Cox Throttling eDonkey Upload Speeds?

Users complaining about “weak and random” upload speeds, though for the time being is apparently limited to certain markets and P2P protocols.

Much has been discussed about how Comcast has been throttling BitTorrent traffic, but now it seems the problem is spreading to other ISPs, which in this case is Cox Communications.

Suspicions customers in the DSL Reports forum have been noticing discrepancies in their upload speeds for some time now, with one user in Oklahoma writing that he is “…rarely able to able to even come close (not to mention sustain)” his “self-imposed cap of 30kB/s.”

He continues:

I would have suspected a problem with up my upstream path, but my FTPs are 100% rock solid. Back to Bittorrent… I tried downloading off of a public torrent server, and was able to download just great, but my upload throughput was weak and random.

So Robb Topolski, a self-described “networking and protocol expert” with more than 25 years of experience, and the person who was the first to discover Comcast’s BitTorrent throttling efforts, was asked to investigate.

So far Topolski’s has discovered that Cox is “…using traffic shaping hardware to send forged TCP/IP packets with the RST (reset) flag set — with the goal of disrupting eDonkey traffic.” He said the technique is similar to what Comcast has using with BitTorrent traffic, but so far he’s unable to tell precisely what hardware Cox is using.

“This capture was on the eDonkey network between a Cox user and a user in Tel-Aviv, Israel,” says Topolski. “In this exchange, the non-Cox user connects, handshakes, and then requests parts, at which time the connection is immediately disrupted by an abort signal (TCP flag RST). The same pattern is repeated for all download requests.”

“This is conclusive proof that Cox is interfering with eDonkey uploads by abusing the RST (abort/reset) flag,” he says.

As for BitTorrent traffic he says that so far there is just “anecdotal reports that are similar but not proven,” but he plans to keep on looking.

I’m a Cox subscriber and haven’t noticed any odd patterns in my connection speeds and I hope I never do. With recent news that a Comcast subscriber has decided to sue the ISP for throttling his BitTorrent traffic, I may not have to worry about it anytime soon.

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