Is Comcast Blocking More Than Just Torrents?
Although I’ve yet to compile any concrete proof, recent indicators have made me wonder whether or not Comcast is filtering more than just torrent traffic. Since implementing the steps outlined in this post, Comcast has actually been pretty tolerable, until recently. In an effort to establish a godly Rainbow Tables collection, I’ve started using torrents for the first time in probably a year. After the first day or so, ssh and remote desktop sessions would randomly terminate. GMail’s built in chat interface would throw an error explaining, “We’re experiencing technical difficulties, please try again later…” But I seriously doubt GMail was the one experiencing technical difficulties.
For some unknown reason the security portion of my event viewer is blank, so that won’t work. Here’s the grepped contents of my Linux server’s auth.log file instead.
Feb 17 07:09:13 nullamatix sshd[9647]: Accepted password… Feb 17 08:26:58 nullamatix sshd[17921]: Accepted password… Feb 17 08:27:59 nullamatix sshd[19837]: Accepted password… Feb 17 08:31:00 nullamatix sshd[16049]: Accepted password… Feb 17 08:34:43 nullamatix sshd[5278]: Accepted password… Feb 17 08:38:52 nullamatix sshd[7646]: Accepted password… Feb 17 08:42:09 nullamatix sshd[7248]: Accepted password… Feb 17 08:57:06 nullamatix sshd[27953]: Accepted password… Feb 17 10:19:36 nullamatix sshd[5956]: Accepted password…
The problem, as you can clearly see, finally stopped at around 10am. But how convenient, that’s after my torrent downloads had been stopped for a few hours. For now, I’ll give Comcast the benefit of the doubt and assume they were doing one of the following:
1) Hardware upgrades and/or maintenance
2) Software upgrades and/or patches
3) Network infrastructure upgrades and/or maintenance
Even if one of these assumptions are true, why wouldn’t Comcast send out an email saying connectivity issues might arise between 7am and 10:30am? Isn’t that what good network administrators do? Many customers depend on their Internet connection for a number of reasons, and whenever maintenance is scheduled, the least Comcast could do is tell their customers. This would reduce the incoming call load to their alleged 24 hour customer service centers, and give customers time to prepare for outages. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. Over the last three or four years as a Comcast customer, I’ve never heard a Comcast employee admit that the problem was on their end, despite having undeniable proof. Here’s how a recent conversation went…
Guy: Hey, I’m having some intermittent connectivity, is there an outage or some sort of maintenance going on?
Comcast: Let me have a look sir, what’s your phone number, blah blah, etc, etc … ? *pause* Nope, nothing going on in your area. Have you tried power cycling your modem, sir?
Guy: Yes. I’ll obtain and IP and everything will appear fine for a few minutes, but then everything just starts timing out. All my active connections are terminated, and after a few seconds or a minute or two, everything comes back on line. Are you sure there isn’t any maintenance going on in my area?
Comcast: Let me update my screen and have a look here… (10-15 seconds go by). No sir, nothing in your area, and everyone else’s Internet seems to be working. I’m going to go ahead and schedule a technician to come out and take a look for you. When’s good for you?
Guy: Look, I’m not taking more time off work to have your tech tell me something I already know. My Internet works fine for extended periods of time, but at occasional random intervals, it’s becomes either completely unavailable, or shows symptoms of severe packet loss. This house was rewired less than two years ago, and in those two years there have been at least 4 techs in my house, yet the problems continue.
Comcast: I’m sorry to hear that Mr. Patterson, some of our techs work in the evening until 9pm if that’s more convenient for you.
Guy: No, it’s not. What I find unusually strange is that you guys really have absolutely no idea what the hell’s going on and who’s doing what where. Prior to calling you, I pulled into my neighborhood and noticed there were two Comcast labeled vans, a white sedan, and four men standing around looking at one of your larger nodes. You know, those big green boxes that may occasionally need some work? Please, either tell me again that there wasn’t any scheduled maintenance, or those men weren’t from Comcast.
Comcast: Well sir, I’m located in South Florida, so I have no way of knowing that.
I hung up after hearing that. One of the largest broadband providers in the United States doesn’t have a centralized ticketing system? Why was I lied to initially? This is turning into a rant, so I’ll leave you with something to ponder. Here’s an excerpt from an article I recently read.
