Comcast Outlines New Broadband Policy

Slatterz writes "US cable provider Comcast has presented its long-term solution for managing broadband traffic. The new system is set at putting to bed a minor scandal that erupted around the company when it was found that Comcast deliberately limited traffic for certain applications. The company said that under its new system, traffic will be analyzed every fifteen minutes. Users who are found to be occupying large amounts of bandwidth will be placed at a lower priority for network access behind users with less bandwidth-intensive traffic. The new system will not replace or be related to the company's earlier installment of bandwidth caps, which limited a user's data intake to 250GB per month."

Comments

Dang...

[Kid Zero]

There are only two games in town: ATT's DSL (slow) and Comcast (Fast, but with strings).

What's the point of having the internet when you can't do anything on it?

Re:Dang...

[arbiter1]

the program might look at how much you downloaded in that 15 period and if that is the case that idea will be pointless

Re:Dang...

[lgw]

At&T's DSL gives me more performance than Comcast will allow you to sustain. Comcast offers a faster burst rate, but how useful is that really? If you're just dowloading a few K, 6M bps is fine.

But personally I'll never do business with a cable company no matter how bad the alternatives are. The only thing worse than a big telco is a cable company!

Re:Dang...

[peragrin]

right up until your skype or vonage sessions are interperted as too much bandwidth. Also video chat is the kind of thing that will probably set this off.

lots of high bandwidth low latency connections are required by many programs to provide features that dial up couldn't.

Re:Dang...

[Drakin020]

I'm sorry, I didn't know limiting yourself to 250GB a month was "I can't do anything"

Seriously?

Re:Dang...

[Kadin2048]

The solution then is to rate-limit at the router or TCP stack, or for applications to start being more careful about how much bandwidth they use -- just because a user has 6.0Mbps available for peak speed, doesn't mean that applications should assume that they can or should use as much of it as possible, all the time.

P2P applications have had rate-limiting controls for a long time; it's probably about time for Skype and video-chat applications to have them too. Skype is particularly bad in this regard because it automatically defaults to the highest-quality codec that a connection supports. While this might make sense on fixed-bandwidth connections, it's not great for the majority of broadband connections, which have the capability of pushing a high peak speed, but shouldn't be expected to sustain that peak for very long. (And this isn't a bad thing or rare, either; lots of "real" internet connections are the same way. You can buy a 100Mb pipe because you occasionally need the full 100 megabits, even though you can't afford to saturate it 24/7. I'd wager most SLAed connections at .coms and .edus are like this.)

In general, it's a pretty fair policy, especially because it only goes into effect when a neighborhood node starts to become congested. (Unlike their 250GB/mo cap and their old policy, which didn't care whether you were actually competing for resources with anyone else.) If I'm using huge amounts of bandwidth for Skype or video-chat, to the point where my neighbors are being affected even though they're just trying to check their mail and log off, they're not going to care what application I'm using. It's fundamentally no different, to anyone else in my neighborhood, if I'm taking up all the bandwidth on the upstream node with VoIP calls, Linux ISOs, or midget porn. They all have the same effect on my network neighbors, and all should get me throttled.

What needs to happen, is applications need to get smarter about their bandwidth consumption. If a VoIP program finds itself getting throttled (increased latency), it should try dialing down its bandwidth usage -- by choosing a tighter codec, perhaps -- and seeing if the situation improves.

Re:Dang...

[ivan256]

It would be really unfortunate if VoIP was considered "too much", considering that VoIP is a low-bandwidth application that depends on latency more than throughput.

You can easily use more bandwidth casually surfing the web than you ever will talking on the phone using VoIP.

There is a three orders of magnitude difference between a high-quality VoIP call and a BitTorrent download. It should be easier than trivial for them to configure this so the former doesn't get throttled, but the latter does.

Re:Dang...

[cmacb]

What's the point of having the internet when you can't do anything on it?

The part of the system where you send them money every month is working just fine. I have inside information that they are not planning to disrupt that in any way.

Re:Dang...

[skroops]

So this only hurts the dumb.

Every bittorrent client I've ever used has easy to set upstream and downstream limits. Simply set your upstream and downstream to 65% and 75% of you're max connection and you'll never be slowed down.

Re:Dang...

