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.

Comments

Unix scheduling model for bandwidth?

[seanadams.com]

Comcast's problem has got me thinking, has anyone implemented a QOS mechanism that works like *nix CPU time allocation? In simple terms that's where a task's priority is determined as an inverse function of the amount of CPU time it wants. It seems to me the same thing should work just fine for bandwidth allocation. You just let interactive connections have as much as they want, and the continuous hogs get whatever is left - but you do this in a protocol-agnostic way that is based solely on demand.

But: this only would be appropriate if your goal is to deliver maximal performance under full link utilization. I don't know if this is a real problem for the cable providers - I doubt if last-mile congestion is as big an issue as people think. Probably they are more concerned about reducing their total cost for bandwidth to the internet. In that case the strategy of temporarily throttling the hogs seems reasonable and fair because it is protocol-agnostic, but ONLY if the specifics of this mechanism are disclosed to the customer, and this service is NOT advertised as "unlimited".

Re:Unix scheduling model for bandwidth?

[eln]

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.

Re:Unix scheduling model for bandwidth?

[Lumpy]

Last mile congestion for comcast is not a problem. the problem is they only have t3 bandwidth where they should have oc12 bandwidth and dont want to upgrade their headend connections to internet backbones. I know of one market that was consolidated with a fiber backbone and they eliminated 4 headends into 1. they did NOT upgrade the connection in the main headend to take account for the added load from all the other communities rolled into it.

THAT is what is happening, they want to be an ISP but dont want to do any of the ISP things like upgrading your backend. Because that's expensive.

Re:Unix scheduling model for bandwidth?

[dgatwood]

So set the limit at 6 Mbps. What, you mean Comcast can't deliver a continuous 5Mbps to all their customers? Are you telling me they oversold their bandwidth? Say it ain't so. :-D

But seriously, the right solution is to make VOD use multicast and treat multicast rates as the number of bytes streamed divided by the number of clients. Use the local hard drive as a very large cache, and by the end of the movie, you have the whole thing on your HD and aren't consuming any bandwidth. The notion of "live" streaming of movies off a hard drive in some server farm in a unicast client-server style is so 1985 (prior to RFC-966). After all, this is precisely what multicast was designed to do. If it doesn't get the job done, create a new RFC and a new underlying packet routing protocol that does, but could the cable companies PLEASE quit jerking everybody's chain and saying "Oh noes, VOD can haz mor bandwidth?" It got tiresome ten years ago. Now, it no longer qualifies as comedy and falls squarely into the bucket marked "that's just sad".

Awesome

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Awesome. So now I can stop my DOS attacks for 20 minutes at a time, and let comcast take over?

Or else what?

[Drakin020]

What is the FCC going to do...Send another strongly worded letter?

Seriously, I want to see something actually happen for once.

Why single them out?

[Statecraftsman]

Is there some reason why they aren't asking Time Warner, Cox, AT&T and others each about their practices? The best reason I can think of is that Comcast was caught sending the RSTs.

If the internet is to be free of this sort of tainted service, the protocols that the internet was built on need to be followed and implemented in good faith. Any deviations need to be made crystal clear so we consumers and businesses can make informed decisions about the tradeoffs. Comcast, I'm not just looking at you.

Re:Don't start celebrating

[loteck]

FCC is asserting authority over Internet Providers, or, put another way, the people who control the resources that the public relies on. Completely different than asserting authority over the content of usage of the internet. In fact, the FCC appears to be specifically positioning itself out of having to deal with questions of content. It's almost like they want to have 'neutrality'.. seems like I've heard that word used somewhere recently...

Now ya done it.

[bigtallmofo]

The FCC rejects Comcast's insistence that it does not have the authority to take these steps.

Want to royally piss off any governmental agency? Tell them they don't have the authority to do what they're doing. They'll find SOME way to get you.

New Comcast ToC

[Nom du Keyboard]

The New Comcast ToC is clear and concise:

You can pay for all the bandwidth that you want
as long as you don't use it.