Just about every big phone company has filed a statement challenging the FCC’s authority to deal with this problem. AT&T, Verizon, and Qwest all submitted lengthy remarks on February 13th
Why do these big corporations even have the ability to challenge the FCC? Is the FCC not a government entity? Since when do corporations have the authority to influence decisions made by the government? What’s the old saying, “By the people, for the people?” Something just doesn’t add up…
Have you ever encountered similar situations of random, unannounced loss of connectivity? Feel free to share your experience in the comments.
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I have that problem out of Windstream at least a few times a day, but the problem seems to be Windstream blocking outgoing connections (too many SYNs not enough ACKs or similar). The limit seems to be right around the 500 mark, but I haven’t bothered testing it. The time out feels like 5 minutes.
I’m positive that this is a preemptive anti-torrent (anti-DDoS even) measure, but it does make some pen testing mighty slow.
They also took the liberty of hijacking unknown DNS queries, instead of handing back a real error message they give out an IP of some really suspicious search page. When it’s done from a browser you even get ’suggestions’. Thanks guys, I really need my privacy to be invaded just a *bit* more…
Oh wow. The hijacked DNS would totally set me off. That’s probably an attempt at earning additional revenue via Google’s Adsense for Search program. Are there no alternatives in your area? The day Comcast implements that shit is the day I’m no longer a customer.
I’ve been a Comcast customer for almost 4 years now. Also an avid torrent user, I’ve never experienced any specific internet issues due to torrent use. None of my downloads were ever blocked or slowed down.
However, I do have the packet loss issue from time to time. In the middle of just browsing the web, I’ve had my internet simply shut down. I could tell it wasn’t a router issue because I run a LAN between my several computers at home over the very same router. The problem would go away once I simply restarted the router. I have spoken to Comcast several times about it but they didn’t offer me any solution except either sending a tech or replacing the router (which they did twice with different brands upon my request - first LinkSys, then NetGear and finally D-Link). All three exhibit the same connection termination issue that is easily resolved with restarting the router.
Point is, my connection was never terminated in the middle of a torrent download. The terminations I suffer have always been completely random, regardless of what I’m doing on the web. I use a VoIP phone service and my internet was terminated in the middle of a call when no computers were even running in the house.
Notice how they immediately placed the blame on YOUR equipment? I’ve been through the exact same thing with my entire network. Replaced the cable modem, used one of their “for rent” models, replaced all my NICs, replaced network cables, replaced the routers, replaced the switches, all in less than a three-four month time-span only to experience the same issues. I eventually moved to another house and everything worked fine the first two or three months, but then the problems came back. I’m almost positive these issues are intentionally being being put into effect.
Umm… I seriously doubt that comcast would be willing to cost themselves even MORE money by rolling a truck multiple times to address an imaginary problem. You see, I work tier II/III support for a regional cable company. There really are people out there who have the most bizarre issues that never can get resolved. I know of about a dozen in our area that have been plagued by nonstop proplems. Two of them have had the issues at more than one residence.
My point is, it makes no sense to spend 75 bucks on each tech call to soothe a customer’s whining. The reality is this: DOCSIS isn’t totally perfect yet, and there are a few situations where it doesn’t work well.
As for Comcast’s traffic shaping, I don’t really understand why they’re being so heavy-handed about it. We do it, and nobody really notices. We simply throttle back the bandwidth on the offending ports at during peak hours, so that instead of getting 900k download speeds, you get 90. once overall traffic goes down, the throttle is lifted. In the last year, I’ve received one complaint about it, and the person complaining was a major DMCA offender.
canthus,
Comcast usually doesn’t hesitate to send out a technician. If a power cycle doesn’t resolve the issue, escalation to an advanced (network operations) tier isn’t an option, just, “We’ll schedule a technician to come to your house.” A couple technicians gave me the impression they knew what was going on, but the others ran bandwidth speed tests, asked if I played WoW or Counter-Strike, failed to provide any indication of intelligence, and ultimately didn’t do anything to resolve the issue. All that’s fine, but instead of pushing the blame over to my end and sending out a technician, why not let me speak to someone educated that actually *knows* what the hell’s going on.
We’ve never met and probably never will, but you sound like an educated guy. I remember a phone conversation with a “high speed Internet technician” that wouldn’t acknowledge the fact that Comcast owns, maintains, and provides DNS servers; and I’ve yet to hear any of them mention DOCSIS. Even if I take the time to explain that I’m responsible for maintaining a network with over 17,000 users, they still ask me to power cycle my modem, like I haven’t 5 times already. I wouldn’t complain so much if they’d just let me speak to someone with your level of intelligence.