[ChuBie]

I hate to say it, but the above email sounds fair.

I just hope Comcast implements it as laid out in their email.

Re:Dang...

[ChuBie]

One question--when does the system remove that flag from your port.

For example, is your port still marked with a low QoS value after the trunk/downstream connection is no longer congested?

Is it removed after 15 minutes, hours, days?

Re:Dang...

[stmfreak]

Not quite. If your QoS on your line is set to higher priority, then when a congestion event is reached, all your packets wait until lower priority packets clear the queue. That could be indefinitely... or at least until the congestion level clears.

Given Comcast's reputation for overselling and under provisioning, this could be a death sentence for indiscriminate torrent users.

Re:Dang...

[Kadin2048]

In a word, yes.

The nice thing about the new Comcast policy -- and I say that unsarcastically, because I think it is a good thing -- is that it doesn't care about the kind of traffic you're pushing. It doesn't try to separate out intent; it doesn't care whether what you're doing is "illegal".

So yes, people watching a lot of YouTube will get throttled. It's even possible that people watching a lot of YouTube will even be throttled before people downloading warez, if the people downloading warez keep their bandwidth under control.

This is exactly as it should be. It's no good for the ISPs to start turning into content police. For them to determine what content is legal and what's illegal would require intrusive deep-packet inspection, and maybe even blocking encrypted traffic or performing MITMs to get around it. It's far better not to go there and to just count packets.

Plus, it doesn't matter to your neighbors what, exactly, you're doing with the bandwidth -- if you're hogging the upstream to the point where there's contention, it's irrelevant what happens to be inside your bits, just that there's too many of them.

Re:Dang...

[Kadin2048]

Well, the interesting thing to consider is that there are situations where a node might get congested, but nobody would get throttled. I'd hope that if that situation occurs, Comcast will realize it's a sign that the node is oversubscribed and break it up.

The QoS deprioritization only kicks in if the whole node is "Near Congestion" (to use their term), and if an individual user is close to pegging the needle for 15+ minutes. It's entirely possible that a node might become congested without meeting the second criteria.

E.g.: Lets say a node has 300 users connected, and it has a 1Gb/s backhaul. (We'll imagine that all the traffic is either symmetric, or only deal with one direction, just for clarity.) Users only get throttled when they're at 70% of their allotted peak. If each of those 300 users has a 6Mb/s plan, they could all be holding steady just under 70% -- low enough to avoid throttling -- but still saturate the node. In fact, they only have to each be at around 56% utilization for full saturation of the upstream link.

If Comcast sticks to its word about the throttling cutoffs -- and I admit that coming from Comcast that may be a bit too much to expect -- they won't be able to use it to stave off equipment upgrades forever, in the face of new services that cause large numbers of users to start sucking down bits. If everyone in the neighborhood decides to watch IPTV or do video chat at once, there's going to be contention, and the throttling setup they've created won't do a thing about it.

Re:Dang...

[Tacvek]

When it is not congested (congested means 100% utilization, so some packets from somebody must get dropped or delayed) the QOS system has no impact, all your packets are routed the moment they are received, regardless of your QOS low-priority flag.

I'm pretty sure the QOS low priorty flag lasts only for the 15 minute interval, unless you stay above the thresh-hold and the port stays at near-congestion level, in which case the flag is extended for the next 15 minutes.

Not such a bad idea

[Aphoxema]

I can deal with that, it's fair and doesn't really stomp on anyone's feet. So what if users eat up all the available bandwidth? Just make it fair who eats up more than others.

Re:Not such a bad idea

[RabidMoose]

I agree. This way of load balancing seems incredibly fair. However, the first time I get close to the 250gb cap, I'm heading over to Qwest and finding out how much an FTTP install costs.

Re:Not such a bad idea

[BobMcD]

I agree. This way of load balancing seems incredibly fair. However, the first time I get close to the 250gb cap, I'm heading over to Qwest and finding out how much an FTTP install costs.

Which is EXACTLY the way the free market is intended to work. Comcast gets the business they want, and Qwest gets to sell a service they offer.

Free markets, FTW.

Re:Not such a bad idea

[Anonymous Coward]

Free markets, you say? They get to use publicly funded infrastructure to rake us over the coals. They block competition. The broadband/telecom market is most decidedly not a free market.

