Fridays are usually good days but when I read this I went nuts. Our beloved online freedom is being stolen from us day in and day out. And the gigantic monopoly which is known as Comcast is fronting this war on stealing more of our freedom every day.

So let me break it down for you what the ISP thought police are doing today. ISPs have been throttling BitTorrent traffic for almost two years now. Most ISPs simply limit the available bandwidth for BitTorrent traffic, but Comcast takes it one step further, and prevents their customers from seeding. And Comcast is not alone in this, Canadian ISPs Cogeco and Rogers use similar methods on a smaller scale.

“Unfortunately, these more aggressive throttling methods can’t be circumvented by simply enabling encryption in your BitTorrent client. It is reported that Comcast is using an application from Sandvine to throttle BitTorrent traffic. Sandvine breaks every (seed) connection with new peers after a few seconds if it’s not a Comcast user. This makes it virtually impossible to seed a file, especially in small swarms without any Comcast users. Some users report that they can still connect to a few peers, but most of the Comcast customers see a significant drop in their upload speed.

The throttling works like this: A few seconds after you connect to someone in the swarm the Sandvine application sends a peer reset message (RST flag) and the upload immediately stops. Most vulnerable are users in a relatively small swarm where you only have a couple of peers you can upload the file to. Only seeding seems to be prevented, most users are able to upload to others while the download is still going, but once the download is finished, the upload speed drops to 0. Some users also report a significant drop in their download speeds, but this seems to be less widespread. Worse on private trackers, likely that this is because of the smaller swarm size” says Ernesto from TorrentFreak.

Although BitTorrent protocol encryption seems to work against most forms of traffic shaping, it doesn’t help in this specific case. Setting up a secure connection through VPN or over SSH seems to be the only solution. More info about how to setup BitTorrent over SSH can be found here.

Customers on the other hand (like Myself) like to fully use their connection, and don’t agree that traffic shaping is the correct solution.If you pay for an internet connection, that’s what you should get from your ISP — an internet connection. Not a connection that will let you browse the web and check email, but little else. If an ISP has issues with the amount of data a customer is transferring, then the ISP needs to address that issue with that customer, and not restrict every user in one class of traffic. For me Comcast rates rise and rise every year. I am paying close to $200 dollars a month for internet

I guess this battle will go on for a while and I would advise Comcast users to try setting up a VPN connection to get around the traffic shaping, other users who find out that they are throttles might try BitTorrent encryption first, that seems to work quite well in most cases.

I am so sick of the Comcast monopoly, users have no other choices around my area. This has upset me to no limit. Yes people use P2P for illegal downloading (which is another story for another day) but some people use p2p for good use. I guess Comcast is now another enemy in the smoke and mirrors game we will all have to play. When will companies start to understand they these types of changes cost them more money in the long run. When they change something like this all it will do is enable more and more people to create new ways of creating freedom once again online. Its a vicious cycle. Goodbye online freedom.

So I make a plea with SCAMCAST, take the shaper out of the loop. Bring your service back to what it once was. Stop trying to control everything. 

But obviously no one will listen to me, maybe someday…..