Comcast, StarHub Throttling BitTorrent
To more than half their subscribers, claims expert. By Commsday
May 19, 2008
Comcast routinely cuts the BitTorrent connections of more than half of the cable company's broadband subscribers, despite claiming otherwise, it was claimed in testimony before the US Federal Communications Commission.
So says the Max Planck Institute, which yesterday published the results of its international probe of torrent connectivity.
The organization said deployment of a traffic analysis tool across 8,175 nodes discovered Comcast impedes P2P traffic in 62% of cases.
The blocking effort is largely uniform no matter the hour, a fact the Institute said runs counter to Comcast claims it only employs traffic shaping in response to peak network conditions.
Comcast rival Cox Communications and Singapore ISP StarHub were also identified as major offenders with each throttling at least half of their torrent traffic. StarHub blocks 57% of such links while Cox hampers fully half, according to Institute figures.
“We found widespread blocking of BitTorrent transfers only in the US and Singapore. Interestingly, even within these countries, most of the hosts that observed blocking belonged to a few large ISPs,” the Institute said in its report.
"Both in the US and in Singapore, all hosts that suffered Bit- Torrent blocking are located in cable ISPs. We did not see any blocking of BitTorrent transfers from DSL hosts in these countries.
"Most (573 of 599) US hosts that observed blocking are located in Comcast and Cox networks. In Singapore, all blocked hosts are connected using the StarHub network.”