Comcast's New Throttling Plan Uses Trigger Conditions, Not Silent Blocking

clang_jangle writes with this excerpt from The Inquirer outlining Comcast's new traffic-throttling scheme, based on information from Comcast's latest FCC filing. "Its network throttling implements a two-tier packet queueing system at the routers, driven by two trigger conditions. Comcast's first traffic throttling trigger is tripped by using more than 70 per cent of your maximum downstream or upstream bandwidth for more than 15 minutes. Its second traffic throttling trigger is tripped when the Cable Modem Termination System you're hooked-up to – along with up to 15,000 other Comcast subscribers – gets congested, and your traffic is somehow identified as being responsible. Tripping either of Comcast's high bandwidth usage rate triggers results in throttling for at least 15 minutes, or until your average bandwidth utilisation rate drops below 50 per cent for 15 minutes."

Comments

Laws

[sopssa]

Comcast's first traffic throttling trigger is tripped by using more than 70 per cent of your maximum downstream or upstream bandwidth for more than 15 minutes.

Eh? In scandinavia countries new laws will state that "the speed of the line must be atleast 75% of the said one during 24 hour measurement period". And you get throttled with comcast if you're actually using more 70% of what you should have? Why do you put up with this shit?

Re:Laws

[pootypeople]

Because our laws are written by corporate interests, not the people.

Re:Laws

[Saishuuheiki]

Here in america we prefer a system where the ISP gets a monopoly and can advertise what you could get, not what you will get ...sadly

Re:Laws

[LordKazan]

which is the inevitable result of "private funding of campaigns"

a more accurate term for "private funding of campaigns" is "buying votes of congresscritters".

Re:Laws

[dwlovell]

Because a T1 line is expensive and guarantees service 24/7. A residential cable/dsl service is far far cheaper and is contractually not obligated to provide consistent speeds, only burst speeds that can be affected by the traffic of other users of the system.

Consumers went from only have only T1/ISDN as a high-speed option and few could afford it, to cable/dsl that almost anyone could afford and has the performance 99% can appreciate. The 1% that expect 24/7 full throughput should understand they never bought that guarantee of service. Just because their aggregation point wasn't previously saturated and they weren't previously throttled doesn't mean that was an entitlement to that level of service forever.

Re:Laws

[castironpigeon]

Why do you put up with this shit?

Because taking it up the ass from ISPs is more convenient than moving to another country.

Re:Laws

[mcgrew]

Because we're a plutocracy masquerading as a democratic republic.

Re:Laws

[IndustrialComplex]

The 1% that expect 24/7 full throughput should understand they never bought that guarantee of service. Just because their aggregation point wasn't previously saturated and they weren't previously throttled doesn't mean that was an entitlement to that level of service forever.

I don't expect 24/7 full throughput. How about 72% for 24/7?

  I'd figure that a "C minus" is more than reasonable on my part, but apparantly it will get me throttled.

Re:Laws

[Nadaka]

I've long suggested the option to vote against a candidate instead of for one, that would be a variation on preferential voting.

Re:Laws

[LordKazan]

They advertise it as

"X down/Y Up"

not

"X down/Y up for part of the time, X1/Y1 the rest of the time".

Throttling is a violation of your customer agreement and false advertising.

The "1%" (it's more than that) that expect 24/7 full throughput ARE THE CUSTOMERS WHO WANT TO USE WHAT THEY PAID FOR.

You sir, are what is wrong with american commerce. you'll take it up the arse from the corporate overloads all day long.

Re:Laws

[amplt1337]

I think it's unlikely that a bunch of local monopolists are going to start poaching on each other's territory. What I suspect would happen, even if the official monopoly (which should never've been granted) were revoked, is that they'd be perfectly happy to continue with spheres of influence in which they can each gouge their own customer bases.

The real issue here is that building infrastructure like this requires such a huge amount of capital that it's a natural monopoly. There's really no way for competitors to come in without a huge investment in laying their own lines that is very much at risk and only serves to lessen their own profit margins. The real government fail here isn't recognizing a monopolist (since the nature of the business is such that one is bound to emerge) -- it's not making sure to regulate that monopolist effectively.

Re:Laws

[commodore64_love]

(blinks)

(puts ice cream back in fridge)

Re:Laws

[dwlovell]

Comcast main service description if you search by your zipcode and look at the "Performance" plan:
"Get download speeds up to 12 Mbps and uploads up to 2 Mbps with PowerBoost® for only $19.99 a month for 6 months!"

Click to immediate link in the summary "Terms and Conditions", in the first paragraph:
"Actual speeds vary and are not guaranteed. PowerBoost provides bursts of download and upload speeds for the first 10 MB and 5 MB of a file, respectively."

