Comcast Supports Ban On Paid Prioritization, Except For 'Specialized Services' (arstechnica.com) 61
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Comcast would support a ban on paid prioritization as long as there is an exception for "specialized services" that benefit consumers, a company executive said this week. Comcast Senior Executive VP David Cohen, who is generally the public face in Comcast's dealings with government policymakers, spoke about paid prioritization at the Free State Foundation's Telecom Policy Conference on Tuesday. (Video available on C-SPAN's website; the segment begins at 2:20.) "How about if we agree to a prohibition on paid prioritization and we have a limited exception created in some way for this concept of specialized services," Cohen said.
Cohen's suggestion of a paid-prioritization ban with an exception for specialized services is similar to an early version of net neutrality rules that was passed in 2010 but thrown out in court in 2014. (The FCC was able to impose stricter net neutrality rules in 2015; that's the set of rules that is being thrown out by the current FCC.) The FCC in 2010 said that specialized services may share capacity with broadband networks but wouldn't be the same as regular broadband. There has never been a great definition of the term, but the 2010 FCC said that broadband providers' facilities-based VoIP and Internet Protocol-video offerings would be included. These services "differ from broadband Internet access service and may drive additional private investment in broadband networks and provide end users valued services, supplementing the benefits of the open Internet," the FCC said at the time. Under the 2010 rules, ISPs could have charged other companies for the right to offer specialized services over broadband networks. Cohen didn't say exactly what types of future services should be covered by an exemption for specialized services. But the services may come along soon enough, he said. "There is a recognition that something might come along that is not anti-competitive, that is pro-consumer, that is a specialized service available not to every user of the Internet, [and] that would be in consumers' interests and in the public interest," Cohen said.
Cohen's suggestion of a paid-prioritization ban with an exception for specialized services is similar to an early version of net neutrality rules that was passed in 2010 but thrown out in court in 2014. (The FCC was able to impose stricter net neutrality rules in 2015; that's the set of rules that is being thrown out by the current FCC.) The FCC in 2010 said that specialized services may share capacity with broadband networks but wouldn't be the same as regular broadband. There has never been a great definition of the term, but the 2010 FCC said that broadband providers' facilities-based VoIP and Internet Protocol-video offerings would be included. These services "differ from broadband Internet access service and may drive additional private investment in broadband networks and provide end users valued services, supplementing the benefits of the open Internet," the FCC said at the time. Under the 2010 rules, ISPs could have charged other companies for the right to offer specialized services over broadband networks. Cohen didn't say exactly what types of future services should be covered by an exemption for specialized services. But the services may come along soon enough, he said. "There is a recognition that something might come along that is not anti-competitive, that is pro-consumer, that is a specialized service available not to every user of the Internet, [and] that would be in consumers' interests and in the public interest," Cohen said.
Fixed (Score:3, Insightful)
Comcast would support a ban on paid prioritization as long as there is an exception for "specialized services" that benefit Comcast
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When most of us only have the choice between... (Score:2)
1.5 Mbps DSL:
http://imgur.com/WgSvnA5 [imgur.com]
Or nothing of course we support 1.5 Mbps DSL. Comcast has the government-granted monopoly over most of Seattle, but the the city council doesn't require them to offer service for their entire monopoly area.
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Seriously? This is recent? In Seattle, no less?
I have seen 100 Mbps in semi-rural India for less than this.
That place also has over 20 tiny ISPs competing... all over telephone poles and such.
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Wave is really cheap. My 10-unit HOA was quoted with very affordable $35000 buildout cost for a ~1000ft line extension. Market magic!
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Or nothing of course we support 1.5 Mbps DSL. Comcast has the government-granted monopoly over most of Seattle, but the the city council doesn't require them to offer service for their entire monopoly area.
Hmmm... BroadbandNow says that Comcast has 95.1% coverage in Seattle [broadbandnow.com]. Even more relevant to your claim, when I punch 6200 53rd Ave NE, the same address in your CenturyLink screenshot, into xfinity.com [xfinity.com], it shows options of up to 400MBps. What's the problem?
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That's interesting, I could this address already has a connection without any details, I of course did not commit a computer crime by falsely claiming any of the options, "Yes, this is my account. I want to update my plan.", "No, I am moving here as an existing customer." and "No, I am moving here as a new customer.", doing that would be fraudulent access to a computer network, ummm, your naughty.
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Yawn. What a weak attempt to distract from the fact that you got caught with your hand in the cookie jar.
(Amusingly, to get the CenturyLink quote in the image you posted, you had to enter that address in response to the prompt: "We need your address to give you accurate pricing and product availability. Your address is used only to provide you with the best deals available." But given your claim that you couldn't accurately click "Yes, this is my account" for xfinity, apparently it's not your address.
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Specialized Services (Score:2)
Comcast Supports Ban On Paid Prioritization, Except For 'Specialized Services'
Like access to prompt, polite Customer Support. Just kidding... we're funny.
Comcast will abuse it (Score:2)
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The stated intent is per se abuse, so IMO, even if they don't go above and beyond the stated intent, they're still evil incarnate.
VoIP is precisely the sort of paid prioritization that should explicitly not be allowed, because as soon as you do, you'll get Comcast throttling VoIP service to the point that it is unusable, and charging VoIP providers for paid prioritization so that their service works again. But of course,
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LOL, let them screw with VoIP; that's literally a public utility now, and doing so would make a great argument for making Internet a public utility, too.
