Imagine an average day in the life of a typical P2P customer. You wake up, hop onto Azureus, your favorite BitTorrent client, and start trading information. This has been going on for the last four years, on one network or another with little or no disruption. Then imagine one day, virtually all connections to your favorite P2P networks suddenly vanishes.

Before calling tech support, you go through all the motions. You remove your router and directly connect, you verify your connection settings, unplug your cable modem for a few minutes then reconnect...nothing. Finally, after hours of torment you finally decide to hopelessly call tech support; perhaps it is the ISP's network that is to blame.

Many experienced computer users typically cut to the chase and simply ask if there are similar problems in the local area. This usually eliminates the annoying troubleshooting routine, as if somehow you changed your network settings.

In many cases, Mediacom customers are being told there is no problem with the network, and that somehow it is their personal equipment. This explination may hold more some weight if it were only one or two individuals experiencing the inability to access P2P networks. However, by traversing the Mediacom forum on BroadBandReports.com, the enormity of the situation becomes obvious.

After only a few days of experiencing such problems, there are already 8 forum threads on the issue. In addition, at least 20 different individuals over a wide geographical area are experiencing an identical problem. Although Mediacom tech support does frequent the forums, they have been unable to identify the issue. Instead, they continue to push the notion that it is not Mediacom to blame. And this appear to be true.

Not only are many Mediacom customers experiencing the virtual disappearance of their P2P abilities, many Insight BroadBand customers are experiencing virtually identical problems. On the BearShare forums, dozens of customers have expressed their inability to connect to the Gnutella network. Please read the BearShare threads here and here.

While it appears neither Mediacom nor InsightBB are directly to blame; they do have something in common. Both Mediacom and InsightBB use AT&T as their Tier 1 (backbone) provider.