Formally rolls out new network traffic congestion management practices that are protocol agnostic.
Comcast, the country’s second largest ISP, has announced that as of December 31st, 2008 it has ceased throttling BitTorrent users as requested by the FCC back in August of 2008.
“Effective December 31, 2008, we have completed this transition, which is now part of our daily business operations for managing congestion on our network,” reads an announcement on its website. “The approach is designed to ensure, to the greatest extent possible, that all of our high-speed Internet customers have fair and equal access to the Internet and to bandwidth resources.”
The FCC found Comcast in violation of the agency’s principles for electively targeting and throttling the connection speeds of a single application – BitTorrent – as part of its overall efforts in managing network traffic.
“Although Comcast asserts that its conduct is necessary to ease network congestion, we conclude that the company’s discriminatory and arbitrary practice unduly squelches the dynamic benefits of an open and accessible Internet and does not constitute reasonable network management,” read its ruling.
As past of its new congestion management practices, they’ve deployed new hardware and software close to the company’s Regional Network Routers (RNRs). This hardware will flip a user from the standard “Priority Best-Effort” traffic (PBE) to lower quality of service (QoS) “Best-Effort” traffic (BE) for fifteen minutes if a subscriber surpasses a “User Consumption Threshold” of 70% of their upstream or downstream bandwidth bandwidth over a similar 15-minute period. Using more than 70% of your bandwidth for this duration is called an “Extended High Consumption State.”
Related Posts
- FCC Gives Comcast 30 Days to Comply with Penalties for Throttling BitTorrent
- Comcast to Throttle Heavy Internet Users Up to 20 Min
- FCC Head: ‘Comcast Should be Punished for BitTorrent Throttling’
- Comcast Appeals FCC Decision Ordering End to BitTorrent Throttling
- Comcast Sued for BitTorrent Throttling, Mulls Data Caps
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Ok but how are customers suppose to know how much bandwidth they have or that they’re reaching their threshold? Seems fair at a glance but at the same time it’s severely lacking important details.
The only problem that remains is the fact that people pay for 100% of their bandwith. I can see Comcast getting sued for breach of contract if they intentionally take away 30% of an expected service. Although I think this is so far a more fair policy than their blanket ban on Bittorrent.
I think that this is definitely the right approach by Comcast. Better to openly limit traffic of all types from intensive users than to single out bittorrent users. Now they just need to stop advertising the ‘Unlimited’ part so much. I’m sure they’ll go as far as put a footnote that no one will notice..
They also need to provide a way for people to check how much bandwidth they’ve used so far.
If you are going to limit your heavy users as an ISP then you need to keep your mouth shut about “unlimited internet” in your advertising.
It is not fair nor legal to throttle heavy users and then turn around and say you can get unlimited internet in your ads just to get new subscribers!
Something has to give. Or the truth in advertising law can and will be used against ISP’s for advertising one thing and doing another.
Otherwise how is a user to know what to expect until they go over the limit and found out the hard way their connection has been shut off?
I think the whole concept of how information is transmitted should be revamped. What is needed is a peer-to-peer hardware system, not software. Take the isp’s out of the loop.
Tesla was on the right track with his coils and desire to power the world for free. Imaging a tesla coil in every home, providing power, data transmission in a dynamic, peer-to-peer fashion.
I remember those “laptops for every child” had this capability to create a mesh network.
What we need are some creative, innovative, engineering minds on the solution.
Cut ISPs out of the equation.