREADY KNEW THE FUCKING ANSWER, WHY DID YOU ASK? Are you trying to be a jackass? Maybe you just wanted to be a fucking attention whore. Reguardless you’re a God damned prick and I for one would not hesitate to dropping the call or chat and blaming it on a “technical difficulty” only to have the next 17 agents you speak with do the same thing. Why do you make things difficult for us?

okay.. heres the deal, I happen to work for comcast… to by pass sandvine… force the client to use encryption its an option in azerus… the reason the packets are being shaped.. is because of pressure from riaa and other bullshit companies its ment to detur u from useing torrents… if u use encrypted traffic… no one can see it or the names… and for all u linux users… u should be slapping yourself because the soultion is so simple :)FORCE ENCRYPTION FUCK TARDS! and u have your pressious bandwidth back. that and it prevents certain hardware from naming the files u are downloading 🙂 I recommen Azerus torrent client for comcast network. If you don’t have the brains to use encryption fuck off and leave us techs alone.

@The Comcast tech:

We’ll leave your service when we can access your lines via another ISP. The internet is rather a very necessary service to many (myself included), and as long as you’re blocking my access to needed services, I WILL complain. I don’t care how hard it makes your job. If your job is hard, voice it to your superiors, and make the source of complaints go away.

@ Dan Sheadel

Seriously man, bitch all you want. All I do is drop your calls and chats anyway. I don’t like Linux users because their OS is crap and I don’t like people who ask questions that they know the answers to. What you do not realize is that I would LOVE to tell you we block torrents VIA sandvine but if I do I will lose my job. My manager will lose his job if he tells you and so on and so forth. I love using torrents as much as anyone but I use them for illegal stuff. What Comcast is trying to prevent. You can go ahead and use them, just stop bitching about it to me. I honestly can’t do anything about it and my supervisors are all fucking dipshits that got their jobs by sucking the cocks of their bosses. What you fail to realize is that encryption CIRCUMVENTS THE FUCKING PROCESS and those of us working at Comcast who have are actually specialized in the network (unlike the self proclaimed Linux user who thinks they know everything) realize this is bullshit and are trying to fight it. Yet again, if I told you I would lose my job. And telling you the truth to a question you already know the answer too only to lose my job and source of income isn’t quite worth the risk.

I work at a call center for Comcast. Ever since the news of the P2P traffic shaping, they’ve needed extra people working on canceling accounts. Sure sign that people are switching over.

Great article btw.

Did any one not miss: “What will most likely happen next is allocation / delayment of inbound P2P traffic depending on how well our network bandwidth levels are through the various regions.”

I guess downloading speeds might be ‘delayed’ indefinitely in the near future as well. Also this supervisor mentioned that he believes other providers will use similar tactics on their networks.

What you should have stated as your problem was the inability to seed files. You should have made up a story about a family reunion multimedia pack that you were attempting to distribute via bittorrent, and why you should be disalowed that option. It is sad that the person you were chatting with was giving you the run around, but with due respect you ran around along with him. When dealing with customer service you have to stick to your guns and try to hit them where it hurts. Ask them if you’ll be getting compensation for their inconvienionces, if not why not?

The person you were speaking with does not work for Comcast. They work for a company called Convergys, which Comcast outsources all their tech support to. You’d be hard pressed to get a legit answer, since all they care about is the phone queue, average chat times, and making sure they hit the criteria required for every customer interaction. I worked for this company last spring, and can vouch for the low level of training and inadquate information provided to the service representatives, let alone the customers.

The free market doesn’t work unless consumers and citizens organize and actively combat inappropriate business practices. Voting with one’s wallet isn’t always an option and isn’t always the best option. At the very least, contacting the company and speaking out against the practice and trying… however futilely… to get a resolution is certainly reasonable. Yes, it probably bites to be the support or tech person on the other end, but that is a JOB they are PAID to do and the calls are in essence a consumer duty. The calls costs the company money and should create buzz and annoyance in the support department which to some degree should flow uphill. Those that handle the calls should understand this and a) not get too frustrated, b) instead of bitching to consumers who are trying to make things better, bitch to your supervisors and keep the crap flowing uphill.
The calls themselves… the time wasted on them… as well as the sentiment… are ammunition you can use to try to change things from within.

forgot, alleviate some of the problem

iptables -A INPUT -p tcp –dport –tcp-flags RST RST -j DROP

This should help.

Update: for Salt Lake City Comcast users

After playing around with some of the encryption settings in Azureus (as hinted by the above ‘Comcast tech’), the following settings currently allow me to seed (legally) on both a public and private tracker.

