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Comcast Outlines New Broadband Policy

Posted by timothy on from the knowledge-is-power dept.

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."

8 of 350 comments (clear)

  1. Dang... by Kid+Zero · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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?

    1. Re:Dang... by Kadin2048 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      --
      "Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
    2. Re:Dang... by skroops · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    3. Re:Dang... by ChuBie · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

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

  2. Legal use of big bandwidth paying the price... by eepok · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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?

  3. Re:What...? by Fulcrum+of+Evil · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

    --
    "We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
  4. Re:What...? by HiVizDiver · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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).

  5. Re:What...? by vux984 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.