Slashdot Mirror
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 the 250GB limit will not be applied to traffic within Comcast's own network. Can you say anticompetitive? I thought so.
I regret that I only have one mod point to give per post.
Thank god. I hear eDonkey constitutes 99.9% of traffic on the tubes. It's not just a big truck ya know.