Comcast killing BitTorrent upload connections (Verified)
[Update] I've posted instructions here on what to do if you're being affected.
Being a skeptic, I didn't believe TorrentFreak's announcement that Comcast is resetting upload connections from BitTorrent. "A misconfigured router, or an isolated problem", I thought. I was wrong.
Since I didn't see any hard proof of this in the post, I decided to test it out for myself. I can verify that the post is accurate, and Comcast is indeed interfering. (More evidence)
Pictures or it didn't happen.
This is a packet trace of a BitTorrent transfer between two peers. The seeder is on Comcast, and the leech is on AT&T DSL. Both peers receive RST packets.
What do I think?
I've never been a proponent of Net Neutrality, but I think that this may sway me. I had faith that ISP would be responsible and respectful of their customers' access to the internet, but I guess I may have been mistaken.
Comcast's response
I've contacted customer support. Not surprisingly, they deny that they interfere with any sort of P2P traffic.
I'm following up the incident with their abuse department to get to the bottom of this. More to come.
What to do now?
- Test it out for yourself. If you're on a Comcast connection, start seeding a file. (You can use http://tracker2.btsharp.com/announce.aspx as a tracker) Upload the .torrent file to http://piqd.com and send your friend a link to the file. When your friend establishes a connection, see how long it takes for your connection to be reset. It took about 10 seconds for me.
- Contact abuse@comcast.net and complain.
Seeding vs. Leeching
Comcast doesn't reset connections from a peer that is only downloading. This is what makes me think that Sandvine is involved.