Comcast's New Terms of Service Disclose Traffic Management

cremou brings us word that Comcast has changed its Terms of Service to include policies on traffic management. This comes after the FCC's recent decision to investigate Comcast's P2P throttling. The language in the updated Terms of Service, according to Ars Technica, mirrors the FCC's 2005 Internet Policy Statement[PDF]. "According to Section III of the revised ToS, Comcast 'uses reasonable network management practices that are consistent with industry standards.' The company points out that it is not alone in the practice, saying that 'all major' ISPs engage in some form of traffic shaping. Comcast does it to keep its subscribers from suffering the heartaches of 'spam, viruses, security attacks, network congestion, and other risks and degradations of service' and to 'deliver the best possible Internet experience to all of its customers.'"

Comments

Re:Traffic Shaping

[bh_doc]

This is a good point. Packet forging is not traffic shaping, it's active degradation of service: Exactly what they say they are trying to prevent by doing this.

Re:Better quality for games/voice?

[ashridah]

Sure, that's a good idea, and probably what a lot of ISP's do in practice. prioritise traffic.

It should be noted, however, that this is *not* what comcast is doing.

Comcast are deliberately cutting connections when a user attempts to seed bittorrent. Most users can still download, but they can no longer upload, without encrypting the tracker's traffic and individual connections. (I was able to get mine working again, after a fashion, once i setup a tunnel for the tracker (not all) traffic was able to go through)

This sucks for people trying to distribute stuff, like, say, linux ISO's, or their own music/media, etc.

I now use verizon as a direct result of these pathetic practices.

ash

Re:In other news...

[Scutter]

Perhaps it's time people stopped using major ISPs.

I have never used a major ISP

Unfortunately, most people in the U.S. don't have the luxury of a choice in internet providers. They generally have one or maybe two options (if they're lucky). I have three "options", myself. I can either get Comcast (see story above), Covad DSL (resold by a number of companies, but limited to 512k and never cheaper than $100/month), or SBC DSL at 6Mb.