You will find similar clauses in any service description for residential cable/dsl.

I am all for pushing the companies to get the best service for the cheapest price, but you do that by voting with your dollar. It is not reasonable or effective to agree to a service contract, then demonize the business for living up to their end of the bargain as they said they would.

The bottom line is you didn't pay for those speeds for any guaranteed amount of time. Techincally those speeds aren't guaranteed at all if your line quality isn't good enough to support the transmission. The only way to get guaranteed service is to pay for a dedicated line, ie: T1.

Go look at the cost of a T1 and realize it is only 1.5 Mbps, now look at the cost of that 12 Mbps residential cable. Why do you think the T1 is so much more expensive for almost 1/10th the speed? Technology may change, bandwidth may get so cheap it doesn't matter, but right now, guaranteeing 100% throughput at residential service prices simply wont work.

Re:Laws

[itpr15061]

Amen, that was a breath of fresh air in a room full of "me-me's" instinctively chanting that Comcast is eating babies and setting villages on fire, and that anyone who disagrees is a corporate apologist.

To agree further...

If someone actually *needs* 250GB or more of data per month, and full-pipe speeds the entire time to boot, then as you said there is a plan available for that, called commercial or business class service. There *is* a distinction, and it's funny that they don't see the irony when they say "I want what I paid for."

I dropped my landline and cable television both, everything comes through my cable modem (and I stream Netflix heavily as well as Plex) without issue.

I don't think that Comcast implementing throttling is going to be like what Rome did to Carthage. The reality is that if you are downloading a massive multi-gig file it's going to take a while whether you are throttled or not. Any QoS or traffic management 101 class defines this as bulk or best effort traffic and puts it at the bottom - it's not interactive or particularly time sensitive. Why not make it livable for everyone else? And before everyone hits the reply button and complains that Comcast shouldn't have their upstream oversubscribed, please pause first to grab a clue and realize that every ISP oversubscribes. On top of that, cable plants were only really designed for one way downstream delivery of cable channels so upstream bandwidth will always be much more limited. The only way Comcast can make more upstream bandwidth available is by splitting a node, which means they are doubling their upstream bandwidth by doubling their cable plant. As you can imagine, this is very expensive and that cost ultimately gets passed along to the consumer.

I'm sure someone in the comments has couched this as a net neutrality issue. I also don't buy that argument since it's not targeted at a specific person or application.

So yeah, this sucks, but it was more or less inevitable.

Re:Laws

[Maxo-Texas]

I used to vote for republicans and against democrats because republicans were thrifty and for small government.
I used to vote for democrats and for republicans because republicans were religious extremists forcing me to live by their religious rules.

So if the position was city controller, it'd be republican. If it was city council, it'd be democratic.

I'd also mix up the council vs the mayor, and so on.

Now the republicans are still religious extremists AND they also spend like drunken sailors AND they sell out my interests and freedom to corporations.
Now the democrats spend like drunken sailors AND they sell out my interests and freedom to corporations.

I tried voting for Ron Paul (religiously extreme but at least a certified small government type).

I'm really at a loss tho. It looks like we are hell bound for a corporofascist oligarchy.

Re:Laws

[commodore64_love]

(1) The price goes up because the cable channels keep demanding more money. At one time channels asked for about 25 cents per home, and collected that money from Comcast, Dish, Directv, and so on. In today's world some channels like CNN or FOX News still only ask for 25 cents, but other channels like Sci-Fi, TNT, ABCfamily, and Disney are demanding 90 cents per subscriber, with the most-expensive channel ESPN charging $3/subscriber.

Therefore since these cable channels are demanding more fees, our monthly bills also go up.

(2) I'd say Dish and Directv are competing more with cable than one another. Dish now offers service for a mere $20 a month, plus $5 if you want locals, which is a darn good deal. Certainly better than what Comcast would charge me (~$65).

(3) I actually have neither of these. I get my TV for free via antenna (about 45 channels total), plus $15 internet for video-on-demand.

Re:Laws

[Bigjeff5]

You do realize we have gone through many political parties in the US, right? The reason parties die out is because more people "throw their vote away" than vote for the original primary party. For example, the Whig party is gone. They are no more. The current two parties, Democrat and Republican, actually started out as one party. Back then, the major polarizing issues were completely different, and the current polarizing issues were little more than minor philosophical differences among party members. Eventually the northern, industrialized portion of the party split off over issues like slavery and representation in congress, while the deep south Democrats consolidated their base. The Republican party has since gone through a number of near-deaths and re-births since then, while the Democrats have changed slowly and steadily since then.

