Feb 08
Comcast has silently changed it’s terms of service to clarify the cable giants policies on traffic management.
This move comes on the heels of months of debate and third-party proof that Comcast was throttling back bandwidth on some subscribers using BitTorrent.
Now according to Section III of the new terms “uses reasonable network management practices that are consistent with industry standards.” Comcast says that it’s not alone in this practice stating that “all major ISPs” use some sort of “traffic shaping”. A spokesman went on to say that if an ISP doesn’t use this type of throttling it leaves the customers open to “spam, viruses, security attacks, and other dangerous risks” that can hinder the company bringing “the best possible service to it’s customers”.
Customers were not happy with Comcast. A class-action lawsuit was filed against by one subscriber, a website complained to the FCC and an investigation ensued. Once the FCC opened the investigation to comments they were flooded to messages from angry users. “If you so much as open a BitTorrent client on a computer on the Comcast network, your entire connection drops to almost a crawl,” said one comment. Another subsciber said, “I have experienced this throttling of bandwidth in sharing open-source software, e.g. Knoppix and Open Office. Also I see considerable differences in speed ftp sessions vs. html. They are obviously limiting speed in ftp as well.”
written by tom
Feb 04
By going over a long thread on Apple.com’s support forums users having slow connection speeds with the iTunes Music Store have discovered that they all live in the same general area and all have Time Warner’s Roadrunner broadband service.
According to the forums the problems started about January 31st with slow downloads of music and podcasts. Some on the forum vented their frustration at Apple for slowing down the connection speed. It was then realized that connection speeds on other online services (web browsing, e-mail, etc) were running just fine.
It wasn’t until later on in the discussion that people started putting down the area where they live. It first started with “Texas” then “Roadrunner”, then towns started pouring in: Plano, Arlington, Austin, and others. In the past few months other companies like Comcast have been accused of capping off bandwidth but not for just one service.
Some customers were able to unblock port addresses on their computer. By turning off blocking of the data going into and out of the ports some users expressed better download speeds. What about people who don’t know how to do this and just want to watch their iTunes movies?
Since Apple announced video rentals over iTunes last month much has been discussed online of how the competitors will react. Is this just Time Warner’s answer for pulling people away from Pay-Per-View movies? Is TWC in bed with the RIAA? Or are people just over-reacting to a thread on an online forum? Time will tell…still downloading, please wait.
written by tom