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Comcast's Congestion Catch-22

Posted by Soulskill on from the solution-looking-for-a-problem dept.

An anonymous reader sends us to Telephony Online for a story about Comcast's second attempt at traffic management (free registration may be required). After the heavy criticism they received from customers and the FCC about their first system, they've adopted a more even-handed "protocol agnostic" approach. Nevertheless, they're once again under scrutiny from the FCC, this time for the way their system interacts with VOIP traffic. By ignoring specific protocols, the occasional bandwidth limits on high-usage customers interferes with those customers' VOIP, yet Comcast's own Digital Voice is unaffected. Quoting: "The shocking thing is just how big a Pandora's box the FCC has appeared to open — and it just keeps getting bigger. When the FCC first started addressing bandwidth usage and DPI issues, it quickly found itself up to its knees in network management minutia. Not long after that, it followed another logical path of the DPI question and asked service providers and Web companies about their use of DPI for behavioral targeting. Now it seemingly has opened up huge questions about what it means to be a voice carrier in the age of IP. It's not hard to imagine the next step: What about video? Telco IPTV services are delivered in roughly the same way as carrier VoIP services — via packets running on the same physical network but a prioritized logical signaling stream. Is that fair to over-the-top video service providers?"

3 of 177 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Congestion? by WhatAmIDoingHere · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Their issue is upload not download.

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  2. How much is self intereference? by nweaver · · Score: 4, Interesting

    If someone is doing very high traffic, enough to get into Comcast's temporary "QOS Low" category, they are probably sending and full rate. If you are sending at full rate, the typical end-host NAT and buffering alone will cause bad quality for VoIP (search for VoIP and BitTorrent for a lot of such tales). There is nothing Comcast's network management really does to affect things in this case anyway.

    Comcast's network management should only cause additional VoIP issues when the big transfer STOPS and the VoIP call is made within only a few minutes (before the user's link is reclassed back into the "QoS normal" category).

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  3. To pipe or not to pipe. by Dyinobal · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Why do ISPs insist on being more than just a pipe? It's so dumb no one wants them to be anything else. Do they just not feel useful when they are a pipe?