Comcast blocking p2p uploads

Fri Oct 19 20:39:27 UTC 2007

Steven M. Bellovin wrote:
> Not a lot more I can say, other than argghhh!
You have a residential bandwidth offering with a price point that is 
possible because of massive oversubscription that is in violent 
competition with a technology that aims to make use of all that "idle" 
network capacity at each subscriber end-point.  This is one of those 
issues where people like to play both sides; you have massive outbursts 
of moral outage that an ISP would engage in throttling activities, and 
an equal outburst when things like usage-based billing get discussed.  
No matter how you slice it, there are costs involved in moving bits and 
as a provider you either need to level the playing field by throttling 
people to reasonable consumption or be able to differentially bill those 
who insist on generating massive traffic loads.   Of course, the 
challenge is that due to current limitations in access technologies 
(both cable and DSL) many broadband ISPs couldn't accommodate some of 
these traffic loads even if people are willing to pay.

It's worth noting that the traffic Comcast is filtering is called out in 
their Terms of Use in the "PROHIBITED USES AND ACTIVITIES" section, 
paragraph xiv.  http://www.comcast.net/terms/use.jsp

-Eric