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Comcast's FCC Filing Called Unfair, Not Good Enough
Shoemaker brings us a follow-up to Comcast's recent defense of its traffic management procedures. The companies involved in the original FCC investigation are not satisfied with Comcast's response. From Ars Technica:
"Comcast made an aggressive defense of its policies, claiming that it only resets P2P uploads made during peak times and when no download is also in progress. Free Press, BitTorrent, and Vuze all say that's not good enough. In a conference call, Vuze's general counsel Jay Monahan drew the starkest analogy. What Comcast is really doing, he said, wasn't at all comparable to limiting the number of cars that enter a highway. Instead, it was more like a horse race where the cable company owns one of the horses and the racetrack itself. By slowing down the horse of a competitor like Vuze, even for a few seconds, Comcast makes it harder for that horse to compete. 'Which horse would you bet on in a race like that?' asked Monahan."
only if the FCC can deal on that Merger between Sirius and XM
Well, probably not this horse.
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
It's more like having a professional sniper taking out the competitors.
My $0.02: deregulate, increase investment in infrastructure and leave it to the law enforcement agencies to deal with potential matters of criminal activity online. then we have an internet we can all enjoy!
I'm sick of following my dreams. I'm just going to ask where they're goin' and hook up with 'em later.
For a minute there, I thought we were going to get yet another car analogy.
Education is fairer when you hold the smartest and best back just a little bit when the rest of the class can not understand their input.
Every mans' island needs an ocean; choose your ocean carefully.
Or ISPs could stop over-selling their capacity, then no one would need to "police" themselves by making sure they use less than the bandwidth they're paying for.
ISPs either need to take on less customers (I know at least one DSL provider in my area is taking this path, actually refusing new customers and their money because they've oversold) or actually tell their customers how much bandwidth they're getting.
Instead, they sell, sell, sell accounts with "unlimited" bandwidth at X speed; add something in their ToS that some unknown amount of usage is too much; and then blame their infrasture problems on those that use BitTorrent and the like (whether they are used for legal or illegal purposes) rather than on their own irresponsibility and money-grabbing.
They admit to sending RST packets, but then claim that they don't forge packets. They're audacious enough to say that the people who say that the packets are forged are the liars. They also say RST packets are the only way, completely ignoring options like ICMP source quench, leaky bucket/token bucket filtering, or TCP's own congestion control reaction to dropped/delayed packets.
Whoever wrote Comcast's response has quite a pair.
Oh, no room for P2P, huh?
Fine. I'll go build my own telecom infrastructure with blackjack.. and hookers.
In fact, forget the infrastructure and the blackjack... Eh, screw the whole thing.
Fine then, as long as I sign a contract that says my traffic can be interrupted by forging packet requests. That's totally cool. turns out my contract DOESN'T say that. Also, the fact that cable companies represent something of a natural monopoly means that regulation in this sense might be the right answer.
Where do you get the notion that using p2p software is immoral or illegal? This is a funny one. I don't care if you can't keep a VPN connection up. that sounds like a problem you need to take up with your carrier. If they can't provide you w/ qos gaurantees, then maybe you shoudl find another carrier. It's as simple as that. If comcast wants to make badnwidth limits or appropriately throttle traffic in order to provide those QoS gaurantees, greate. If they want to illegally forge packets and impersonate parties in a conversation, that is a legal manner.
Not only that, but their own arguments support the view that they're massively oversold.
They say that they are only targeting a few users--that a "small minority" of people are hogging the bandwidth. If a small percentage (say, 2%) of your users can overload the network, that directly means you are heavily oversold (by 50x).
On my way home from work this evening, a radio host was finally talking about this in a way that regular joes would care about (and the show was for regular joes trying to invest). He said that Comcast is using its monopoly to limit competing content (non-comcast video and audio). I'm sure more than a few ears perked up.
I agree that the horserace analogy is pretty stupid. I had to read it twice to figure out if that was all there was to it. I don't agree that comcast's policy is akin to protection money (another analogy), nor do I agree that the use of analogies in general is bad.
