U.S. ISP's block BitTorrent users

Article mentions Comcast but refers to Canadian ISP's as well.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20071019.wgtcomcast1019/BNStory/Technology/home

 

boy... that should affect lotta cableModem downloaders huh!

 

Maybe using the method described in the article but some other ISP's and not just U.S. ones use their own methods.

 

OK, I can't hold back.

[rant on] As a victim of traffic shaping myself by another US cable company, I can feel there pain. There was a point not to long ago that my isp let this area get so overloaded that ALL traffic was capped after 20MB downloaded. After that, my 3MB connection was throttled to 256k. I would get throttled downloading QuickTime which I needed because of an exploit. I guess they would rather have a zombied computer on their network . They finally upgraded there badly neglected equipment and the caps have been relaxed for now.

It also figures that a US company and or it's government would try to block an efficient way of transferring data which file sharing/bitorrent has proven to be. Share holders are increasing becoming way more important the the paying customers.[rant off]

 

Hello,
Using traffic obfuscation is the simple way of evading this.
It's implemented in some sharing software - I guess new versions of BT will have this feature.
Mrk

 

This is an issue that creates a lot of, often heated, debate. I personally am not a big file sharer, that is to say, occaisionally I dabble. I think it would be better if ISP's came clean about their attitude towards p2p so that networks could be defined into those who dislike and disrput it and those who are happy to let it go.
I personally, not being a big p2p contributor, tend to go with ISP's who put caps on bandwidth and charge for use over that limit, as I think it helps keep the congestion down on my ISP since heavy users will go to other networks.

 

My bandwidth was a steady 1-2m/s until they started enforcing the cap, and now I get 7-10m/s consistantly. Whenever I do use P2P, it is considerably slower, 600k/s at best! So if an ISP would be upfront about their P2P preferences, it would save the users a lot of trouble.

 

Yes they should be upfront about restrictions/caps. That's not going to happen. What sucks is that it doesn't matter if your downloading the latest rap song or downloading a recipe or a news broadcast from the 1940's. It's all throttled/capped/dropped. What ticked me off is when they installed the QOS (Quality of Service) enforcer on my system is that I thought I had problems and spent days trying to troubleshoot. I did all kinds of scans in safe mode, I called my isp to see if they throttled p2p which they flatly denied and still do. I sent emails and only found one semi-truthful tech. I did eventually find someone else that finally sorta helped me and was truthful. This was very recently. I guess I am lucky.

I had to give up p2p because of this which was almost 2 years ago. I just want what I pay for and that is a 3/300 or now 6/256 meg internet connection. I remember having my 2400 baud modem hooked to my Atari 130XE and just being amazed to communicate with others and learn. An internet connection shouldn't be only for those that check their emails or shop at Amazon. The internet is about sharing and helping and communicating and should not be about greed. Or a least that is the way I want it .

 

I have had comcast for some time, and haven't noticed any changes nor throttle control...

I wonder if changing your port would help,,, I don't use the port most use for torrent downloads, maybe thats it if comcast applied that throttle policy

give it a shot, it might work...