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Comcast Corp. (CMCSA) told the Federal Communications Commission in formal comments Tuesday that hampering some file-sharing by its subscribers was a justifiable way to keep Web traffic flowing for everyone.

The comments are the fullest accounting yet of how Comcast manages its network.

Comcast's network management is the subject of formal complaints to the FCC from consumer groups and law professors.

The groups say Comcast has breached the principle, known as "'Net Neutrality," of treating all Internet traffic equally. They also say the company was hampering movie downloading services because they might compete with Comcast's cable TV business.

Comcast says it must curb some file-sharing traffic because some subscribers would otherwise hog the cables with their uploads and slow traffic in their neighborhood.

The company - the country's second-largest Internet service provider - also said it was justified in using "reset" packets to break off communications between two computers.
more on this here - http://apnews.excite.com/article/200802 ... 5CJ80.html

Get used ito it. I don't like it but it's their network and they have to ensure their nodes aren't saturated.

I'm not defending Comcast, but this is the technical reality. There is no unlimited internet - you are not paying for access to all your bandwidth all the time. Read your contract.

This is why all these movie download schemes are nonsense. If everyone on cable a node is downloading movies from Netflix or whatever, at the same time, then all the bandwidth for everyone on the node gets sucked down. Everyone on your node is all sharing one WAN and there's a limited amount of bandwidth. Period.

So of course Comcast and other cable companies are throttling high bandwidth data transfers on saturated nodes. First thing they started doing a while ago (and no one complained) was blocking port 25 for any user who was suspected of send large amounts of SPAM, and they'd get an email telling them that they may have a trojan and their computer may be part of a bot net.

I can't see how any complaint has any legal validity. You want unlimited use of all bandwidth you're paying for? Then pay the extra money for a T1. That what a T1 is - a fully symmetrical (bandwidth is equal in both directions) unfiltered direct pipe to the Internet. It costs more though. Oh yes. Always has.

There's never really been any such thing as net neutrality - big bandwidth users have always been forced to pay more.

Thats why I love my DSL.. sure i only get 1.5 ish down.. but I can do it 24/7 and nobody complains. I think that cable is both a good way and a stupid way to distribute internet.

cable is like trying to feed a wole sub division of houses with a 4" water main. at night when nobody is using the water is't fine. But at 7AM when everybody takes a shower nobody has any pressure. the 4" main cant server that many houses at once. Thats kinda what cable internet is.

True, although be aware that DSL isn't unlimited either. While you have a dedicated pipe to the closest switching center, nowadays that switch is actually just a box in the street and may be the switch for a large area. From there a fiber optic cable takes it to one of the main switching centers.

That fiber carries EVERYTHING - not just DSL but phone and and corporate data (like T1's) so it also has limited bandwidth. Phone companies oversell themselves as bad as anyone and their user agreements say the same thing that cable's do about no guarantees about access to your full bandwidth 24x7.

It's fair to say all ISPs do some kind of packet filtering. They have to or the network would be ground to a halt by SPAM alone. We can only expect more of this.

I'm very happy with Comcast out here, but I live in a rural area so I'm not sharing my WAN with many people right now. In a metropolitan area I would usually take DSL over cable.