Slashdot Mirror
Comcast Has 30 Days To 'Fess Up About P2P Throttling
negRo_slim writes with some welcome news from Ars Technica: "Comcast has 30 days to disclose the details of its 'unreasonable network management practices' to the Federal Communications Commission, the agency warned Wednesday morning as it released its full, 67-page Order. As FCC Chair Kevin Martin said it would, the Commission's Order rejects the ISP giant's insistence that its handling of peer-to-peer applications was necessary. 'We conclude that the company's discriminatory and arbitrary practice unduly squelches the dynamic benefits of an open and accessible Internet,' the agency declares." And from reader JagsLive comes news that Comcast has a different plan in place to deal with heavy bandwidth users: slow traffic for up to 20 minutes at a time to users who are grabbing the most bits.
What is the FCC going to do...Send another strongly worded letter?
Seriously, I want to see something actually happen for once.
The greatest revenge in life is massive success.
This type of throttling seems like it could be a real problem for Video On Demand applications, since suddenly slowing down your connection when you're streaming video could result in some pretty lousy viewing experiences.
Since Comcast itself seems like one of the companies poised to go into Video On Demand in a big way, this strategy seems like shooting themselves in the foot. Sure, they could have it throttle only if it's not Comcast's VOD, but then they run into the same issue with the FCC that they currently have with the P2P throttling.
I don't see how Comcast can do real content-agnostic throttling without screwing with its own content offerings. I guess that's the problem with being a bandwidth provider and a content provider at the same time.
for instance. The minute Starbucks stock stopped earning gobs of money, the greedy investors got cold feet and ditched their shares. What we need to do to battle Comcast is not to go through the FCC, but to scare the investors. We know we can't convince subscribers to give up the service, so we should hit them in the ball sack.
pay based on how much bandwidth you use- say 25 cents a gig + 10$/month for the connection its self- that way it regulates its self. you use more, you pay more and it doesn't matter what kind of data it is. the isps get more $ for more traffic they get and consumers don't get throttled nor do those who don't use much pay truckloads for the privilage of just getting online. [in fact data use would somewhat be encourageable by isps because they'd make more] it works for utilities like water, gas, electric etc why not here too?
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
They're not just throttling P2P. At a company that will remain nameless, we caught Comcast RST-throttling HTTPS traffic generated by our business software.
Said company is nameless because management doesn't want to expose what Comcast is up to. Says it makes them look bad.
Also, since net neutrality is not the law, that sort of throttling might even be legal.
Well I'm not a lawyer nor American...But due to their size, can't it be considered as unfair practices against the competition? (other VOD providers?)
How can I put Time Warner in their place? What data do I need to collect? Are there law firms I should contact with the data who would be likely to pursue a class action lawsuit? Paying to be abused like this is outrageous.
I'd hate to consider the financial consequences of getting recruited into a botnet. Could you imagine finding out that you have a virus when you receive a $200+ cable bill?
greed@All_Evils:~#
So it is all well and good that people think this is about torrent and p2p, but I have seen the browser experience degraded also. And after enough resets, some things fail. I hate that. I have no other choice but to remain with comcast as the alternative to my 16Mb broadband is lousy DSL at 1.5Mb. Those are my only choices, except for satellite and I cannot do that.