[PLUG] Is it Comcast or Motorola?

John Jason Jordan johnxj at comcast.net
Fri Dec 12 03:48:42 UTC 2008


On Thu, 11 Dec 2008 19:17:34 -0800
"drew wymore" <drew.wymore at gmail.com> dijo:

> Download an ISO via HTTP instead of Torrent and see what happens to the
> connection or see if you can use a proxy for your traffic to hide it from
> any sniffing Comcast is doing. You'll be taxing it then. Pick a fast mirror
> like kernel.org.

That was already suggested, and I did it. I downloaded the Edubuntu
addons from cat.pdx.edu directly instead of via torrent (3-400 MB each)
and they downloaded without issue.

But when using torrents you have dozens if not hundreds of connections.
Plus, (I don't understand this well) there is a lot of back and forth
to the tracker. I haven't been using torrents for the past 24 hours and
my connection has been fine. But when downloading Fedora recently I had
500 connections per torrent and I was downloading/uploading four
torrents - no problem at all. Now I can't maintain even ten connections
per torrent for just two torrents without getting disconnected.

Something has changed. 

Add the fact that when using Ktorrent I first got disconnected every 12
hours or so. Now I get disconnected every 15 minutes. The degradation
has been a straight line. If Comcast was throttling torrents I would
assume it would be an all or nothing situation, not a gradual
degradation in service. 

And one other matter - if you google on cable modem problems you will
find dozens of posts from consumers whose modems failed. And just about
every one says they had to recycle the modem more and more often until
finally they couldn't restore the connection at all. The symptoms echo
what is happening to me.

I can't be sure it's the modem, but it is six years old and all fingers
are pointing at it, yelling "j'accuse!"

So I may be posting later that I was completely wrong. But for the
moment the #1 suspect is the modem. Maybe Microsoft has an investment
in Motorola, so it has a feature which makes it die after so many Linux
downloads. :)

It looks like the best option at the moment is a Motorola SB5101. I'm
off to buy one on eBay or wheverever. 



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