Comcast!?!?

[Joseph]

Hello Ted/everyone,

  Ted, I respect your opinion but I beg to differ. 
Comcast is no longer on a vendor list of mine.  First
it was banning "servers", then bandwidth caps and now
this.  Net Neutrality is important to me and I make my
choice know with my $$'s and thats my perogative. 
Consumers should have input regarding the internet
they want to see and feel free to demand what they
want from the companies they support.  Companies
should recognize that consumers have choice and will
make it based upon the intersection of their offerings
and the consumers wants.  

  Actually there is a pending complaint/petition and
not a lawsuit in with the FCC against Comcast. 

"The petition asks the commission to immediately
declare that Comcast is violating the FCC's policy.
The co-signers are Consumer Federation of America;
Consumers Union, the publisher of Consumer Reports;
Media Access Project; Public Knowledge; and professors
at the Internet practices of the Yale, Harvard and
Stanford law schools."

  This is not the first time they have taken repugnant
actions and one can only question what is next on the
agenda.  What further innovations will be stiffled by
this?  Do they have a right to do this at all? 
BiTorrent is a promising technology that is put to
many new, exciting and legal uses.  Could it be that
these uses might eventually cause competition with one
of their potential revenue stream?  Hmmm, smells a bit
sour to me.  Heck, why don't they just go all out and
create an AOL like "interweb" where the "tubes" are
free of any traffic they don't bless. Maybe it will
only run on Windows with super nifty DRM.  Lol!  =P   
 

http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9804158-7.html
http://www.wtop.com/?nid=108&sid=1272760
  
Have a great weekend,
Joe

Message: 8
Date: Fri, 09 Nov 2007 09:43:43 -0500
From: Ted Roche <tedroche at tedroche.com>
Subject: Re: Fedora Eight is out on the streets!
To: gnhlug-discuss at gnhlug.org
Message-ID: <4734721F.2050707 at tedroche.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1

VirginSnow at vfemail.net wrote:
> 
> I heard, somewhere, that Comcast is actually being
sued for violating
> net neutrality. 

I don't believe that net neutrality is the law of the
land. There are
many who argue it may not even be a good idea, but
that's beyond this
thread about Fedora by far...

> Supposedly, they're throttling BitTorrent traffic.
> Sorry, I don't have any links to support this; this
info is purely
> from the rumor mill. :)

A quick web search on "Comcast Throttling" or "Comcast
Blocking" can
produce lots of interesting hits of varied
reputation...

http://consumerist.com/consumer/leaks/comcasts-we-dont-throttle-bittorrent-internal-talking-points-memo-315791.php

and...

http://torrentfreak.com/how-to-bypass-comcast-bittorrent-throttling-071021/


FWIW, I downloaded the RC3 DVD of Fedora 8 last week
quite quickly (a
couple hours) and shared it back to the network over
the weekend,
 seeing
around 5M down, 256K up over the long haul. I used
that same image with
an updated torrent and renamed files to update my
local copy to the
 gold
release, replacing only 15% of the blocks (I was
surprised it was that
many!), saving the download time and joining in early
as a seed.
Download finished in less than 2 hours yesterday and
my sharing ratio
had hit 1.33 by this morning. So perhaps Comcast is
only messing with
BitTorrent feeds in some more heavily trafficked
areas?


-- 
Ted Roche
Ted Roche & Associates, LLC
http://www.tedroche.com