North American Network Operators Group
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Re: Can P2P applications learn to play fair on networks?

  • From: Sean Donelan
  • Date: Wed Oct 24 09:56:18 2007

On Wed, 24 Oct 2007, Iljitsch van Beijnum wrote:
There are many "reasonable" things providers could do.

So then why to you stick up for Comcast when they do something unreasonable?

Although yesterday there was a little more info and it seems they only stop the affected protocols temporarily, the uploads should complete later. If that's true, I'd say that's reasonable for a protocol like BitTorrent that automatically retries, but it's hard to know if it's true, and Comcast is still to blame for saying one thing and doing something else.

Because, unlike some of the bloggers, I can actually understand what
Comcast is doing and know the limitations providers work under. Most of the misinformation and hyperbole is being generated by others. Although Comcast's PR people don't explain technical things very well, they have
been pretty consistent in what they've said since the begining which then
gets filtered through reporters and bloggers.

Now that you understand it a bit more, you're also saying it may be a
reasonable approach.

Nothing is perfect, and within the known limitations, Comcast is trying something interesting. Just like Cox Communications tried one resonable response to Bots, Qwest Communications tried one reasonable response to malware, AOL tried one resonable response to Spam, and so on and so on.

The reality is no matter what any large provider tries or doesn't try, they will be criticized.


The result is network engineering by politician, and many reasonable things can no longer be done.

I don't see that.

You may have missed what's been happening for the last few years in the US.