[100233] in North American Network Operators' Group

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Re: Comcast blocking p2p uploads

daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Daniel Senie)
Fri Oct 19 17:58:28 2007

Date: Fri, 19 Oct 2007 16:53:22 -0400
To: nanog@nanog.org
From: Daniel Senie <dts@senie.com>
In-Reply-To: <d800cd540710191210q287f0421qfd4cec437904b6d1@mail.gmail.co
 m>
Errors-To: owner-nanog@merit.edu


At 03:10 PM 10/19/2007, John C. A. Bambenek wrote:


>I love how the framed it as "data discrimination".  Let's just be
>honest... 99% of it was illegal traffic taking up far more than their
>fair share of bandwidth.

Let's be honest. The US ISPs have been advertising "unlimited" 
service, but heavily oversubscribe to limit costs. The expectation is 
that users will only use the bandwidth rarely and in short bursts. We 
all know all about over subscription, but it is now problematic due 
to distributed applications.

Blocking heavy users (or terminating them, as at least one 
cellular/wireless Internet service provider does to heavy users of 
its "unlimited" service) is false advertising. but it seems to be 
accepted all around, without so much as an asterisk and footnote.

So it all comes down to what the definition of "unlimited" is. Truth 
in advertising and all that. There seems to be a great unwillingness 
to tell the truth in our society. 


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