The false advertising claim is probably baseless. The laws on what constitutes false advertising vary state to state and aren't as strict as one might imagine. The breach of contract might also be shaky. I don't have a comcast contract on hand, but I'm more than 50% sure that I won't find a bandwidth or QoS gaurantee written into a residential high speed internet agreement. No lawyer in his right mind would offer that much to a customer.
Except in this case it is much more than just blocking connections. Comcast was making forged reset packets, and sending it to both parties. Forgery != Blocking.
These reset packets were also targeted at VPN connections.
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
You see, the internet is like a car, and Comcast is like the clutch. If you stick a bologna sandwich in the clutch, obviously you need more cup holders, like Bit Torrent and Vuze.
That's why we need net neutrality!
hookers and grits.
Funny, when I mail an "unfair, not good enough" check for my Comcast bill, they just shut me down.
--
make install -not war
Yes, the network is oversold; the Internet (and packet-switched networks in general) is designed around the assumption that nobody uses 100% of their bandwidth 100% of the time. We could go back to circuit-switched networks, but who wants to pay $1000+/month for residential Internet access?
In Comcast's case though, the problem is the design of the cable modem network protocols. There are a limited number of channels available for upstream bandwidth, and they have to be shared among all users on a segment. Comcast could put just one user per segment, but again the cost would be many times what they charge today (because of the significant increase in equipment and management costs). The newest version of the protocol (DOCSIS 3.0) allows for more upstream bandwidth, but they're going to have to spend a significant amount of money to upgrade (and in some cases replace) all of their existing equipment to take advantage of the new version.
Who are these paragons of good ISP behavior, by the way? If they are in the northeast, I would like to give them my custom.
:)
When, that is, they are willing to take it.
So why can't they just advertise "speeds UP TO xxxx Mbps*" (with "* speed only seen at off-peak times" in small print)?
No one expects their new sports car to go 180 mph on the freeway in rush-hour traffic, so why is this such a problem with advertised network speeds?
I don't think the analogy in the summary is worth a horse's turd. Disconnecting is more like shooting the horse, not slowing it down.
Anyway there's no car in that analogy. I don't understand!!!
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
I don't think the EFFECT of Comcast's interference is the main issue here. Traffic shaping IS an issue, but not the important one in this case. HOW they are doing it is important. They are forging network packets (RST packets, in particular). This isn't just limiting the cars getting on the highway, it's like calling you on your cell phone before you get on the highway, pretending to be your boss, and telling you not to bother coming to work today. They are committing fraud, of multiple sorts, every time they do this.
It isn't that there is overselling that is the problem, it's that there is *heavy* overselling. Comcast is promising gobs of bandwidth for very little money, yet they don't have the capacity to back it up. They probably based the amount they could oversell on estimates from pre-broadband usage patterns; it's not the customer's fault that Comcast made an incorrect assumption. If they've oversold so much that it is causing such bad problems, then advertise lower peak bandwidths, or stop accepting new customers. Cheating your existing customers is not a valid option.
As for the shortcomings of DOCSIS; the DSL specs allowed tuning which frequency bands are assigned to upstream vs. downstream. The phone company understood that traffic patterns can change, and that they need to be flexible. If the cable internet industry was incompetent/shortsighted when designing their specs, then they brought their troubles on themselves.
Shared co-ax has some advantages in that it does allow for very large peak bandwidth for individual users; it stinks in that it supports quite poor average bandwidth per user. For DSL, the expensive, super-high-speed links only have to go to the central offices; for cable internet, the whole loop has to operate fast. It was a good design for broadcasting TV; not so much for internet.
Another possibility would be to accept that their mixed calculation doesn't add up. They could make the flatrates more expensive and add a variety of volume/time based options for "normal" people. It's not the fault of the customers if the current model fails because some people really use what they paid for.
Disclaimer: I don't know about Comcast's pricing model (and I can't really check without a valid address in the states). But wrong flatrate pricing seems to be a generic ISP problem nowadays
I don't read replies by ACs.
You know, I have to admit, as much as I like this seeing the light of day, it scares me to have Congress so...involved...in these technological affairs that they cannot, really, possibly all understand.