System
Java 1.5.0_07
Apple Computer, Inc.
SWT v3406, carbon
Mac OS X v10.4.10, ppc

Settings
Azureus>Preferences>Connection
Transport Encryption:
Check “Require encrypted transport”
Minimum encryption level RC4
Check “Allow non-encrypted outgoing connections if encrypted connection attempt fails”
Check “Allow non-encrypted incoming connections”
Save

Restart Azureus

Good luck!

I don’t know why you’re wasting your time contacting them about this. if you want to cancel with them then go ahead and switch already and stop whining. One customer cannot make a difference sadly and comcast is doing this clearly to save bandwidth. I don’t see why you got so upset at the reps trying to help you either, they don’t get paid to piss people off they get paid to help people with their problems and fix their shit. Especially a decision like BT traffic throttling was made high up and no low level rep is going to have control over the network and be able to make such a change on an individual basis nor could such a thing be requested. If you don’t like it switch otherwise suck it up and deal with it. Theres a reason you’re still with comcast after all this crap so I’d stop hating on them and enjoy the service while you can or as I’ve stated several times now switch to a different ISP. Stop demonizing these people who tried to help you in your futile complaint for a stupid share ratio for some linux distro that no one cares about.

Oh I wish I saved my log of the chat I had with them about my internet connection being down. I was unable to connect to my home from work, and when they asked what I was connecting to, I made the mistake of saying that I have a personal ssh server running.

The rep freaked and lanbasted me with comments about how running a server is against the EULA. Since he basically told me he won’t help me any more, I pointed out that the EULA then doesn’t allow people to host games.

His reponse. “I play WoW with out breaking the EULA. That is a internet game.”

I spent the next 10 minutes explaining the difference between MMOs and Standard Multiplayer games. After I did that, I explained that Comcast ADVERTISES the ability to play online games faster.

He closed the chat.

Aka, two issues.

1. The “techs” are id10ts.
2. One can not be the host of ANYTHING with out breaking the EULA in it’s current form. This includes all those people who host a webcam/voice chat. (Another thing they advertise being able to do.)

I think all you were doing here Wayne is wasting the time of Comcast support. What did you REALLY expect to happen here? Do you think either one of these guys would have had a definitive answer, or would have just clicked a few buttons and voila your bit torrent works?

Like was said before, these guys are just doing their jobs, and have no control on how the networks are set up to handle these sort of things.

Get yourself a personal VPN from http://www.witopia.net
I use BitTorrent on a PowerBook and my seeding is always in the neighborhood of 100 kb/s
I love my VPN and it cost only $40/year, well worth every penny
Go get one to enjoy your BitTorrent experience and privacy

I’m in utah as well (murray) and am under the thumb of REALLY crappy torrent upload. unfortunatly of the 77% of the city of murray that’s set up for utopia fiber optic, I’m in the 23% that isn’t. crap.

Comcast will eat itself.

Oh, and nice Specials Shirt.

It sounds like you just contacted Comcast to rattle off p2p terminology that some idiot at tech support would not understand in an effort to make yourself seem smarter. I use Comcast and the shit they are doing hasn’t hampered my torrent speeds at all.

I’m in Provo and I’m SO glad I went with Qwest this year. Torrents have been working great. Comcast can suck it.

Target: Sandvine. Project: Mayhem. Hack the planet. You guys know what to do.

Waynem I hear what your legitimate complaint is, I have the same problem with Verizon services (but we both know is a laugh anyways). My question I had for you reading after the first 10 lines of this was, “Did you think you were going to get a non-scripted response from a Tier-1 Helpdesk employee”?! You don’t strike me as a naive person, so were you looking for a fight? My point in these small comments probably overlooked is to not bother the puppet, write to some that could actually inflict change or that gets paid respectively to ignore your questions properly.

I’m In Utah too, came across this from Digg. Soo funny, I live in downtown SLC and use azureus and comcast. I don’t have problems with uploads at all. The azureus wiki is really amazing at giving detailed instructions on how to fine tune it to get the best downloads possible. They recommend doing all the stuff the comcast guy stated.

I still hate comcast tech support. My signal is always failing and I have learned never to call them because they don’t know shit and if I ever reveal that I have a router or a server they insist that they have to send someone out to my house on a service call for a fee.

Oh and we do not block torrents.. packet shape maybe but all isps do that, im pretty sure they didnt intentionally fuck up your torrents. force your client to use encryption.. it fixes it.

What exactly did you accomplish other than to show to the world what an asshole you are?

Are you really so stupid as to think that tech support made the decision to deploy sandvine?

Has it dawned on your brilliant self that the company might have instructed their employees not to address this topic?

Do you think that he should have gotten himself fired by talking bad about his employer in a recorded conversation?

Here’s an idea. Go work for Comcast. You can get all the information that you seem to think the executives share with their lowest level employees. Hell, you can deal with other “intellectuals” such as yourself over the phone.