If you want to see what free market broadband looks like, look at Asian countries. They have 20+ megabit un-metered connections, at a fraction of the price our duopolies grant us. And that's the low end.

Re:Not such a bad idea

[LunaticTippy]

I must not have read that properly. Did you just say that telcos and cable companies are free market?

Re:Not such a bad idea

[Wildclaw]

Yup. As someone who usually complain about these companies not doing things neutrally, I don't really have anything to stand on this time. This is basically how it should work. It is the network neutral way of doing things. Don't analyze the type or destination, but instead just look at the traffic you are causing. If you are using more than your fair share, you get put behind the one who has used less.

There only is so much bandwidth during primetime and to divide fairly among all users you have to do something. The system mentioned in the article is about as fair as you can get. It doesn't matter if it is video streaming or bittorrent, you shouldn't be able to use more than your fair share. Yes, high quality video streaming is probably hit, but that is because it is an incredibly wasteful type of technology, requiring high bandwidth during primetime when the user online.

Of course, you can still complain about comcast not providing enough last mile bandwidth, having a too high oversubscription ratio, but that is a different matter. As an actual packet prioritizing scheme, this is a good one.

Re:Not such a bad idea

[kefkahax]

I can deal with that, it's fair and doesn't really stomp on anyone's feet. So what if users eat up all the available bandwidth? Just make it fair who eats up more than others.

It's not fair, because the problem is NOT the p2p users. The problem is the oversubscribed. It's their problem, not their users'. They're just pushing the charges to fix it onto you, by fucking with those of us that use the FULL service, that we pay for.

I'm not that pissed about it, I'm an American. So, I'm used to getting pissed on and sometimes even shit on, by just about every single utility and government agency we have (DMV). And people call us capitalist [pssshh]. The average American wouldn't know capitalism from facism, and I bet certain people are counting on that. (No, not Comcast, they're probably impartial to capitalism and facism).

In short: They didn't stop fucking you, they just applied some lube. But, only for certain customers, the rest of us will still be getting the "raw end" of the deal.

Re:Not such a bad idea

[Carnildo]

It's not fair, because the problem is NOT the p2p users. The problem is the oversubscribed.

Comcast internet is 6Mbps at $60 a month. A dedicated T1 line is 1.5Mbps at $700 a month. You know why the T1 costs ten times as much even though it's only a quarter as fast? It's not oversubscribed.

Backwards?

[businessnerd]

Users who are found to be occupying large amounts of bandwidth will be placed at a lower priority for network access behind users with less bandwidth-intensive traffic

So they're saying that if I am doing something that requires more bandwidth, I will get less bandwidth; and when I don't need much bandwidth, they're going to give me more? I'm really confused by this. Can anyone make sense of this for me?

Re:Backwards?

[Fulcrum of Evil]

No, it means that bulk transfers are lower priority than someone checking email, since that's fairly low load and interactive.

Re:Backwards?

[Anonymous Coward]

You're confusing bandwidth with latency. These are two separate measures for any data transfer.

If I'm just copying a file from point A to point B, I might require a huge amount of bandwidth (it's a big file), but I won't be too concerned if it takes 10 seconds or if it takes 15 seconds.

On the other hand, if I'm using VOIP, my bandwidth isn't very big, but I want my packets getting through without unnecessary delays; it makes a huge difference if some packets are delayed a few seconds.

Of course, there's also things like streaming video, which may require large bandwidth and consistent latency (doesn't have to be super low latency). These strain both measures.

Re:Backwards?

[RobBebop]

when I don't need much bandwidth, they're going to give me more?

Prioritization is not the same as giving you more bandwidth. You packets are just dispatched through their servers faster than the lower priority ones. The net effect is that you get less bandwidth when the routers are overloaded (which is VERY sensible), but when the routers are not overloaded then you will get the quicker speeds (at least, that would be a fair understanding of how it *should* work).

The theory is that casual users are more deserving of the higher speeds and more appreciative of getting content quicker, whereas somebody who is spending 15+ minutes downloading a single thing is going to be more forgiving that it takes 4 hours instead of 2 hours to arrive.

Personally, I think Comcast's goal is to degrade internet streaming video to the point where it matches their cable services with the "Occasional 5 Second Pause" (TM) where the service goes apeshit and becomes unusable.

