Net pioneers trash Comcast's P2P traffic treatment
A few hundred students, locals, and Washington policy transplants showed up for the Federal Communications Commission's public hearing on broadband network management practices in this Harvard Law School courtroom. The crowd had thinned out, however, by the afternoon session, when two Internet engineering pioneers weighed in on the topic.
(Credit: Anne Broache/CNET News.com)CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--Comcast has confessed to slowing down certain peer-to-peer file-sharing traffic, but is it being clear enough about what it's doing?
That's perhaps the key question that emerged by the end of a lengthy public forum convened by the Federal Communications Commission on Monday here at Harvard Law School.
While none of the FCC commissioners was willing to solidify an answer to that just yet, two MIT computer scientists on an afternoon panel accused the cable company of behaving badly on multiple levels.
Each drew on his experience with fundamental Internet standards-setting bodies. And each charged that Comcast's admitted practice of delaying uploads to peer-to-peer networks at times of "peak" network congestion--ostensibly to optimize the surfing experiences for all other customers in that geographic area--presents at least two major concerns. First, it leaves users and application developers in the dark about when traffic interference will be triggered, and second, it goes aggressively beyond existing techniques for managing Internet traffic congestion.
David Reed, an MIT professor who's considered to be an Internet engineering pioneer, said Comcast's behavior makes him especially "uncomfortable" because it involves both deep packet inspection, which poses privacy concerns, and injection of forged reset packets, a disruptive tactic that makes a message appear to be coming from someone it's not.
Comcast has been put on the defensive ever since a handful of networking-traffic tests last fall forced it to go public about delaying uploads of files to peer-to-peer file-sharing applications such as BitTorrent. Monday's hearing was meant to inform the FCC's thinking as it decides whether to grant two petitions, which ask it to declare Comcast's behavior outside the scope of "reasonable" network management and set ground "Net neutrality" rules for all Internet service providers to follow.
Comcast Executive Vice President David Cohen repeatedly defended his company's practices during his appearance before the commission on Monday. He argued that Comcast engages in extremely limited management of "excessive" peer-to-peer file-sharing traffic at peak hours of network congestion and that such activities produce "imperceptible" effects for most of its customers. In fact, he added, more customers have come to the cable operator with compliments than complaints about its traffic handling.
BitTorrent Chief Technology Officer Eric Klinker, who spoke on the panel alongside the computer scientists, said network operators have been mischaracterizing the role of the file-sharing protocol. It's not intended to swallow up all available bandwidth, he said. Rather, it was hatched back in 2001 to respond to the question of "how do we efficiently move large files on the Internet," he told the commissioners.
But commissioners were clearly finding it difficult to draw the line between what's "reasonable" network management and and what's not, or as Democratic Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein put it in a final question to the MIT computer scientists: "Where is the line between good discrimination and bad discrimination?"
One problem is an absence of quantifiable ways of figuring out whether peer-to-peer use is causing consumers to exceed their seemingly unspoken bandwidth allotments--and what those are, anyway. FCC Republican Chairman Kevin Martin and Republican Commissioner Robert McDowell each pressed Comcast to help supply that information, but in a way, they may have been asking the wrong question.
"We don't say for x dollars you get to use x amount of bandwidth, that's not the way we market our service," Comcast's Cohen replied. "We market...that we provide a service up to a certain amount of speed, subject to the condition that the customer does not use a service in a way that would degrade other customers' services."
That ambiguous threshold makes it difficult for application developers and users alike to know what exactly they're getting from their Internet access provider, David Clark, chief protocol architect of the Internet during its nascent stages and a senior research scientist at MIT.
Clark said he doesn't understand why ISPs are reluctant to be more specific about such policies, although he did acknowledge it's difficult to say "how much is too much." "If I had to quantify what constituted unacceptable congestion, it becomes a very contentious space," he said.
Martin indicated he was similarly perplexed. "If the contract doesn't say that there's any limitations, then how can there be limitations on (subscribers)?" he asked.
