Comcast Accused of Congestion By Choice 434
An anonymous reader writes "A kind soul known as Backdoor Santa has posted graphs purportedly showing traffic through TATA, one of Comcast's transit providers. The graphs of throughput for a day and month, respectively, show that Comcast chooses to run congested links rather than buy more capacity. Keeping their links full may ensure that content providers must pay to colocate within Comcast's network. The graphs also show a traffic ratio far from 1:1, which has implications for the validity of its arguments with Level (3) last month."
Stop The Cap (Score:4, Interesting)
Current Comcast customer... (Score:3, Interesting)
Please someone tell me that Verizon is better, because I really want to switch to FIOS when it's available.
Re:Lowest customer satisfaction rankings (Score:5, Interesting)
Arguably, no, they don't care.
Most monopolies don't. Even in areas where they have to compete against DSL, there's only a small segment of the population that can purchase service that rivals theirs in terms of advertised speed / service. And even then ... who are they competing against? Well ... the phone company, which has a stellar reputation when it comes to customer service ...
Can't This Backfire? (Score:5, Interesting)
That's only meaningful if there are alternatives/competition in the area, and there might be an argument that Comcast wants to push it's own video streaming service (which wouldn't crap out).
Re:Oh Comcrap! (Score:4, Interesting)
From what I've heard about their infrastructure staff at a few conferences, they seem somewhat competent as they've been into IPv6 and DNSSEC from an early stage (doesn't always mean anything though). It is 10Gbits which is impressive, but I can't believe thats their only link out. They have tens of millions using their internet service right? How can it only be 10Gbits?
For the record, I am a comcast customer now (for only 2 months now) and I do agree it sucks balls compared to the fiber to the house I had before. But I also deliberately chose to go with cable internet for the first time because I wanted my own real experience to back up my suspicions instead of just angry posts by random people on forums.
Re:Does it have to be a conspiracy? (Score:3, Interesting)
It's simple economics. If the cost of problems with annoyed customers remains below the cost of upgrading the system, then they won't upgrade.
Comcast makes no money on the traffic that traverses their network, and has nothing to gain by upgrading except their customers' good will. Since every third post here begins with "Comcrap" or ends with "sucks", I don't think they're too worried about their quality of service image.
Here's the deal breaker for Santa's conspiracy theory: what kind of idiot would locate their service inside this boundary, effectively guaranteeing crappy service to everyone who isn't a Comcast customer? There would have to be a compelling reason that this would improve Comcast's networking business for this theory to be true, and I see nothing compelling about this.
There's a perfectly simple explanation, backed by a mountain of evidence: Comcast is cheap.
Re:Can't This Backfire? (Score:4, Interesting)
You would think so, but the average user does not think that. The average user thinks "My YouTube videos of cats stream just fine, but Netflix does not. It must be Netflix's fault."
Re:I, for one... (Score:5, Interesting)
Treat last-mile connectivity as a utility-style natural monopoly(which it essentially is, economically speaking). Have the municipality build out either fiber, or tubes for running fiber, to a peering point accessible under RAND conditions. Their responsibility would be to ensure that the pipe between you and the peering point is maintained(ie. this isn't a 'gummint internet'). At this point, anybody who wished to do so could set up shop at the peering point and offer services over the pipe, whether they be straight internet access, IP TV, VOIP, whatever.
Once you get beyond the last-mile, there is a much stronger case to be made that competition is both possible and actual; but the last mile is an oligopoly at best, monopoly at worst, and(like water, power, and roads) tends toward being a natural monopoly in the economic sense...
Re:Oh Comcrap! (Score:4, Interesting)
Not really. I used to work for an ISP for 7 years that dealt in both DSL and Cable (don't ask how). I know the technologies behind DSL and Cable modems and know that the design of DSL usually wins out in situations where lots of people are online in the same area. Most people don't understand this and only pay attention to the marketing and data rates. For many years I had either direct ethernet, high speed wireless link,DSL and fiber to the home. So I wanted to try cable out to see how it was because all the marketing and clueless people making claims can really confuse the issue. I'm just familiarizing myself with my industry so that I have first hand experience when I give others advice. There is nothing wrong or sadomasochistic about that.
Re:Does it have to be a conspiracy? (Score:4, Interesting)
AFAIK bittorrent has better-than-normal conjestion management, not "very crappy congestion management".
It uses either TCP (almost the definition of bog-standard) or uTP (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_Transport_Protocol [wikipedia.org]); designed for the express purpose to improve upon TCP traffic management.
Perhaps the uTP devs failed; but there's no evidence for that that I can see.
Re:Lowest customer satisfaction rankings (Score:5, Interesting)
Arguably, no, they don't care.
Most monopolies don't. Even in areas where they have to compete against DSL, there's only a small segment of the population that can purchase service that rivals theirs in terms of advertised speed / service. And even then ... who are they competing against? Well ... the phone company, which has a stellar reputation when it comes to customer service ...
The phone company's 100-year reputation isn't always a reliable predictor: I recently had an excellent experience with the local phone company. My Comcast download speed, advertised as “up to” 12 million bits per second, was actually between 6 and 7. I had been waiting for DSL to be available for years, and when it finally was, I invited Fairpoint, the local telco, to install it on 30 days approval.
They sent me a DSL modem, which I hooked up, and then waited for the service to be switched on. To my surprise, they dispatched a technician. I walked him around the property, showing him where the wires were buried, and he then followed the pair of wires that connected me to the neighborhood fibre termination point, making sure I had a straight run. When he was done I had an excellent signal to noise ratio, and was able to actually get the advertised 15 million bits per second of download speed.
The technician told me that mine was the first 15 million bits per second installation he had done, so that might be why he went the extra mile (literally—the neighborhood fibre termination point is a mile away) to make sure I got good service. Nevertheless, it shows that when you get down to the level of individuals, the reputation of the organization doesn't tell you much.
Re:Nobody has a peering agreement with Comcast (Score:2, Interesting)
http://blog.comcast.com/2010/12/20-qs---with-accurate-as---about-level-3s-peering-dispute.html [comcast.com]
http://blog.comcast.com/2010/11/10-facts-about-peering-comcast-and-level-3.html [comcast.com]