Full disclosure: I won't give Comcast a dime, and am waiting patiently for more capable internet to come to my neighborhood. Value = price + quality... and IMHO Comcast is simply a bad value.

Re:Backwards?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but the FCC says that Comcast must be neutral with respect to application type, so Comcast is complying. If that means that high-bandwidth streaming media gets hosed, well, take that up with the FCC.

Re:Backwards?

[RobBebop]

Shouldn't that be more like:: Value = quality / price

Value is quite obviously maximized when quality is high and price is low, and minimized when quality is low and price is high... so the ratio formula seems to be quite logical.

However, normalization between quality and price is necessary to make complex decisions that are not mathematical in nature easier to solve. Quality can be measured in lifetime, image quality, speed, or ease-of-use. Price can be measured in fixed or variable costs, cost to repair, and cost to replace. All these factors evaluate together so individual consumers can decide value for themselves (and it varies widely from person to person).

Thus, "price" and "quality" are reduced to numbers between 0.0 and 1.0 so that summing them together can produce a "value" measurement where a value > 1.0 would indicate a product which should be considered for purchase.

For me, I don't think Comcast will ever get a 1.0 for value (on my arbitrary rating system).

Re:Backwards?

[Wildclaw]

It is simple. The more bandwidth you use, the less priority you will get.

Streaming audio, not so much. It doesn't use that much bandwidth.

Streaming video will suffer. Really, those people who download huge files during primetime (mainly streaming that can't schedule downloads) are hurting the network far more than someone who download/upload large amounts of data during the night. The p2p bogeyman is getting tired of taking all the blame.

OK, but can we help?

[SleptThroughClass]

Low priority for large transfers is fine with me, but can we mark which data should be high priority? So we can download a movie from Comcast-Buy-A-Movie-Service in the background while online with Halo 3?

Re:OK, but can we help?

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately, I believe they are more interested in forcing you to buy movies from their OnDemand cable TV system or watch TV over their digital TV, rather than using the internet to get movies and TV which may, or more likely may not be from their service.

This, I believe, is why they are limiting downloads to 250G a month. So you don't go online to watch your TV shows and movies and not need their 65+ a month digital TV. They want to charge you lots for cable TV.

Why increase capacity when you can charge more money instead?! That's what they think.

Anyone else agree? Disagree?

What...?

[MikeRT]

What's the point of having the internet when you can't do anything on it?

What legal activity are you doing from home that takes over 250GB of data and requires that you always have a blazing fast connection? Sheesh, give them a chance to balance this out so that a few miscreants can't ruin it for everyone else.

Re:What...?

[Fulcrum of Evil]

So suddenly any large use of BW is illegal? Way to distract from the point.

Re:What...?

[ajparr]

If you must know, I'm jerking off to time-delayed video of myself jerking off sent to my server on the other side of the world and back. I do this for 8-12 hours each day. ...then again... What business is it of ANYONE's what I'm doing with my bandwidth? What ever happend to innocent until proven guilty? Sheesh!

Re:What...?

[Pathwalker]

Offsite backups.

My disk array syncs to a disk array about 2000 miles away, and that one syncs to mine.

I used about 230G last month, and that was the largest part.

The next largest component was torrents of lectures (such as this machine learning class offered by Stanford).

Re:What...?

[HiVizDiver]

I'm not sure why this was modded -1, Flamebait. The parent makes a good point - as I posted in a semi-related thread a couple of days ago, I rented a movie from the Playstation store as an HD rental. The filesize was 6275 MB (around 6 GB). This download definitely saturated my connection, as I had the whole thing in around 2 hours. I realize that Comcast has a way of telling (or maybe they don't, who knows) P2P traffic from a straight download, but ultimately the question is the same - if I'm blasting a 6 GB file download in an hour or two, does that piss them off? Because I'm going to be mad if it does, since it was a perfectly legitimate use of the service that I'm paying for (vs. some "gray area" activities).

Re:What...?

[vux984]

You could always upgrade to a class of service that doesn't have the caps, or has caps in line with what you require.

A system in which people like you who use 100s or thousands of gigabytes per month pay more than people who use 10 or 15 a year seems entirely fair to me.

Re:What...?

