November 29, 2007
EFF Confirms Comcast's BitTorrent Degradation
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has confirmed the research done by the Associated Press into Comcast's traffic shaping.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has released a report detailing its own investigation into allegations that Comcast is selectively degrading the performance of peer-to-peer systems on its networks, and has concluded that the ISP giant is indeed targeting certain protocols for active interference with reset packets.
The EFF also detailed its research methods in a separate report, and provided a guide to duplicating their tests.
The tests involve using two computers simultaneously at two different Comcast user connections. Computers are connected directly to the internet at both locations with no firewalls between the computers and the cable modems. A packet sniffer on each end of the connection is used to compare outgoing and incoming packets, and by observing differences in transmitted and received data, the EFF claims it can prove Comcast is targeting BitTorrent and Gnutella traffic for slowdowns.