One particular election that nearly saw the death of the Republican party in somewhat recent history was Theodor Roosavelt's second term - he became angry with the Republican party and ran under the Bull party. He took around 20% of the vote, while the republican candidate took around 30% of the vote giving the Democrat candidate the victory. Had his party been a little more established it might have overtaken the Republican party and we'd have the Democrats and Bulls today.

So, while it may seem like voting 3rd party is throwing your vote away, it isn't. You can think of it as voting against both parties, and if enough people agree with you a new party may rise to dominance. The mere fact that you voted has an effect on the election. No candidate can win by less than 50% of the electoral votes, so a strong enough third party siphoning votes from both sides can really shake up the political system. That isn't possible when nobody votes third party. For example, if the Green Party managed to take California and (inexplicably) Texas, both major parties would be screwed. Basically whichever party is dominant in the House of Reps chooses the president (effectively, it is run like another election), and the Senate elects the VP. Just imagine the message that would be sent to both parties and the grass-roots political efforts that would be generated. It would almost be a given that a new party will rise to dominance.

Honestly, I think if more people voted for the candidate that actually represented what what they believed instead of saying "well, it's better than the other guy" we would be in a lot better shape today.

Re:Laws

[AaronW]

I totally agree. If I'm gaming and my connection slows to a crawl because my neighbor decides to bittorrent 50GB of data I would be pretty pissed. Traffic management is a must for a smooth running network. For the 5% who use 90% of the bandwidth and demand no throttling it just makes life miserable to the 95% who aren't abusing the bandwidth. If you want non-throttled bandwidth, get a business account.

I myself have a Comcast business account and am quite pleased with it. The level of service is much better and the customer service is night and day compared to residential, but then again, I'm paying $90/month for my connection. Then again, I never really had much of a problem with my residential account for the most part, I mostly wanted a static IP and the ability to run servers.

All ISPs oversubscribe their networks because otherwise it would cost far too much for them to be competitive. If there's congestion, which packets should be dropped? The casual user or the user running huge bittorrents? Bandwidth is a limited resource.

The best solution would be if applications properly marked the packets as bulk, time sensitive, etc, but that isn't the case, and instead other less optimal methods must be used.

DOCSIS 3 will hopefully help, but it will be a while before it's available everywhere.

Re:Laws

[badasscat]

Because our laws are written by corporate interests, not the people.

Oh, this is bullshit. We put up with it because we're conditioned to put up with all manner of mediocrity, lies, and incompetence in this country. This is only one example of it. Our leaders are another, but WE voted for them.

People always want to put the blame on someone other than themselves. But the people who are responsible for this kind of crap in this country are US. We are responsible because we expect it and we do nothing about it.

If we don't want to put up with shit like this, then we should be electing people based on how they specifically say they're going to respond to these kinds of shenanigans. But we don't. Instead, we vote for people because it looks like they have a nice family in TV commercials, or because they're against teh gays, or because they claim to adhere to some poorly defined set of values (ie. "family values", "conservative principles", etc.).

THAT IS OUR FAULT.

When you see 6-10% of people undecided in the final days of a national election (as was the case in 2008), what does that tell you? It doesn't tell you that we have a bunch of independent thinkers, as those people and the media will claim, it tells you that we have a bunch of people in this country who aren't paying any attention at all. Not only do they not understand the candidates' stances on the issues they care about, they don't even know the broad ideologies of the parties they belong to - they can't even make an assumption based on party affiliation or label. These are the people that often decide our elections.

And when you couple this lack of paying attention with the ridiculously low voting rates we have in this country compared with other democracies, then we have nobody to blame but ourselves.

Advertised Speed

[Anonymous Coward]

How can they advertise xx mbps when you can only use said speed for 15 minutes? Shouldn't it be advertised as a burst speed with a real speed of 70% of burst speed.

Then throttle yourself

[RichardDeVries]

What if you throttle your own connection for 5 seconds every 14 minutes? (No, I don't agree with the policy. At all.)

250GB cap is meant to discourage competing service

[zerofoo]

So you've hit the 250GB cap, but you aren't a pirate. You pay for everything you consume - including bandwidth. Your only crime is that you went to another company for video service. You like your Apple TV and the iTunes store, or you like using a slingbox, or you like movies on demand from your Roku, or your DirecTV receiver.

All of these technologies may cause you to run over your cap, and they all have one thing in common - they directly compete with Comcast's video services.

Now Comcast appears to be using their broadband monopoly, in the form of transfer caps, to discourage the use of competing services.

If this isn't the very definition of an abusive monopoly, I don't know what is.

-ted

Re:So...

