On Wed, 15 Dec 2010, Rich Kulawiec wrote:
On Tue, Dec 14, 2010 at 04:38:27PM -0600, Richard A Steenbergen wrote:
I believe Comcast has made clear their position that they feel content providers should be paying them for access to their customers. I've seen them repeatedly state that they feel networks who send them too much traffic are "abusing their network".
That's rich, given the enormous quantity of spam sourced from Comcast's network over the last decade. (And yes, it's ongoing: 162 unique sources in the last hour noted at one small observation point.)
Spam is irrelevant. In this context, abuse = sending large amounts of data to Comcast customers (at their request) without paying at the Comcast toll booth.
Now I realize that SMTP abuse isn't exactly the most bandwidth-chewing problem. However, it's a surface indicator of underlying security issues, which in this particular case can be summarized as "one heck of a lot of zombies". Given that those systems are known-hostile and under the control of adversaries, it's certain that they're doing all kinds of other things that chew up a lot more bandwidth than the spam does.
It might even "improve" their ratios if they stopped those zombies from sendig spam, participating in DDoS's, etc. After all, that's outgoing traffic, and the less they send, the worse the ratio gets for networks sending data to Comcast. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Jon Lewis, MCP :) | I route Senior Network Engineer | therefore you are Atlantic Net | _________ http://www.lewis.org/~jlewis/pgp for PGP public key_________