I know plenty of hot young IT geeks who don't really "get" the bigger picture, let alone a bunch of technophobic Congrescritters...
expandfairuse.org
I have said this before, why does Comcast not just throttle BT packets when the lines are being saturated? On multiple levels. You could also throttle the bandwidth of the largest users in general if other users who barely ever use the internet want bandwidth. AKA if all I do is log on once a day and watch 10 youtube videos I would get priority over the guy who maxes out his line doing BT all day.
Of course, you would always want to prioritize VOIP, games, DNS and other types of vital traffic. Could even prioritize based on what servers are being accessed. Blackberry.net, Chase Online Banking, ETrade, and other similar sites are a bit more important than YouTube.com for most customers.
This shaping would only be if the line is being saturated.
I go to a school that, when I was a freshman, had a few thousand students on the residential network sharing a single T3. There were arrays of squids which basically cached all of Facebook & Yahoo Mail and traffic shapers for everything else. The shapers were set to aggregate and monitor the usage of bandwidth that is not being pulled from the squids based on the mac addresses they registered when they first connected to the network. So if one user was using a ton of bandwidth, their devices would be throttled down. I was absolutely floored by this. Not only because I feel like I was getting ripped off by sharing a single T3 with a thousand other college students, but also that I never even suspected that I was sharing such a small connection. In fact, since the squids were there things seemed to load even faster! (although I wouldn't recommend having Squids for business customers, if it is a residential non-business network then it should be fair game if the remote hosts don't specifically say not to cache the content)
It can be done, and Comcast doesn't have to mess with the actual packets or play games with the traffic on their network. Just do some traffic shaping for Christ's sake! Not only that, you can start offering faster connections like RCN... Hey, if they can get me 20mbit even if any BT I use is throttled based on what my neighbor's needs are, then I'm game.
-nick
Semi-valid arguement, however its not really *where* the story originates, but how many people it reaches... some people (myself included) dont like Ars Technica, mainly because its a pain in the Ars, too much advertising, links, way too much focus on bullshit rather than the story (I mean the layout of the site, not the articles)... and its about a third as speedy as /.
/. need is a forum on itself (Maybe there is but only for "Subscribers" ?) or atleast a poll now and again about "How could /. improve ths site?"
What
I just had to deal with spending 3+ hours to download a 150MB file, due to my entire connection going down every time I have Bit Torrent up for more than ~5 minutes. From what I've read, Cox is supposedly using the same forging method as Comcast. When does the FCC start hanging other companies out to dry? ...or, do they feel that putting pressure on only one company will solve the problem?
Just -1, Troll talking to another.
The end users cannot unlock their modems.
They know what the up load at a set maximum speed will do to the network.
There are no real unknown unknowns with closed network math.
Light up some dark fiber, make it glow.
Put few new big boxes in.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
I'd rather see it continue. I don't go to Ars. I don't want to. I also do go to reuters. Or cnews. Or many other news sites. I expect slashdot to bring the most important news here, and that's why I come here. It's not like slashdot has original articles I can't find elsewhere. Every article on slashdot comes from somewhere else.
Look at all of the campaign promises being made by the people currently running for US President, and all of the lies being told by the current (and former) administration(s).
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
"Premium 56K Dial Up Internet Access"
I guess I never felt that slashdot will bring the important news to me. OR.....I should be more clear. I feel that slashdot should be aggregating news that isn't showing up in other major venues. I should see a story about some weird linux nonsense or something about the ESA or some such. I don't want to see something from "ars" or "cnet" every other day. That appears to be a very narrowly held viewpoint.
If your business model requires you to use another companies LIMITED resources for free or you go out of business, your business model is busted.
From the testing I have done, I have only seen throttling applied to external networks trying to download from me. All comcast customers appear to be able to download from me with no issue. So if these companies are in fact being throttled it is because they are using Comcast's bandwidth and transit to serve video to non comcast customers.
Your mileage may vary as the sandvine policies implemented may vary from region to region or even sandvine box to sandvine box.
