[ale] comcast & bittorrent

[Jim Popovitch]

On Sat, 2007-08-18 at 10:59 -0400, Paul Cartwright wrote:
> FsG writes "Over the past few weeks, more and more Comcast users have reported 
> that their BitTorrent traffic is severely throttled and they are totally 
> unable to seed. Comcast doesn't seem to discriminate between legitimate and 
> infringing torrent traffic, and most of the BitTorrent encryption techniques 
> in use today aren't helping. If more ISPs adopt their strategy, could this 
> mean the end of BitTorrent?"

Yes.  Sorta.  It takes X amount of resources to transfer Y file.  If the
provider of Y is not spending X, then someone else is somewhere.

Cable providers added caching proxies years ago to handle large and
repeated downloads by their users... with BT the reverse situation
occurs, that is lots of cable customers are providing the same (or
pieces of the same) content on the upstream channel benefiting non-Cable
customers.... and there is no way to reverse-cache this.  Why should
Cable companies allow/support that?

-Jim P.