You think your attempts get the rep to explain the board members decisions were frustrating? Try it from his side. He didn’t get to go sulk and then write in a blog about how much this large corporation sucks. He had to immediately jump into the next whiner and get shit on for decisions and malfunctions that weren’t his doing.

Then again, its all his fault for working there so its your right to be a douche.

don’t complain about getting this kind of call, it’s your job. people want comcast to just admit that it’s traffic shaping, that’s the point, and lots of people are making these calls to try to call them on their bullshit. If you don’t like the position you are in don’t be in tech support, because that’s the only place people can lodge complaints, they can’t talk to the actual people who make company policy.

I’m a customer with ATT, and I’ve run into the exact same issues you have, all while running Windows with Azureus. I can download four torrents in the time it takes me upload half of one. I’ve also found that they randomly switch my (and others’) connection speeds around, lowering the upload speeds on a whim, along with throttling of non-centralized uploads.

Ah, again customer support proving they know 0% about computers, along with a few posters. P2P wasn’t set up as a way to illegally share files, it was set up as a way to locally share files and network computers, but then people got the idea they could do naughty stuff with it and then your done.

Same thing happened with Viruses and worms, both were created with the idea of having an automated updating or file fixing system, but then some people abused the idea.

This can also relate to torrents. An easier way for people to share files. Quick and simple. However any type of way of sharing files is going to result in Piracy. Quite simply put, if software wasn’t so bloody over-priced, then nobody would download. We aren’t all made of money…

You rock man! you rock! Death to tyranny!
US is right now becoming commies…or even worse (China block sites that attacks them but didn’t block torrent :/)

blocking Torrent first, then all articles that attacks it, then everything bad about them, then everything other then http://www.comcast.com

This posting and the associated article are complete wastes of time – I can’t even believe I am wasting the time to write this. Cable modems use shared bandwidth technology and DSL and fiber modems use non-shared bandwidth technology, except for my new FiOS service in NJ which uses cable modem technology (FTTC) – which is completely different from my old FiOS service in TX (FTTH).

Bottom line – Cable modem service sucks if you actually want to use the service. The listed bandwidths you are paying for (notice I said “paying for” – I did not say “getting”) are meaningless except for webpage downloads (i.e. plain vanilla HTTP – I don’t think they even like FTP…) So to say Comcast’s speeds of whatever Mbps (say 15Mbps for example) are meaningless if you can‘t actually use it. In these cases, a dedicated DSL line at 1.5Mbps would be faster since it actually works for you! The problem is in the technology of the Comcast network. Let me explain.

The problem with shared bandwidth technologies, e.g. cable modems, is that each and every use of the bandwidth affects ALL users on that portion of the network. So your P2P downloading is lowering the total available bandwidth for all of your neighbors – who are trying to pull HTTP webpages, SMTP or POP3 email and FTP downloading.

Hey, I didn’t make the rules and I don’t agree with them. But Comcast is just trying to keep their network moving for the majority of unaffected customers, i.e., the customers who are not heavy users but just pull webpages, check their email and download files now and then – not heavy data users or those users who are actually trying to use the Mbps that their payments are supposed to be for. And, unfortunately, those users who are outside of this bracket are in the minority. If you are one of these users, and are affected by this “traffic shaping” then the answer is simple – change ISP’s or move.

I am a former Comcast employee. I am also a former Comcast user. And I was also in the minority too. I even got one of the famous letters warning me to not use my service so much or I might be shut off permanently. So I went to Verizon for a 1.5Mbps ADSL line. It wasn’t as fast as my supposed 3Mbps cable modem (at the time), but hey – at least I could use it! So my advise is, if you are one of these users, change ISP’s and go for whatever ADSL line you can get. If you can only get dial up – MOVE, GET SATTELITE INTERNET OR SHUT UP.

Now for the good part – if you are actually using P2P then you are a lamer. Only idiots use P2P. Whatever your reason, I don’t care – you are a complete idiot. You are a moron. You are obtaining data, either © or not © I don’t care – you are obtaining data from and giving data to complete strangers. Get a premium news service, a SSL enabled newsreader and download your shit from the Usenet. Although nothing is totally secure (you don’t have a TACLANE now do you) at least it is from one source, and not from many – of which only one has to be the RIAA, MPAA, FBI, etc.

Oh yeah, Comcast SUX.

Just one thing. Comcast makes a big stink about torrents using up bandwidth. What no one seems to consider is, why not just make a network that CAN handle all the bandwidth??? They can’t or won’t spend the capital on building a DECENT network, and then when customers who PAY to receive the benefit of internet access, they blame them for their bandwidth woes. I say bullshit, build a better network.

I do trust all of the ideas you’ve presented to your post. They’re really convincing and will certainly work. Still, the posts are too quick for starters. Could you please extend them a bit from subsequent time? Thank you for the post.