Comcast Discloses Throttling Practices

Wired reports that Comcast finally provided information on its network management practices late Friday. In a report to the FCC (PDF), the cable company admitted to targeting P2P protocols Ares, BitTorrent, eDonkey, FasTrack, and Gnutella. Quoting: "For each of the managed P2P protocols, the [Sandvine Policy Traffic Switch] monitors and identifies the number of simultaneous unidirectional uploads that are passed from the [Cable Modem Termination System] to the upstream router. Because of the prevalence of P2P traffic on the upstream portion of our network, the number of simultaneous unidirectional upload sessions of any particular P2P protocol at any given time serves as a useful proxy for determining the level of overall network congestion. For each of the protocols, a session threshold is in place that is intended to provide for equivalently fair access between the protocols, but still mitigate the likelihood of congestion that could cause service degradation for our customers."

Evil from cable companies? Nevar.

[David Gerard]

Shocked, shocked I am! Evil in the telecoms industry? Never! Well, hardly ever.

Perhaps Google could develop a not evil telecoms company. (Or, as they did with the spectrum auction, play the evils off against each other and not actually spend ridiculous sums of their own money.)

I think we need a Microsoft telecoms company. Their evil has been slipping lately [today.com]. It's not good enough, Mr Ballmer!

(I'm picturing Steve Ballmer with his high-pressure used car salesman shout: "EVIL! EVIL! EVIL! EVIL!" Bouncing around the stage.)

Re:Now what will happen?

[ionix5891]

so to sum it up, you are getting up the behind but at least you know how far itll go

I Hope My Service Improves

[superid]

For well over a year I have had intermittent but persistent dropouts during primetime (Comcast). I've put in about a dozen service calls and had a tech at my house just the other day. I've had two new cable modems and the tech confirmed that the signal is fine.

I used tcpdump to show him the traffic scroll by at a nearly constant rate (I have a very active home network) and then *bam* it's dead. He looked at the lights and from his point of view says "the signal is fine". It's not my network because I see the same dropouts when connected directly to the cable modem, and it's apparently not the signal.

So that leaves the network. I think it's saturated. I can see 30+ ARPs per second immediately after service comes back up. And if this new policy helps that, then I'm all for it.

The irony

[dataninja]

The funny part is that I just move to New Mexico and the only available option was Comcast. Oh the irony.