If the FCC says that Comcast cannot manage their network, expect internet access to switch to a per bit pricing model. Everyone using p2p to seed those ever popular linux iso's might have a change of heart when they end up paying what it costs comcast, which is close to 30 bucks a meg.
People expect an internet service that has a best effort price but dedicated bandwidth performance. You can't have both. You can order your t1 for 500.00 a month, or you can have your best effort cable modem service. the kicker is.. the p2p abusers will stop when they have to pay for it, but the rest of us will have to live with the new pricing structure they forced the ISP's to adopt.
If they have promised and sold some bandwidth to a customer, the customer is not a "hog" if he/she takes all available bandwidth. And tragedy of commons doesn't apply here: the simple solution is to sell less bandwidth or have fewer customers. Also, I guess at least some ISP contracts are written so that an ISP can unilaterally change the provisions of an existing contract whenever it wants. If this is the case, an ISP can just alter its contract terms to provide lower bandwidth. But resetting uploads is a no-no.
Instead, they sell, sell, sell accounts with "unlimited" bandwidth at X speed; add something in their ToS that some unknown amount of usage is too much; and then blame their infrasture problems on those that use BitTorrent and the like (whether they are used for legal or illegal purposes) rather than on their own irresponsibility and money-grabbing.
I live in an old house, parts of which over 100 years old. (It's been heavily remodeled) Old enough that there's no meter on the water. We pay a flat rate. You could call this "unlimited" water because there is no specific limit on the water usage.
Technically, there's no particular reason why we couldn't run pipes over to our neighbors and run the whole block on our single water feed. In theory, I could turn on a faucet and use it as a fountain to feed some forever-flushing toilet art.
Except that would be fraud. See, even with my "unlimited" water source, there are practical limits, if not technical ones. If I were caught, the city would have every right to sue me for damages. I can't go in the business and sell water to southern California. (Yes, I live in Northern CA)
Your Internet pipe is not much different. No, you aren't being sold to specific limits. But the reality is that a very small percentage of the customers account for most of the bandwidth used. They don't want to worry about the 97% of the customers, they just want to put some limits on the last 3%, or get rid of them altogether.
That 3% is us. That includes the 120 TB of network traffic I accounted for last month on my DSL account. That's not BT traffic, that's mostly offsite backups of my business, but still, I know I'm in the "blood sucking leaches" category.
Now, let's talk about brass tacks: My company hosts servers. We have half a dozen in a top-notch hosting facility in Sacramento, CA on a 6Mb burstable contract. In short, we serve data at about a 6 Mb rate during my daily peaks. Yet a single cable customer could account for 6 Mb of data stream if they're set up right.
But while the cable customer pays $50/month for their 6 Mb service, we pay over $1,000 per month for my 6 Mb hosting contract, and I'm happy to pay that (damned cheap!) price. For that $1,200 per month, I get at 5 nines (99.999%) network uptime with dual network feeds, a half-rack, (about 20 U) 20 amps of redundant power, and the ability to burst up to 100 Mb during peak usage.
Are you noticing a small price disparity? $1,200 on my side, $50 on yours. Is that fair? Not that I mind the $1,000 price tag, it's a million-dollar business. The $1,200/mo is peanuts. But it's a big number compared to your $50/month.
Where was I going with this? I don't know. But the bottom line is that Mb isn't the only factor, and the telecoms aren't being as greedy as your limited experience would lead you to believe.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
they have absolutely no right to do that. does your landlord have the right to go into your appartment and tamper with your property ?
Back in 2002 is wasn't on Slashdot, but this stuff seems kind of interesting - i know now what they mean with "browse at -1 to spot abuse".
Are there any newer threads like this [1] ?
[1] http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=26315&cid=2850660
Yep, ComCast own the little bit of the internet between you and the rest of the world that isn't on ComCast, and probably operate a hell of a lot of hardware between you and the border router. What little of that they DON'T own is copper owned by some telcom carrier company between your house and your local phone exchange and ComCast are paying to license the use of that anyway :)
So yeah, ComCast can run the horse race however it likes. It can also run foxy boxing in the middle of the track too, while it does it. Their network. If you don't like it, get another ISP.
