Cheats-Area.com

Looks like another ComCast scandal is looming: some Call of Duty 4 players, most of them PlayStation 3 owners, are pissed off because their ISP is apparently blocking multiplayer sessions of the game.

One gamer wrote to Product-Reviews.com expressing his frustration with his Italy-based ISP Tiscali, which has subsidiaries in the UK, the Czech Republic, Switzerland and Denmark. It seems the aforementioned telecom giant is blocking/throttling P2P connections of its subscribers (especially in the evening), leaving most COD 4 players with the impossibility to frag each other.

The reason for this situation is the technology used by COD 4 when it comes to online multiplayer: the P2P protocol. It's the same technology widely used today for intensive file sharing, and the same that's giving Internet Service Providers some of the worst nightmares.

Peer-to-peer file sharing usually clogs the bandwidth so to ensure everyone has a decent downloading speed, ISPs like Tiscali resort to the only cheap tool they have at their disposal: throttling. The issue apparently affects gamers too and according to the Product-Reviews post there are plenty of them out there complaining, even from other companies.