Competitors Ally With Comcast In FCC P2P Filings

crocoduck writes "Right before the deadline passed for filing comments in the FCC investigation of Comcast's traffic-management practices, telecoms and other cable companies submitted a slew of comments defending Comcast's actions to the FCC. 'Just about every big phone company has filed a statement challenging the FCC's authority to deal with this problem. AT&T, Verizon, and Qwest all submitted lengthy remarks on February 13th, the last day for comments on the proceeding (parties can still reply to comments through the 28th). "The Internet marketplace remains fundamentally healthy, and the purported 'cure' could only make it sick," AT&T's filing declared. "At best, the network-management restrictions proposed by Free Press and others would inflict wasteful costs on broadband providers in the form of expensive and needless capacity upgrades — costs that would ultimately be passed through to end users, raise broadband prices across the board, and force ordinary broadband consumers to subsidize the bandwidth-hogging activities of a few."' P2P fans have also weighed in."

Comments

Needless?

[MachineShedFred]

"expensive and needless capacity upgrades" which the US Taxpayers ALREADY PAID FOR THROUGH EXCISE FEES?!

The telcos can eat a bag of dicks.

Western countries' telecoms seem crotchety

[CRCulver]

In my experience in Eastern Europe, customers that heavily use bandwidth are the average customer. I know hardly a single household that doesn't massively download music and films. Nonetheless, the local ISPs can keep monthly fees down to what is even by local standards cheap, and people are increasingly getting fiber to their door. Funny how the U.S., that beacon of technological progress, is being outdone by some former Communist states.

Translation

[Wildclaw]

Translations:

marketplace remains fundamentally healthy, the non market driven place where the minimal competition allows us to dicate all the terms, remains a good place for us to squeeze money.

and the purported 'cure' could only make it sick, the suggested changes would make it more difficult for us to squeeze money out of our customers.

"At best, the network-management restrictions proposed by Free Press and others would inflict wasteful costs on broadband providers in the form of expensive and needless capacity upgrades The suggested changes would force us to spend money on upgrades, that we could avoid spending by capping everyone so much that they become unneeded.

ordinary broadband consumers customers who hardly use the broadband they paid for.

the bandwidth-hogging activities of a few. the activities that we advertise our services for, but that we don't want our customers to use.

Re:Another car ananolgy

[funaho]

Actually a better analogy would be that they're forcing all the sports cars to stay in first gear, and just to be sure they're throwing up fake stop signs every so often to slow down traffic flow.

Amazing

[alphastar]

This whole argument strikes me with this odd thought:

Some Peer-to-Peer protocols (i.e., BitTorrent) were developed in order to take the burden of content distribution _away_ from the "dedicated server" (do reduce demand on bandwidth) and push it more on the users engaged in retrieving.

Comcast and ilk seem to be arguing in favor of the _exact opposite_ of this point.

Re:THERE'S A SIMPLE SOLUTION - used by interstates

[mrchaotica]

In a competitive environment where multiple choices exist...

Sure, but the reality is exactly the opposite of that!

Here's reality:

• There is exactly one cable ISP. It is the same company that provides cable TV, and has a government-mandated monopoly on cable right-of-way. Where I live, it's Comcast.
• There is exactly one DSL ISP. It is the same company that provides phone service, and has a government-mandated monopoly on phone line right-of-way. Where I live, it's the AT&T.
• The cable ISP and DSL ISP collude to provide about the same speed for about the same price. Around here, that's $40/month for 6Mbps download (if your wire is brand new, in pristine condition, and there's nobody else connected to the same CMTS or DSLAM).
• Satellite Internet doesn't count as broadband (because upload is via modem).
• Cellular Internet is too expensive and slow, and always will be by its inherent nature.
• Verizon FiOS doesn't exist. As far as I can tell, it's just a lie perpetuated by Verizon in order to keep the government from demanding all that taxpayer money (that was supposed to be used for upgrading the infrastructure) back.

Non-broadband options, such as satellite and dialup, are entirely irrelevant -- unless, of course, you get a warm fuzzy feeling knowing that our situation is slightly better than some rural, 4th-world Hellhole where they've only recently decided that not shitting in the drinking water was a good idea. I, for one, think we ought to hold ourselves to higher standards than that!

Besides, not even cable and DSL count as real broadband! Real broadband, like they have in Europe and (especially) Asia, is in the tens or even hundreds of Mbps range. What we've got here is lies and excuses caused by insufficient regulation of a decidedly non-free market!

In reality, there are two solutions:

• Force the telco and cableco monopolies to follow through with their promises by actually regulating them.
• Entirely deregulate the industry, including removing all exclusive right-of-way agreements, and demand repayment of the billions of taxpayer dollars the industry has received in infrastructure subsidies over the years.