[c0d3g33k]

I can't speak for everyone, but I do bioinformatics/computational biology and often telecommute when consulting or to continue the days work at home when deadlines are tight. Depending on the project or analysis task, having local copies of public scientific databases is very useful (eg. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Database/). These databases are rather large and are growing rapidly. Since terabyte drives have become affordable, it's become feasible to maintain up-to-date personal copies at home rather than accessing them via NFS at work or working with representative subsets.

Perfectly legal, legitimate and probably more useful to society than streaming HD content. This is the kind of stuff we used the internet for back before it hit the bigtime, so as legitimate a use of the internet as what people now consider "normal use" (web browsing, shopping, watching video, streaming music, and yes I do those too).

Re:What...?

[kimvette]

Uh, let's see:

  - Downloading F/OSS software?
  - hulu.com?
  - Various TV networks?
  - Netflix?
  - VOIP?

Face it: (IMHO) Comcast is afraid of streaming video sites, and are using P2P as an excuse to curb competition. They do not want to happen to them what happened to land line telephone companies when cellular and VOIP took off.

Re:What...?

[Wildclaw]

if I'm blasting a 6 GB file download in an hour or two, does that piss them off? Because I'm going to be mad if it does, since it was a perfectly legitimate use of the service that I'm paying for (vs. some "gray area" activities).

If you do it during primetime when everyone else is on and the bandwidth is saturated, Yes. And by pissed off, I mean that your traffic will get less priority and slow down to avoid you hogging all the availible bandwidth.

If you are doing it during the night when there is plenty of availible bandwidth, No. Sure, you will still get deprioritized, but it doesn't matter as the bandwidth isn't saturated and you will be just another bulk downloader making use of the less "crowdy" nights.

Re:What...?

[Anonymous Coward]

I won't "piss them off", but if I am your neighbor and I want to open a small web page somewhere, I want to get my share of the bandwidth. This system will give my traffic priority until it adds up to enough bits to match yours.

Re:What...?

[Skye16]

Then shouldn't the people who use 10 or 15 a year pay considerably less than they are now?

After all, the only reason pricing is at this point is because they reasoned that the people using the service at only 5% capacity would effectively subsidized the others who use it at 100% capacity.

If you're now making those who would use it at 100% capacity pay more for service, shouldn't those who are only using a fraction of the network capacity get a major discount to their connectivity?

Re:What...?

[Anonymous Coward]

Making backups is hardly a "business class task"...

Re:What...?

[UncleTogie]

You are the reason these policies have been put into place. By using consumer internet for business class tasks, you have screwed us all.

Yes, how DARE he use a resource that was underspec'd and oversold! It's all his fault that Comcast uses shady business practices!

...now get off our lawn...

Re:What...?

[Anonymous Coward]

It should be blatantly obvious what Comcast's strategy is here. They introduce a cap that is much larger than the average user's usage. That way the majority of their users accept the cap without much protest. Now think of a second if the cap will only affect a small percentage (say less than 1%) of users how much money/bandwidth are they really going to save? Not all that much. But again that's not the point. The point is to introduce a cap in order to make it part of their bandwidth policy.

Now in time as users fully accept a cap, Comcast will slowly creep the cap down from 250 GB. It's a whole lot cheaper (millions of dollars) to simply change a number than to lay down more fiber. Of course Comcast will invest in more bandwidth but not as much as they should. Only enough to to say have a "fastlane" service for those who wish to not have a cap on their services.

Re:What...?

[vux984]

Then shouldn't the people who use 10 or 15 a year pay considerably less than they are now?

Perhaps a bit less, but not necessarily considerably less. (After all, there is considerable fixed overhead to a DSL line on top of the bandwidth, those 5% bandwidth users consume telephone support, need their "modems" fixed, have line trouble, etc at the same rate as the 100% users.)

After all, the only reason pricing is at this point is because they reasoned that the people using the service at only 5% capacity would effectively subsidized the others who use it at 100% capacity.

That's true to a point, but its a gross oversimplification.

If you're now making those who would use it at 100% capacity pay more for service, shouldn't those who are only using a fraction of the network capacity get a major discount to their connectivity?

Let me give you an example to illustrate my point.

