FCC Reports Comcast P2P Blocking Was More Widespread

bob charlton from 66 tips us to a ComputerWorld story about FCC Chairman Kevin Martin, who has testified that Comcast's P2P traffic management occurred even when network congestion wasn't an issue, contrary to the ISP's claims. After defending its actions and being investigated by the FCC over the past few months, Comcast has tried to repair its image by making nice with BitTorrent and working towards a P2P Bill of Rights. Quoting: "'It does not appear that this technique was used only to occasionally delay traffic at particular nodes suffering from network congestion at that time,' Martin told the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee. 'Based on testimony we've received thus far, this equipment was typically deployed over a wider geographic area or system, and is not even capable of knowing when an individual ... segment of the network is congested.'

Surprised?

[M0bius]

Who is surprised by this revelation? From initial denial to any traffic shaping, to stacking the hearing with payed shills, Comcast has proven they are willing to do whatever it takes to oversell their service and then bottleneck it to keep from having to make infrastructure upgrades. I wouldn't be shocked if they rubbed the blood of sacrificed newborn children onto their fiber if it would save them a buck or two. Go Comcast!

Re:fixed?

[Raineer]

I _still_ only get 20kb/s on my Comcast line...

They said they are working with BT, and working on this "bill of rights", and also admitting to slowing down the throttling.

I have never seen them say they are stopping such activities.

Re:Suits don't know

[Anonymous Coward]

...squeezing as much revenue of the porn addled, facebook addicted, morons paying the bills.

The key words in that sentence are "paying the bills." Like it or not, all of this infrastructure exists because those "morons" are paying the bills, and because the "suits" are so good at "squeezing revenue" out of them. If the internet were built without regard to profit, it would never have grown past a modest network connecting a few academic and government computers. At the very least, we would be paying a heck of a lot more for less bandwidth because we wouldn't be enjoying the economies of scale we experience right now.

All that being said, one could definitely make an argument that Comcast should be doing a more responsible job of turning those profits back around into more infrastructure. If there were true competition in this industry, they would be getting hammered for their short-term focus on "squeezing" at the expense of growth. Unfortunately, there just aren't enough real alternatives out there for dissatisfied customers to switch to.

Re:Suits don't know

[MarcQuadra]

The -responsible- thing to do would be to use QoS to make all the P2P streams a lower priority than HTTP.

Instead, they're actively (and randomly) interrupting P2P and causing -all- P2P traffic to fail, even at 4AM.

The sad thing is, I know exactly why this is happening. There's someone (or a group of people) who honestly believe that 'P2P is eating all our bandwidth' and that if they use this blocking method, it'll all be OK.

I worked at a place where the Network Manager would see what sites were 'eating all the bandwidth' and just knock them down to 56Kbits/sec for the whole place. What he didn't understand is that -using your bandwidth is a good thing-, it means you're not paying for more than you use. 'blocking' P2P or 'top-talkers' just makes the experience on a network suck, there are much more effective and subtle ways to manage traffic that quietly make the traffic you want more important than the traffic you don't want interfering.

Re:You worked at comsuck

[dw604]

Dude, it's not his company... even if it were, you're still an ass. Are we still making fun of AOL these days?