Net Neutrality is for morons. Only in the USA could you legislate that networks and routers that you own CANNOT be flow controlled, while strengthening physical international borders using biometrics, reshuffled border agencies and more strict immigration..
"Bandwith" apparentl;y is much like "rights" It's made up as we go along. Second, the only people who think they can take all of a shared resource (tragedy of the commons) are the same who failed remedial physics.
Tell me who exactly produces and allocates those resources? Right, ISPs do that. They're not like a common pasture or water body, they have an owner who manages them, so your tragedy of commons analogy is pure bullshit. It's perfectly within the capabilities of ISP to share AND PROMISE less resources from the beginning and do what they advertise. But they prefer false advertising.
Or the right customers but that's not politically correct in a finite world with infinite rights.
Yes, customers acquired through false advertising are not right customers. The ISP in question try to target a larger audience than they actually can handle without breaking their promises. This is a problem with their business model.
It also says that continued use is acceptance of those terms. I hope you're typing your reply over dial-up?
Why, I have a good ISP that doesn't advertise what it can't deliver. Also, where I live, I suppose that behavior like the one Comcast exhibits could lead to license withdrawal.
You know what, as much as I want Comcast to stop this RST packet shit, this argument, while I guess technically having some merit, isn't very convincing:
(1) Yeah, I agree, they shouldn't advertise unlimited if it isn't. Their equivocation on what "unlimited" means is sleazy, but...
(2) If you feel rooked, you *can* cancel service. What I don't like is I have no alternative to Comcast, but that's a completely separate issue.
(3) I doubt there's any Comcast reader or torrent junkie who doesn't know what Comcast is doing, so I'm a lot less sympathetic to this argument today. Whether they're dishonestly advertising unlimited or not, we know what they're doing, so we all know to seek out alternatives or not sign up.
We're arguing over fine-print. Now unless Comcast works differently in other locations than my own (I am a Comcast subscriber), there are no contracts anyone's locked into. You can cancel, and maybe go with DSL or something else if it is available.
My point is that I don't know how useful this argument is - that they advertise unlimited and goddamit, I'm going to max out my bandwidth 24/7 because of it. All you invite them to do is adjust their advertising verbiage a bit, and continue doing the same shit, which isn't going to help anyone.
We should be looking at why there's not more competition, why there is not more capacity, why the US is falling behind, broadband wise, and what can be done about this situation. As much as the self-righteous guardians of intellectual property rant about how THEY can't use their internet because of Warez kiddies (A situation I've never encountered, nor have I met anyone IRL who this has happened to), it will be interesting to see what they say as television and phone companies start pumping more and more data across the internet, and the same conditions occur because some octogenarian next door watching reruns of The Golden Girls, or some telecommuter is running massive system backups across his pipe.
Comcast has been a poor steward of them tubes, and what I'd really like to see is competition - something needs to light a fire under their ass to invest in their infrastructure - as others have pointed out, there's dark fiber all over the place, and the only thing that, in the long run, is going to make a damn bit of difference, is to hit their stockholders in the wallet. We need to figure out how to create conditions where this is possible. It is not, now, the way cable companies work, at least where I live.
But complaining about "false advertising" is just childish, even if it's true. We all *know* they don't really mean unlimited now, and the kind of people who don't know and sign up for Comcast are probably not people who give a crap about bittorrent. Let's move on; this argument is a tarpit.
The biggest problem that the cableco's like Comcast have is that the present DOCSIS protocol heavily favors a World Wide Web model where the provider transits a small number of short requests for the user and a large amount of downloaded content. It works OK for the smaller peer to peer stuff like Instant Messaging and some games with chat, but when you go to a full montey interactive model the cableco gets hammered by the upload traffic. The biggest pisser is the cableco's realize that the p2p apps, music and video are the hot stuff on the internet and getting them is aggressively marketed, while the network does everything they can get a way with to block them.