[Znork]

ISP's should be legally obliged to advertise only what they actually offer. If you can only use half, then they can only advertise half with any burst capability added as a possible extra.

News for nerds?

[Wesley Felter]

This article is from January. Maybe it got throttled somewhere.

I have an idea...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

If they are going to "throttle" my service, it seems only fair for me to "throttle" my payments.

"Oh, you've been billing 100% of the advertised rate for the last 4 months? I'm going to have to cut you down to 50% until your annual average is under 75%..."

Summary Backwards

[HoboCop]

I read the FCC paper.. the summary is full of errors. The individual user does not get throttled until the entire CTMS port is in a congested state (that's 80% downstream, 70% upstream). And 'throttled' is a loose term.. if the bandwidth is available you get it. You are throttled if there are lower volume users on the shared pipe, and even then they just get a higher priority. Depending on how bad the congestion is, you might not even notice this.

Oops, left something out

[sunking2]

This part is rather important, yet amazingly was left out of the summary.

During the time that a subscriber's traffic is assigned the lower priority status, such traffic will not be delayed so long as the network segment is not actually congested. If, however, the network segment becomes congested, such traffic could be delayed.

So what they are really doing is lowering your priority. If there is no real congestion then you notice no difference. If things get saturated then your packets are delayed before other peoples.

Re:So...

[Itninja]

Or you can run at 100% for 14.5 minutes, automatically throttle yourself for 30 seconds, then go back to 100% for another 14.5 minutes. So for a 24 hours day you would be at 100% for 23.2 (non-consecutive) hours. Meh.

Business clas customers please note

[dragonsomnolent]

The 250GB cap mentioned in the article does not affect business customers (I called to confirm it). I know I have a contract for 3 years (they were the only ones who could deliver service in my area), and was so floored by the assertion that all customers would be subject to bandwidth caps, I called about it. The rep informed me that there is no bandwidth cap for business customers, although if you do use a lot of bandwidth, they will let you know about it (I have no idea what limit would trigger that event or anything, but then again, neither did the rep I spoke with).

Just to be clear...

[fahrbot-bot]

From the actual PDF:

• ... create two Quality of Service ("QoS") levels for Internet traffic going to and from the cable modem: (1) "Priority Best-Effort" traffic ("PBE"); and (2) "Best-Effort" traffic ("BE").
• During the time that a subscriber's traffic is assigned the lower priority status, such traffic will not be delayed so long as the network segment is not actually congested. If, however, the network segment becomes congested, such traffic could be delayed.
• Given our experience so far, we have determined that a starting point for the upstream Port Utilization Threshold should be 70 percent and the downstream Port Utilization Threshold should be 80 percent. (The term "port" as used here generally contemplates single channels on a CMTS, but these statements will apply to virtual channels, also known as "bonded groups," in a DOCSIS 3.0 environment.) -- (Basically, a "port" is the neighborhood connection.)
• (Given the above) When a subscriber uses an average of 70 percent or more of his or her (individually) provisioned upstream or downstream bandwidth over a particular 15-minute period, that user will be in an Extended High Consumption State.

Simply put, there are four steps to determining whether the traffic associated with a particular cable modem is designated as PBE or BE:

1. Determine if the CMTS port is in a Near Congestion State.
2. If yes, determine whether any users are in an Extended High Consumption State.
3. If yes, change those users' traffic to BE from PBE. If the answer at either step one or step two is no, no action is taken.
4. If a user's traffic has been designated BE, check user consumption at next interval. If user consumption has declined below predetermined threshold, reassign the user's traffic as PBE. If not, recheck at next interval

Re:Actually, its not...

[IgnoramusMaximus]

Lets do a little math. Good video over the net is 2 Mbps for Netflix. At that rate, this is ~9 hours of video a DAY before you get to the 250 GB cap. Do you watch 9 hours of video a DAY over netflix's service?

Your "math" is full of unwarranted assumptions. Chief amongst them the mother's-basement-dwelling single nerd's view-point. Lets try this with a family of 4 using Hulu/Netflix/iTunes/what-not combo to watch TV, movies, sports, buy music, get Anime etc. That's slightly over 2 hours a day per person. Not so "unreasonable" anymore, is it now? And 2 hours a day for kids/teenagers is somewhat a conservative estimation (and am I not master of understatement or what?).

Re:So...

[droopycom]

I only agree 70%.

Re:So...

[Gnavpot]

I only agree 70%.

Fine with me. As long as you don't do so for more than 15 minutes.

Vote With My Dollar How?

[Tony Freakin Twist]

Comcast is a monopoly in my area (Twin Cities). How exactly do I vote with my dollar?