Comcast Sued Over BitTorrent Traffic Interference

[Bolt_Gundam510]

by Ernesto

It was to be expected, yesterday, a Comcast subscriber from California filed a suit against Comcast in which he calls upon the ISP to stop interfering with his BitTorrent traffic.

We first reported that Comcast was actively disconnecting BitTorrent seeds back in August. Comcast of course denied our allegations, even though we had proof, and they continued to do so.

Jon Hart, a Comcast subscriber from California couldn’t take it anymore and decided to take legal action. He filed a class-action lawsuit on Tuesday and demands that Comcast stops the BitTorrent traffic interference. In addition he wants Comcast to pay him, and all other Comcast customers in California, damages for not giving him the “crazy fast speeds” they advertised.

Threat Level asked Comcast for a response to this news, but the spokesman put them off with his default response: “Comcast does not, has not, and will not block any websites or online applications, including peer-to-peer services”.

Semantically speaking they are totally right, they don’t block any applications or websites, they do however, actively disconnect peer-to-peer connections, making it impossible for many users to seed files on BitTorrent.

Hart is not the only one taking action against Comcast, the people behind SaveTheInternet have also formed a coalition and plan to demand $195,000 for all the customers who are affected.

Comcast is using an application from the broadband management company Sandvine to throttle BitTorrent traffic. The application is installed at the cable modem termination system and breaks every (seed) connection with new peers after a few seconds. This means that Comcast is not simply slowing down connections, they actually disconnect peer-to-peer transfers.

Source: Torrent Freak

[voodoohippie]

Well it is about time that consumers demand what they are payong for. I know that when I lived in Michigan Millennium cablevision was slowing down my p2p connections since 2002. I was using Limewire after Kazaa went crap and even Limewire would not go beyond about 10-15Kb/s. However when I did a speed test all was fine. I could stream video OK, but not use p2p. So in retaliation I went to Yahoo DSL to which I could use Limewire and Ares, but forget Bit Torrent till I was able to use encrypted connections or I could use ES5 with the proxy server hopping and that worked wonderfully. Too bad Es5 went down even tough they had some bugs. When it did work I was able to use Millennium cable and never have a hitch. It just goes to show that the little guys have been using this technology for quite some time and when I called the cable company they denied slowing down p2p connections. However I bet behind the scene they are saying "if we can only get rid of p2p traffic others will have faster bandwidth!" Heck even sprint broadband was faster than this crappy Millennium cablevision company. I'm not even sure where they originated but I believe they are a small Michigan company. I know that the Internet service was in Ohio and it was from a small company I've never heard of.

[Q Can Fix IT]

great, now all they need is to get this case before a judge who is not in comcast's pocket.