The computer scientists agreed that network operators must accept that congestion will occur from time to time on the Internet, just as it does on physical streets, and they readily acknowledged network management is necessary to a degree. But if network operators need to develop more innovative ways to manage heavy loads, they suggested abiding by already-accepted methods in Internet standards communities or working with standards-setting bodies to develop new ones, rather than unilaterally adopting techniques favored by hackers, as Reed argues Comcast did.
Clark also urged that Internet users, rather than their ISPs, should have the power to assign priority to applications as they please. For instance, if they want choose to give Internet phone traffic precedence over gaming, or vice versa, they should be allowed to do so.
Martin said he hadn't decided by the end of Monday's hearing where to come out on the Comcast-BitTorrent dispute, but he said he would weigh carefully what the MIT professors and other panelists recommended during the hours of public discussion.
"One of the main concerns I have," he told reporters after the hearing had adjourned, "is that there wasn't a transparency to some of the network management practices (Comcast) engaged in."
He in turn explained that if I didn't stop, my service will be cut off for a year and this would be my first and only warning. I in turn responded back that I'm not going to stop, not to threaten me, it's deceitful what they advertise, and to kinda go **** himself. I also let him know that I am under contract for one year, and I am recording this entire conversation.
Sure enough within a few weeks without warning, my service was cut off.
Made to switch to Verizon DSL and the first thing I asked was do they provide a bandwidth cap limit and the rep said no they do not and I asked them to put it in writing which they did.
I am actually thinking about filing a class-action suit against Comcast for this decietful business practice because apparently, I am not alone and have been talking to other Comcast subscribers and recently I have also posted a video message on YOU TUBE warning others about this. Any ideas?
Yes bittorrent is an eficient way to move large files, and yes it also consumes as much bandwidth as it can get. That is shared bandwidth, consuming all you can get at all time is not sharing.
We are paying taxes for having law enforcement agencies dealing with illegal activities. Comcast is not one of it. You are not in the position and don't have the data to claim that Comcast is right because everybody else is breaking the law.
If somebody wants to start a class action suit aganst Comcast I will gladly join it.
This is a country of laws to be enforced by the government we are electing and paying for. We don't want a self righteous corporatocracy to take upon it self the functions of the government. We are paying Comcast for ISP services It should limit it self to that function
I guess what you are saying is that as long as it doesn't impact you, you don't really care.
software installation are being distributed via Bit Torrent nowadays.
I don't participate in uploading or illegal use of the utility. But I generally refrain even from legal use of the application because it runs so poorly over my internet connection.
supposedly 2-3x faster than my DSL service it would not allow me
to successfully video chat (using IChat). Comcast never could
explain why this application would not run properly so I reluctantly
returned to using DSL that although slower for downloads works
well when using an interactive two way application like video chat.
That may fool the judge, but I doubt he actually believes that. Virtually all big companies use layer 7 routers which require deep packet inspection to work, and which routinely alter and/or outright synthesize ("forge") packets such that they "appear to be coming from someone they're not" for routing/firewall purposes.
I use file-sharing software myself, and I hate the idea of *my* bandwidth being restricted, but I also hate the idea of trillions of dollars in network infrastructure being brought to it's knees by people downloading illegal copies of bad pop music and porn, so I'm sympathetic to Comcast as well.
Yani
- Bill for quantity not speed
- by eyemahsource February 28, 2008 4:07 PM PST
- ISPs should just change their billing from "speed tier" to "quantity of
- Reply to this comment
-
(19 Comments)packets delivered up and down".
If the power company charged for voltage instead of kilowatt hours
we'd leave everything on and scratch our heads when the voltage
dropped.
Spammers go for a free ride on this abberated billing model. Dormitory teams running bittorrent 24/7 go for a free ride on this
billing model.
There are caps on quantity but ISPs don't make this transparent.
This is in small print if you care to look.
A network that charges for quantity will be motivated to gear up to
deliver more quantity and do so with acceptable speed, which speed
encourages more quantity of use to charge for.
Who says the person downloading a high def movie every day
should pay the same as a person who turns off the graphics and
surfs text only?