Lets say we have a service that costs $20 for the average person. But instead we charge $21. So if 1000 people pay 21$ instead of 20$ for a service, that subsidizes the 1% of people who uses $120 worth of service. Are you with me?

So costs are: 990 people use $20 worth of service ($19800) plus 10 people use $120 worth of service ($1200) = $21000.
While revenue is: 1000 people * $21 = $21000.

So the low end users are subsidizing the high end users, and we 'break even'.
That's more or less how the subsidy works in reality.

So if we start charging those 10 people $120 directly. We can afford to knock a whole dollar off everyone else's plan? Big flipping deal. That gets lost in the noise.

(The "noise" being price increases due to inflation, cost decreases due to modern technology, it gets used to cover some new 'feature' like anti-spam on the server, or free antivirus for subscribers, etc, etc).

Re:What...?

[bucky0]

He's not talking about syncing up a 15gig home directory. He's talking about producing 230gigs of data per month in deltas to whatever he's generating (I hope he's using rsync and not something naive).

Backing up 230 gigs/month is certainly business class usage. If "business" isn't a good adjective use "large" if you want. You don't have to be making money to need "business" features.

Re:What...?

[Albanach]

How is me wanting what I was sold unreasonable?

You were sold a resedential service with residential terms and conditions.

Your terms include:

• The Service is for personal and non-commercial residential use only. Therefore, Comcast reserves the right to suspend or terminate Service accounts where bandwidth consumption is not characteristic of a typical residential user of the Service as determined by the company in its sole discretion. Common activities that may cause excessive bandwidth consumption in violation of this Policy include, but are not limited to, numerous or continuous bulk transfers of files and other high capacity traffic

So you bought a product that bulk transfers of files may be restricted. Why are you complaining when Comcast are giving you exactly what you bought? As others have said, they probably also sell products more suited to your needs.

Re:What...?

[Kadin2048]

The system (based on everything I've read) does not care, or try to detect, the contents of your packets.* It doesn't care whether what you're downloading is legal or not.

This is exactly as it should be, since it doesn't matter to other people on the local node what you're doing, only that you're hogging bandwidth. Legal movies, illegal movies, videoconferencing, a totally opaque VPN connection ... it doesn't matter. They all have the same effect on other users of the network, and should all be treated exactly the same way.

* Or so they claim. Some people have noted that the hardware they're using comes from a company most noted for its sophisticated and purpose-built DPI products, which seems like a bit of an odd choice of vendor for something that's really quite simple. I don't have a dog in that fight, but I'm taking them at face value for now.

Legal use of big bandwidth paying the price...

[eepok]

1) User pays for their own broadband access (cost of bandwidth). $$
2) User pay for Netflix a service contract (which includes more bandwidth costs). $$
3) User uses the bandwidth for which he paid by watching streaming movies and suddenly the movies don't load anymore... because it takes a bit of bandwidth to download movies.
4) User buys digital movies from Amazon et al? $$
5) User gets kicked from ISP because he paid enough to use what bandwidth he used.

Sounds like a scam to me!

Why offer high speed internet if you're not going to provide high speed internet?

Re:Legal use of big bandwidth paying the price...

[hurfy]

Silly user...

Comcast users are supposed to have cable TV and use pay-per-view from them...

If they cripple your speed as a heavy user does it go back up after 15 minutes of being a crippled light user? Rinse and Repeat?

So a 6MB Comcast tier provides 12MB for 1 min, 6MB for 14 min, and then 1MB(or whatever it is) for 15 min ???

Sold Vs Delivered

[WTSane]

I am upset by the fact that they have now told their users that if they try and use the bandwidth that they were sold for too long a period of time, thier service will be degraded until they fall in to the 50% bracket as compared to all other users. If they can not support speeds that they are advertizing, they should not be selling them. If you have a 250GB a month limit, you should be able to use the speeds you are paying for until you reach that limit.

You mean proper QoS?

[Abcd1234]

Wow, what a crazy idea. If only they could have deployed this sooner! Pity the technology has only been available for far longer than bittorrent has been a problem...

Look.

[Drakin020]

If you seriously think you are going to exceed 250GB a month, spend the extra money and get a business account. If you are that heavy of an internet user, moving to 70 bucks a month or so shouldn't be that big of a deal.

