A Comcast employee supplied The Consumerist with the following internal email sent out to all the customer service staff at the Maryland call center. It’s regarding recent reports that the cable company disrupts traffic between customers using the BitTorrent file-sharing protocol:

All,
You may get customers who are contacting us with regard to several articles which were published recently, accusing Comcast of blocking or otherwise filtering customers’ Internet traffic. An in-depth AP story suggests Comcast is hindering our customers’ ability to use BitTorrent, a peer to peer file sharing program. If a customer contacts us to inquire about this, please use the following talking points.

Comcast does not block access to any applications, including BitTorrent

We respect our customers’ privacy and we don’t monitor specific customer activities on the Internet or track individual online behavior, such as which websites they visit. Therefore, we do not know whether any individual user is visiting BitTorrent or any other site…

We have a responsibility to provide all of our customers with a good experience online and we use the latest technologies to manage our network. This is standard practice for ISPs and network operators all over the world.

We rarely disclose our vendors or our processes for operating our network both for competitive reasons and to protect against network abuse.

If a customer asks:
I read that Comcast is limiting customer access to BitTorrent. Is this true?

Respond:
No. We do not block access to any applications, including BitTorrent. We also respect our customers’ privacy and don’t monitor specific customer activities on the Internet or track individual online behavior, such as which websites they visit. Therefore, we do not know whether any individual user is visiting BitTorrent or any other site.

We have a responsibility to provide all of our customers with a good experience online and we use the latest technologies to manage our network. This is standard practice for ISPs and network operators all over the world.

Are you working with Sandvine as these reports claim?

Respond:
We rarely disclose our vendors or our processes for operating our network both for competitive reasons and to protect against network abuse.

Please do not deviate from the responses above. If you have any questions about this issue, please reach out to Brian Becker, Gene Bridges or myself.

Thanx…
________________________________________
Michael S. Groman
Manager / IP Support
MD-DE-RCH Region

We guess it must have been a little devil or gremlin sabotaging the AP from transferring that Bible.

The insider tells us that employees were told not to say a word outside the pre-ordained script. Management said that anyone who otherwise discussed the issue would be terminated. A meeting was held last week to cover the issue as well.

Our source says, “It is definitely being covered under tight wraps. Why else would they go through with all this if they didn’t have anything to hide?”

UPDATE: Insider Tells Us There’s Proof Comcast Contracts BitTorrent Throttling To Sandvine

(Photo: cmorran123)

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