If it were a backbone bandwidth they could traffic shape at the boarder, and I could get lightening fast connections to other comcast user's but slower connections to non-comcast user's and nobody would even know because they would get good throughput, but the problem is in the "last mile". My son used to install cable tv systems, pole to pole not pole to house and he put a wavemeter on my cable connection, we're getting massive amounts of high frequency roll-off because they are pushing nearly 900MHz of signal through a 500 MHz coax; they'd probably go bankrupt upgrading everybody from RG56 cable to the high frequency RG6 like Belden 1694A, so instead they're going digital because it'll get by and buy them time.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
We call a rigged horse race a "boat race." Don't ask me how I know that.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
Over at Capitol Valley they've got a pretty good clue about how strong Vuze's reply is.
Basically, they hit the Republican Commissioners over the head with their own free market theories and say that if Comcast creates the market by entering the video distribution world (as opposed to just managing a network and controlling the flow to keep it fair for all users), they have to let the market decide if they are the bes provider of video instead of messing with their competitors under the guise of "network management."
I (heart) irony.
Yes, the network is oversold; the Internet (and packet-switched networks in general) is designed around the assumption that nobody uses 100% of their bandwidth 100% of the time. We could go back to circuit-switched networks, but who wants to pay $1000+/month for residential Internet access?
The problem isn't that they oversell. For the exact reason you point out, some overselling is the right thing to do. The problem is that they MASSIVELY oversell. They oversell beyond what the real usage patterns can support and they oversell way beyond the usage pattern they themselves suggest in their advertising (that is, to the point that they can't handle the traffic if people use the service the way the commercials suggest that they will). Then, they quietly sabotage some protocols (denying it until the proof is overwealming) and set secret limits. Then they just dump anyone who isn't psychic enough to figure out what the limit is and stay under it. To add insult to injury, they call those people abusers even though they never defined abuse in a useful enough way to avoid it.
They act as if they owe residents of a community nothing even though they couldn't even exist if not granted right of way by people who supposedly represent those residents.
They COULD be honest, admit to what they can and do really provide for the monthly fee and give "abusers" a way to monitor themselves and avoid exceeding what they have actually paid for. It's too bad they choose to lie instead.
That will happen when the Magic Free Bandwidth Fairies sprinkle their pixie dust on the backbone.
Seriously, it is economically impossible to run an ISP without overselling bandwidth. In fact, there's a special term for ISPs that analyze their customers' usage patterns and try to scale to demand, rather than to being able to provide 100% throughput to all customers simultaneously. In the trade, those ISPs are referred to as "not (yet) bankrupt".
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
I can vouch for that. I have had my VPN dropped every time I've used it since being with Comcast. It isn't automatic but it will eventually time out and disconnect itself.
It's even worse when they have a contract with the city I live in and no one else can even lay down lines. That shouldn't be legal.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. indymedia
You want every single ISP to be able to lay lines down?
A better solution is to have the company/government department that owns the lines be very regulated, with guarantees about service quality, etc. The main issue is to make sure that the lines get upgraded, like now with fiber, and whatever we use in the future. And then have the ISP(which has to be a separate company, open to competition) lease the lines from the connection provider for each person that is subscribed to that ISP.
Anything that involves cables going to a house/building is going to be a monopoly/oligarchy simply because people will not put up with every company laying their own wires. But, once you have a connection from a house to a central point, the monopoly can end, and competition can take over.
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
Maybe I was a bit hasty. But I'm with you there on the competition aspect, which seems to be hampering the innovation/upgrading of these services. Competition, or lack thereof, was the reason I was forced to sign up with the ISP who had a contract with the apartment complex I lived in, which I believe has been deemed illegal and now I'm still unable to get a competitive service since the only other ISP in the area, Adelphia, was bought by Comcast. I just hope wherever I move next has something other than Comcast.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. indymedia
No, you're missing the point. I said "rush-hour traffic". In rush-hour traffic, it doesn't matter how fast your car can go, or how fast the speed limits allow you to go, because the gridlock around you will bring your car to a complete halt on the freeway.
