Who Let the Hogs Out?

Cable World, Sept 9, 2002

Byline: ANTHONY CRUPI

Michael Pellenz was Hollywood's worst nightmare. The 34-year-old Brooklynite estimates he once spent a good four or five hours every afternoon swapping files over various Internet peer-to-peer networks. Much of the content Pellenz downloaded via his mainstay service, Kazaa, was copyrighted material - songs, movies, a disconcerting amount of pornography, etc. - but the legal niceties of fair use never really seemed of much concern to him.

That all came to an end about two months ago. In the midst of helping himself to a pirated copy of the 1992 Quentin Tarantino film Reservoir Dogs, Pellenz says he was suddenly "knocked off line." After a quick reboot and a few clicks through the Kazaa interface, Pellenz discovered that he could no longer get back into the users queue. "It was like somebody - or something - was kicking me off the server every time I tried to get back on," Pellenz says. "Very spooky. That's when I began to suspect the Time Warner cops."

While it's hard not to discount the testimony of someone who readily admits to spending the better part of his days in a bathrobe (he's a "consultant"), Pellenz is not the only Time Warner Cable/Road Runner user to experience free-floating anxiety in the face of sudden disconnection from a P2P network. A number of the ISP's disgruntled customers have been sharing similar stories on the techie community website Slashdot since late July; many of those commiserating point to the disruption of something called "port 1214" as the culprit. A key connection point for file-sharing networks, port 1214 is reserved for Intelligent Communications Protocol on TCP/IP networks. When blocked, file-sharing capabilities are halted.

That's all well and good, says Time Warner spokesman Mark Harrad, but the cable giant isn't behind the cessation of swapping capabilities. "No one is being bumped off line by Time Warner," Harrad says. "There was a situation in July where a group of people began posting stories on a certain website about how Road Runner was blocking peer-to-peer access in Texas. But it's not true."

Harrad doesn't deny that the ISP has put the brakes on a few ardent P2P enthusiasts, however. "From time to time there's a bandwidth hog who slows things up for everyone else," he says. "In extreme cases, we'll turn around and slow it up for them. That's the only way to ensure great service to everyone - limiting bandwidth access to those few who traffic in disproportionately large amounts of data."

Although some members of the Slashdot community seem to believe that TWC is blocking P2P networks in an effort to protect parent company AOL Time Warner's various film/music/media properties, even Pellenz admits that the idea is a little far fetched. "It's not like they've got someone watching the pipe, saying, 'Oh, he's grabbing an REM song. Let's waste him!" he says. "If that were the case, they'd put a filter in so that all their competitors' stuff went through untouched. Think of the advantage that would give them."

Well, sure. But the simplest explanation can be found in the fine print in Road Runner's service agreement, which clearly states that the transmission of copyrighted material is prohibited. The agreement also forbids customers from using their PCs as servers - which is precisely what every user in a P2P network does.

Harrad says the vast majority of Road Runner users are happy with the service, citing the ISP's latest JD Power award for customer satisfaction. To keep those people satisfied, TWC will have to maintain its vigilance. The Yankee Group estimates that nearly 7.5 billion files will be traded online in 2005. And that'll eat up an awful lot of bandwidth.