Comment by xrange | Hacker News Reader

Comment by xrange | Hacker News Reader

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>it really goes back to things like Comcast blocking Bittorrent, and many ISPs having rules governing what kind of applications users are permitted to use on their connection.

...I'm not up to speed on Bittorrent, but are they specifically blocking Bittorrent, or is coming under the ruberic of "thou shall not run a server behind your cable modem"? Certainly I can see that the 'net is supposed to be peer-to-peer and your server shouldn't be blocked from your residential connection, but can't you usually upgrade to a "business" package and get around those limitations? On the one hand I suppose you could get mad at having to pay extra for the "full" internet. On the other hand I suppose that someone could equally say that they're offering a discount for offering less services.

I'm interested to know what other sorts of things/applications ISPs may be blocking. Is there a name-and-shame site out there listing various ISPs and what they don't allow. Kind of a Consumer Reports for ISPs? And I suppose someone has crunched the numbers and knows what percentage of people are only served by one broadband supplier. Is it 10% of the population who can't get DSL, wireless, satellite or some other form of competition of some kind?

> I'm not up to speed on Bittorrent, but are they specifically blocking Bittorrent, or is coming under the ruberic of "thou shall not run a server behind your cable modem"?

Maybe try googling before you comment? Comcast would inject forged TCP rst packets to inbound bittorrent connections. It did not send these packets to people running servers or other peer-to-peer protocols. In fact, people complained that the resets would sometimes prevent Windows Remote Desktop from working and Comcast adjusted their system to prevent it from jamming.

https://www.eff.org/wp/packet-forgery-isps-report-comcast-af...

> I'm interested to know what other sorts of things/applications ISPs may be blocking. Is there a name-and-shame site out there listing various ISPs and what they don't allow.

The current issue isn't really blocking, it's throttling. There are a couple of sites that do this sort of measurements. Look at http://www.measurementlab.net/

> Is it 10% of the population who can't get DSL, wireless, satellite or some other form of competition of some kind?

The FCC's current definition of broadband is 25mbps.

Vast majority of DSL isn't broadband speed (Avg is 10Mbps.) 4g isn't broadband speed (~12Mbps). Satellite isn't broadband speed (~15Mbps and usually expensive compared to wired.)

At 25mbps, 20% have no service and 55% have only one service.

http://arstechnica.com/business/2014/09/most-of-the-us-has-n...

Thanks for that informative link about the number of providers and the speed links. I wonder what the velocity of those numbers is, or how fast the average speed available is increasing. Also, I am enjoying my advancing years quite a bit. <you need to read this next part in the Ernest P. Worrell lecturing mode (look him up)> You kids and your making a federal issue about only having one provider of 25Mbps for your you-tubes, and your corporately produced circuses. Talk about a first world problem. Back in my day we had 9600bps, and by golly we were grateful to have that. Get off my lawn ;-)

Are you serious, there are developing nations with better internet than America. This isn't about how great 'murica is, it's about how because of a lack of competition, American internet is about to become a liability. My first modem was 600 baud, so cut the old man crap.

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