One thing to consider

[Allnighterking]

Cable Internet, as configured by Comcast (bombast) has a fixed ceiling for how much traffic can flow through it's network without interfering with TV/phone. More people can watch a pseudo HD TV show, on the cable than can fairly share the bandwidth. So in the case of Comcast they are pulling an airline trick. In order to ensure max revenue they also "over book" the line. Problem is as time goes on more an more people are using their internet connection for more than e-mail.

Now on a airplane you can "bump" passengers. However in the case of bandwidth there is no bump available. The only options they have are to either put in more lines/equipment (quite often impossible due to community regulations and available space in underground cable easements) or drop customers. Both a and b won't sit well with the board. The only remaining options are to not renew customers who leave. (difficult since it also cuts into TV/phone revenues) or they can do what they are doing and refuse to service properly existing customers.

Problem for many is that it comes down to a choice between Darth and Adolf. Chose your darkside. But at least on ADSL you know that the bandwidth you use has little affect on anyone but people in your household.

Give me what I want

[Mizchief]

I want my 10Mbs when I want it and for as long as I want it. If the $77 I pay per month isn't enough to build the infrastructure to handle that then charge more and I will pay it untill another company offers me something better. Don't offer me 10mbs which I pay $30 extra a month for, then try to shame me accepting anything less because i'm a "greedy bandwidth hog". I want what you sell and i'm willing to pay for it. If your supply can't meet my demands then prepair to be replaced.

Class Action

[jmichaelg]

I'm thinking the same thing and am not laughing - don't know why your post was moderated as 'funny.'

Comcast is selling bandwidth and, because they can't deliver what they've sold, is resorting to prioritization algorithms. If Comcast's problem is some users are using what they've been sold and that's overloading Comcast's ability to deliver, Comcast needs to either increase their ability to deliver or admit they can't deliver what they've sold.

Admitting the later is tantamount to admitting to fraud.

actually pretty fair IMHO

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually I think this is pretty fair with regards to congestiong. Throttle the particular user / account when the port is saturated, and let the user decide what's important and what's not.

This neutral from a protocol view, it saves the ISP equipment costs since they can use the built-in functionality of the network equipment (and perhaps use that cash to invest in more bandwidth upstream).

The issue of caps (which many people have a problem with) is separate than that of protocol shaping.

Re:Why

[Tacvek]

If you had read the other messages you would find out that this has absolutely no impact to any user except when the comcast router port (sevicing ~250 modems) reaches 100% utilization. When that happens some of somebody's packets must be delayed (or if the router runs out of memory dropped).

Those who have been using a sustained (average) of over 75% of their advertised peak bandwidth for the 15 minute window get lower priority, meaning the other packets get routed first. This means your latency increases, although your bandwidth does not necessarily decrease unless the router runs out of memory and starts dropping packets, or the delays cause your packets to time-out. In any event, this is just applying a well known process scheduling technique to packet scheduling.

This is in fact a far more fair system than having no such system, because the least number of people are affected when congestion occurs, unless the non-flagged uses combined bandwidth exceeds the total node bandwidth. In that case, the flagged users might be starved for bandwidth (depending on the system used, Comcast is not clear about that), and the non-flagged users would begin to have increased latency. Comcast's analysis of bandwidth utilization show that that scenario virtually never occurs in reality.

Re:Comcast, UPDATE YOUR SHITTY NETWORK

[Tacvek]

Fuck comcast. Every 15 minutes its going to check to see who is using the bandwidth and then limit that person? What if no one else is using that bandwidth? Can that person who is using it without being limited?

Yes. The limits only apply when congestion occursm which is to say the port in comcast's router reaches 100 percent, requiring at least some of the packets received to be delayed. This is in no way throttling, as the impact is based on total network utilization. In non-peak hours, this policy has EXACTLY ZERO IMPACT.

Re:In other words - we still oversell our bandwidt

[Tacvek]

I really don't see the problem, as long one is made aware of this fact, and realize that they are buying oversubscribed bandwidth. But please realize that the internet backbones are oversubscribed, so there is no way to truly get bandwidth that is not oversubscribed at some level. This packet prioritizing scheme is entirely reasonable, and similar systems are in place on the internet backbones, and other high level routers. Comcast's real problem is the transfer cap, which is completely absurd.