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Comcast Discloses Throttling Practices
Wired reports that Comcast finally provided information on its network management practices late Friday. In a report to the FCC (PDF), the cable company admitted to targeting P2P protocols Ares, BitTorrent, eDonkey, FasTrack, and Gnutella. Quoting:
"For each of the managed P2P protocols, the [Sandvine Policy Traffic Switch] monitors and identifies the number of simultaneous unidirectional uploads that are passed from the [Cable Modem Termination System] to the upstream router. Because of the prevalence of P2P traffic on the upstream portion of our network, the number of simultaneous unidirectional upload sessions of any particular P2P protocol at any given time serves as a useful proxy for determining the level of overall network congestion. For each of the protocols, a session threshold is in place that is intended to provide for equivalently fair access between the protocols, but still mitigate the likelihood of congestion that could cause service degradation for our customers."
That is worded to basically say 'if the bandwidth is available, anyone can do anything' but from what I've been reading, those affected have been saying it's 'no p2p no matter what.'
They're lying.
But either way, the idea of throttling is bunk. If their networks cannot handle the service they sell, then they need to upgrade their networks.
Anything an ISP limits - whether it be browsing certain sites, severely limiting upload speed, or throttling p2p - is limiting free speech. They need to watch themselves. It's not hard to see that the 'big media' companies essentially want the Internet to turn into cable TV - where the customers are zombies that cannot contribute.
Comcast offers a voip product. Would anyone like to guess how the throttling practice was applied to traffic that was catagorized as VOIP but was not associated with Comcast's subscription service? Can anyone out there say anti-competitive practice? Real easy for Comcast to put those copyright infringers out front as the rationale for this policy but when one reads between the lines..... things are not quite as pristine as outlined. Connect the dots and get a clue.
Choice? I wish! In my area Comcast bought out everyone and now they are the only player in the game. Needless to say their service is horrible and their customer service is horrendous! Something really needs to be done about these ridiculous cable monopolies.
The US is a capitalist economy, right ? Isn't the market supposed to fix this ?
Where I live (small city in the Netherlands), I can choose from dozens of ISP's, there's also at least 10 different power companies to choose from. Also, it's always possible to move to an area where there are more or better ISP's to choose from.
Personally I don't thinks this has anything to do with what they claim. I see it more as comcast realizing that people are starting to get content from iTunes, or off the Xbox 360 or from Netflix and they are going to lose cable advertising dollars as well as customers paying for pay per view or home box office type services. Cable companies do not have a history of being customer friendly and have pretty much always taken the position of "you will pay us through the nose for our crappy signal and you will damn well like it" attitude. Now consumers are getting some choices of how to get their entertainment and I'm sure this just burns them up. So if they give you a 250 gig limit now, you can bet it won't stay that high and you can bet that if they can start throttling traffic they will. If it takes mom 14 hours to download that episode of Lost in HD, you can be sure she will just go back to the lovely ad packed version on TV. Just like newspapers, cable tv has become irrelevant and we all just want pipes to our homes, not the crap they give us over them. Just like when AOL came along and shook up the industry with the one price for all you can eat internet, someone will come along again and kick these greedy crooks in the nuts.