Or ISPs could stop over-selling their capacity, then no one would need to "police" themselves by making sure they use less than the bandwidth they're paying for.
But then if you are a Concast customers, you don't know what you are paying for (how much bandwidth do you get?). And if you upgrade to a business account like we did, you get more bandwidth. I asked, the salesdroid said it. When I asked how much more bandwidth do we get. His response?
"I don't know, just.... more".
Yeah, great company.
Has Comcast disconnected your Internet account? Same here. You can read about it at http://comcastissue.blogspot.com
I am a Comcast customer. Every time I update World of Warcraft, which does so via P2P, the client eventually loses its connection and appears to be "behind a firewall", making it use the direct download from Blizzard, instead of the P2P download method. Comcast are either a bunch of filthy, stinking liars or they're just grossly incompetent. They are hitting more than just pure upload P2P traffic when they "shape". No matter how you slice it, I want Comcast to get kicked in the teeth on this.
If your business model requires you to use another companies LIMITED resources for free or you go out of business, your business model is busted.
I have some sympathy for this position, however I do not find the pricing information you include in your article persuasive:
If the FCC says that Comcast cannot manage their network, expect internet access to switch to a per bit pricing model. Everyone using p2p to seed those ever popular linux iso's might have a change of heart when they end up paying what it costs comcast, which is close to 30 bucks a meg.
I rent a couple of colo servers, which do not tend to benefit near as much from overcommitment as the last mile, and if my colo company was paying 30 bucks a megabyte, let alone a megabit (if that's what you're claiming) I would be out of business. If you said 30 bucks a *gig* I'd still be suspicious, given the rates I'm paying for bandwidth. Can you elaborate on this point?
Consumers would rather grab the cheapest deal, ignore what they are actually buying and blame *evil corporations* than their own greed when the quality service they get on their 15 USD a month ADSL connection isn't as good as it is on hundreds-of-dollars-a-month SDSL package. The reality in the DSL market is that most (say in the order of 90%) customers have a service that is far LESS contended than advertised (although cable is more oversold, but then course cable tends to offer higher speeds in the first place
The problem is the guys (who often have 2 DSL accounts) and are hooked up to P2P, doing max utilisation day in and day out on their second line. The correct way to deal with them is traffic shaping, so they get a slower service (e.g. take the 5% of users pirating software like crazy and let them contend against each other, leaving the 95% of customers using the service reasonably with a top quality service and, in practice, no contention). However, building infrastructure to handle that is costly, particularly with regard to man hours of qualified staff, so many do the cheaper thing, and just ask (read: tell) the guys who are making the service unworkable to go find another provider.
Uhappy with that? Well get this:
You can be sure that providers who take on the expense of implementing proper QoS for residential DSL customers are going to use it (not least to try and claw some money back from the investment) - and that means enforcing their QoS for everybody (not just the very heavy P2P users), and would make things worse for the majority of customers. It's basically inevitable (as firmware gets better and QoS gets easier to impliment), and statistically that's going to negatively impact more customers, but given the amount of bitching by greedy customers - who's basic motivation for unlimited bandwith is the wholesale downloading of software and movies they haven't paid for in any case - I will have no sympathy.
Consumers get really cheap internet access rates because they are buying a service that is contented and bandwidth capped. High speed network connections with guaranteed 1:1 contention and all-the-bandwith-you-can-use cost hundreds of dollars a month, not 10 dollars a month.
There is plenty of choice out there - it's a case of pick the level of service you want and stop bitching. It's not rocket science.
I wasn't aware this was a problem specific to cable. Thanks for clearing that up for me.
A slightly ot note: When our cable company wanted us to switch to digital cable and internet over cable they only wanted to replace the converter in the basement of our house and replace the in-house infrastructure to a star topology (we have 16 parties living in the house). I wasn't aware that the cable type they currently use poses a problem. But we dropped cable anyways because they wanted us to sign a 15 year contract in exchange for the "upgrades". Satellite and DSL are not cheaper for us, but being bound to one technology for 15 years seems rather insane at the current stage of development. Who knows if there will be traditional television in 2023?
I don't read replies by ACs.