Friday, August 22, 2008

Comcast Says No New Traffic Management Plan Yet

Comcast
has made no final decisions on how to manage network congestion,
despite news reports Wednesday that it will slow traffic for heavy
users for up to 20 minutes during times of peak network use.

Comcast has been looking into new network management practices after
the furor caused by an Associated Press report last October that said
the cable modem service provider was quietly slowing BitTorrent P-to-P
(peer-to-peer) traffic as a tool to fight network congestion.

Net neutrality advocates called on the U.S. Federal Communications Commission
to take action against Comcast, and early this month, the FCC voted 3-2
to prohibit broadband providers from blocking or slowing specific
applications on its network.

Comcast has been conducting tests on
new network management techniques since the end of May, said Charlie
Douglas, a Comcast spokesman. Among the leading options is to slow all
Web traffic from heavy users for up to 20 minutes during times of heavy
network traffic.

When the congestion is resolved in under 20
minutes, the heavy users' traffic would be slowed for shorter times,
sometimes for only a minute or two, he said. Heavy users' traffic would
still move over the Internet, but it would "become de-prioritized"
during times of congestion, Douglas said.

This approach would be
"protocol agnostic," Douglas added. By not blocking specific
applications, Comcast likely would comply with the FCC's Aug. 1 vote.

Asked
why Comcast doesn't slow all users' traffic during times of congestion,
Douglas said it's not fair to subscribers who aren't clogging up the
pipes. "It's the heaviest of users that are directly contributing to
the degradation of the service for the other people on the network," he
said.

Representatives of Free Press and Public Knowledge, two
digital rights advocacy groups that filed a complaint against Comcast
for slowing P-to-P traffic, expressed reservations about Comcast's
apparent new direction.

"It's an interesting reflection on the
claim that there is a free market for broadband," said Art Brodsky, a
spokesman for Public Knowledge. "If there was competition, could you
slow down your best customers?"

Comcast was "dishonest" in the
past about its network management practices, added Ben Scott, Free
Press policy director. The broadband provider originally denied it was
degrading BitTorrent streams.

"We have to be skeptical and
vigilant," Scott said. "The FCC has required them to disclose all the
details so we look forward to seeing that before we can fully evaluate.
Any move that doesn't involve blocking consumers' access to the
Internet is a positive step but we won't know for sure about this
particular practice until we see the details."

On Wednesday, the
FCC released the full text of its Aug. 1 order prohibiting Comcast from
blocking legal Web applications. Public Knowledge and Free Press
praised the order, with Scott calling it "a major milestone in Internet
policy."

From : http://www.nytimes.com