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Optimum Online Blocks Limewire

Edit: Limewire may or may not be blocked anymore. Some people are now reporting being able to connect.

It’s official. If you’re on Optimum Online, you won’t be connecting to Limewire’s network because they have taken measures to block all of peer to peer traffic. Besides Limewire, some other P2P applications are also affected.

In order to get around this, you kind of have to know what you are doing and it is beyond the basic skill level of average computer users. I am not giving detailed instructions here (Google it), but this is basic idea: 1) In Limewire options you have to change the default port. 2) Forward that port in your router control panel to the internal IP of the computer on your network.

This is completely uncool. Not all P2P traffic is illegal. There are perfectly legal things licensed under Creative Commons that are free to distribute (free internet shows, podcasts etc.). The whole point of P2P is not piracy, but rather to take a load off one central server and distribute the content among users. This is useful for linux distributions and other things of that nature. I lost most of my respect for Optimum Online and Cablevision as a result of this. For a while, I always thought cable was good because of it’s high speeds. However, many people started complaining that excessive bandwidth usage led to individual bandwidth capping restrictions. Optimum online is doing this because it is less expensive for them when customers use less bandwidth. And that is not the point of paying for internet access.