Scott Kveton

It looks like Comcast is now throttling BitTorrent users on their network. I’ll be the first one to admit that I’ve used BitTorrent before (*gasp*). I may have a piece of software that I own but lost the media for or maybe I really want to see a crappy cam capture of the latest movie in theaters to decide if I want to get the DVD or not (side note: took my son to Rattotoie this weekend with my wife; $17.50 just for the tickets … no wonder people steal). This news of Comcast throttling BitTorrent is no surprise and it means users will most likely start using encryption to solve the problem.

When I worked at OSU we had a lot of the same limitations in the dorms as well. What did the students do? They used the local network to share like crazy. There were even sites (what were those sites again?! I forget) that were setup to help facilitate this sharing of data among students within their own networks. Why couldn’t you do the same thing with Comcast? That’s like 30 million subscribers … that’s a lot of users to share with.

I would imagine something like this could manifest itself as a site that allows users to share what they have (most likely via BitTorrent) among the Comcast network. Heck, I bet you could even uncap your modem for traffic _within_ the Comcast network and they wouldn’t know. Of course they would ban you for life if you got caught but that’s another story. Legal problems aside (yep, I’m just sweeping them away) this could even be a fantastic driver for new subscribers to Comcast; all-you-can-eat transfers with other Comcast customers.