Sometimes (frequently), either one or both of their DNS servers will stop responding. I know this because providing IPs rather than hostnames work, and assigning static, alternative DNS servers corrects the hostname issue. Just once I would love to hear a technician tell me, “Well sir, we’re actually performing a variety of upgrades|updates|whatever but everything should be good to go in 30-45 minutes (which is sometimes the case).” Just own up and admit what’s going on, what’s the big deal? There’s no excuse for not having the ability to look up scheduled outages, period. Honesty really is the best policy.
Yeah comcast is doing something for sure….my ssh’s to my box on a comcast network timeouts if it’s idle for around 10 mins…if I’m using the shell it doesn’t die. Usually at night I leave a few shells open to it output tcpdump stats to randomize traffic size and it stays open.
Galactic Dominator,
I know exactly what you mean. I’ve even set the “keep-alive” in my SSH client to send packets of data every 35 seconds. The connection still randomly drops..
Hi, I also have trouble with Comcast after being on the internet for 3-4 hours, my connection speeds slows up my page loading or I get error messages too..I usually have to click off IE and just let it set for a couple of minutes then I can continue to browse the web..I have cable internet, which I do like and pay almost $50 a month for so I should be able to browse the internet…I am not doing any updoading files or anything like that…beats me why Comcast is trying to control our internet usage….
Another weird problem with Comcast. For some reason, I’m not surprised. A lot of research has proven that we’re not the only experiencing these types of unusual issues.
We ran in to a similar problem recently with our ISP Insight (insightbb.com). However, their customer service centers are local and are actually pretty helpful. One tech put a tracer on our line to see when our connection would drop. We had the lines on the house replaced, we had the lines in the house replaced, we bought a new modem, they even replaced the line from the pole to the back of the house. Yet, after 5 techs visited hour house we were still getting kicked off. So finally, with a very patient customer service rep on the phone, we shut down and turned on each computer individually and ran it on the network by itself. Turned out my roommate had spyware installed. We backed up his data, wiped and formatted the hard drive, and reinstalled everything. Now, we’re having no problems being dropped.
Insight was great because they accepted responsibility although it turned out to not be their fault.
(P.S. After a recent snow/ice storm, our cable line fell in the back. Not more than two days later Insight workers were on the scene fixing it)
Why would your room-mate having spyware installed cause your Internet connection to stop responding?
As the customer service rep explained it…the spyware was sending out so much information, that it was basically hogging all the bandwidth available to us. It was some sort of spyware that basically keeps sending information to server…I’m not sure what info its sending, but I immediately put a block on his MAC address until we could work it out. So it wouldn’t boot us, but we couldn’t connect at all to the internet, and when we did it was extremely slow. We received letters saying that we were our downloads were well above what an ‘average user’ uses. We kick our neighbors off our wireless, but that wasn’t enough.
Finally when we did the test with the last technician, he showed us where my roommate’s computer was sending out more packets than it was receiving. He said it was more than likely coming from spyware on the computer. During that time my roommate turned off his firewall, that he believed to be causing problems…but that created more problems than before.
Like you I had the same problem two months ago. They made me to change my cablemodem, but the problem was not fixed. Finally, in the last call I threatened to sue. After that, the same day, suddenly, without any technician came to my house, the connection was reinstated and so far I have not had more problems.
Definitely was a problem for them and it was not any scheduled maintenance. Until today I don’t know how the problem was resolved.
I plan in the future to change my internet provider.
Was this issue ever resolved? I just started having a problem a couple weeks ago. I don’t do any kind of torrent downloading, but I do have to work from home occasionally via VPN. When I’m getting DC’d every minute or two for up to 10 seconds, it makes it very hard to work. I’ve set up Newsrover downloads to d/l large files just so I can watch the speed. All is fine and dandy for a minute, then I get a huge spike in speed followed by a disconnect for about 15 seconds, then another large spike in speed, then it settles down for about a minute and starts all over again. I know this isn’t just from downloading large files either, as simply surfing the web will occasionally produce a “Page cannot be displayed” error. A refresh will immediately bring the page up. I called CS and got the usual “When can we send a technician out?”. I had the same major issues about a year ago during the Adelphia/Comcast switch-over. I haven’t had any problems since then, up until 2 weeks ago. Something’s definately going on in my area. I just bought Age of Conan last night and get DC’d every couple minutes. This is really frustrating and I’m seriously considering just going to DSL (not that Comcast will care if I leave).