a little slice of geek

Comcast Traffic Management Called To FCC Hearing

Internet users everywhere are holding their breath in anticipation today as Comcast are called to the second part of an FCC hearing to address issues surrounding their rather promiscuous traffic shaping, peer resest and network management techniques.

For quite a while now Comcast has been the top runner of “bad” ISP’s, notorious for the “TCP Reset” method of traffic handlin, an act in which as soon as you connect to a peer in a bittorrent swarm, comcast will issue a peer reset message (called an RST Flag), this immediately disconnects any upload connection that may have been established. Not exactly a friendly way of dealing with a “problem”

Several industry professionals and topical experts have been giving insights and information in the hearing.

Richard Bennett (co-inventor of the twisted-pair system for ethernet, and its protocol, 1BASE5) targeted those opposed to any sort of traffic management in his opening statement saying, “if we can’t control network management, we’ll have to shut down the internet”. David Clark, of the MIT computer science lab, opened by saying that ISPs can either see enemies, or they can see partners, and suggesting that right now, they see the former. He, like almost all the panelists, called the current usage of Sandvine technology ‘troubling’, and said that the user should pick the Quality of Service (QoS) level, not an ISP.

Daniel Weitzner, Director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Decentralized Information Group summed up bad traffic management with: “Maybe it’s a bit like the old adage about pornography ‘I know it when I see it’. In this case I know what Comcast is doing is in the camp of unreasonable. These are techniques that hackers would use to deny service to any application on the web, very similar in that regard. It might be interesting to hold a panel of security experts to talk about those kind of mechanisms, I’m certainly not one. But, forging data on the internet is probably outside of the realm of reasonable, and any standards body would deem it to be.”

However, one of the most succinct criticisms of Comcast’s actions came from Prof. David Reed, of MIT’s Media Lab, who suggested that any ISP that didn’t follow the standard solutions evolved over the last 30 years should not advertise themselves as an Internet provider, but instead as a company “offering selective access to portions of the net only”, a description many of Comcast’s customers will probably agree with.

Credit: TorrentFreak.com

Accused of employing techniques favoured by hacking communities, Comcast officials have a lot to answer for. Let’s hope for the internets sake they answer quickly…