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As much as it pains me to say this about Comcast.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Sure, we turned on QoS and quickly learned that it's pretty much ignored upstream.
IF real regulations were written to allow prioritization for real-time AV services that were implemented in a neutral fashion, I could support that. Otherwise, yeah, it's Comcrap looking to rake in more bucks. Yawn.
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....They do kinda have a point. Hear me out. In a prior life, I worked with a company providing VoIP phone systems for companies to bypass the traditional telecom system. One of our biggest issues (somewhat mitigated since in the last few years as I understand) that we encountered in deployments was the ridiculous variability in latency, which is tiny for web browsing but horrible for real-time communications.
Sure, we turned on QoS and quickly learned that it's pretty much ignored upstream.
IF real regulations were written to allow prioritization for real-time AV services that were implemented in a neutral fashion, I could support that. Otherwise, yeah, it's Comcrap looking to rake in more bucks. Yawn.
I guess your business model didn't consider the possibility that ISP's would oversell local bandwidth, and not spend any money building out more capacity.
The only thing I think I would consider prioritizing would be 911 calls. They're usually important.
Re:As much as it pains me to say this about Comcas (Score:5, Insightful)
....They do kinda have a point. Hear me out. In a prior life, I worked with a company providing VoIP phone systems for companies to bypass the traditional telecom system. One of our biggest issues (somewhat mitigated since in the last few years as I understand) that we encountered in deployments was the ridiculous variability in latency, which is tiny for web browsing but horrible for real-time communications.
Sure, we turned on QoS and quickly learned that it's pretty much ignored upstream.
This argument makes no logical sense because in your case you were using the public Internet to provide service over domains you had little to no control over.
This is not what Comcast is doing. They are hosting unique services on their own network from within their own administrative domain towards the customer.
If the ISP is providing telephone service over the customer's Internet infrastructure then there are no issues here because the customer's router can do QoS to prioritize whatever traffic they want and it WILL work.
IF real regulations were written to allow prioritization for real-time AV services that were implemented in a neutral fashion, I could support that.
As Admiral Ackbar would say...
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You literally described the entire point of QoS, which is not at all the same thing as paid prioritization. Upstream providers will absolutely honor QoS if you work out that arrangement with them, usually by paying a little extra. Paid prioritization has absolutely nothing to do with that.
I _currently_ work for a company selling VOIP services over the public internet, and this is exactly what we do. It works exactly as designed and there are absolutely no problems with it because we designed our entire mode
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This is a wedge designed to divide us. After all, you’re right, of course; there are VERY good arguments to be made for allowing exceptions. The real problem here is that they’re trying to convince people that supporting Net Neutrality means we can’t have all those nice things, thus making anyone who supports Net Neutrality appear to be an unreasonable person.
For example, the fast lane that Pai has been trumpeting is telemedicine, which, like VoIP, is sensitive to spikes in latency. He
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But they don't have a point. Nowhere in that need is there any valid reason for Comcast to charge VoIP providers money for doing so. Prioritizing VoIP is fine. Charging money for that prioritization to companies that they compete with is per se an antitrust violation right off the bat, because
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Except you're then giving the ISP preference over other VOIP and streaming video services. Would an ISP pay for its own prioritized VOIP/video? Would Netflix/Hulu/Amazon/etc? Would a new startup VOIP/video service be able to pay for that for all ISPs looking to get their it-would-be-a-shame-if-something-happened-to-your-stream money?
The only thing I could see "prioritized" would be VOIP calls to emergency services, but that should be included in the cost of the VOIP plan.
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Oxymoron (Score:2)
The whole point of ban on paid prioritization is prevention of exactly this type of leveraging of the ISPs position.
The end user is just as much a part of the public "Internet" as Bing or MySpace. Packets crossing administrative boundary between Comcast's network and customer's Internet network over customers public Internet address and customer's Internet infrastructure is no different than packets crossing boundary between Comcast and Level3.
The locality of ISP provided services already affords the ISP p
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They built the network, they maintain the network, they own it, they set the rules. I'm not sure why you think you have any say in the matter.
Most likely because I pay for Internet service, vote and have made my views on NN known to my representatives?
Don't like it?
What was your first clue?
Write a check for a few billion and build your own network.
Quite certain it would bounce.
REAL neutrality would mean any site for PP (Score:2)
To my mind, consumers and technical users alike would LOVE to be able to pay to prioritize traffic to specific sites of interest.
However to my mind, if you were going to abide by a network neutrality principal, it would mean you could pay for network prioritization for ANY website of your choosing. So a consumer could prioritize traffic to an Anime site, or Netflix, or linux distros.
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Ignoring sites that are slow outside of the ISP due to routing and such, most problems seem to be due to oversubscribing. Allow a few households to pay for priority access to Netflix or whatever and everyone else slows down a bit, more households pay for priority and everyone else slows down more, more people pay and pretty soon most everyone is paying, the network is still oversubscribed and things are just about as slow except the last households that didn't pay are super slow. End result is everyone who
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I don't mind prioritization, so long as we don't have paid prioritization at any end, and don't allow the prioritization to impact base level service for any other user or service.
'Specialized Services' are defined as... (Score:2)
any service that an outside company pays Comcast to provide to it's customers. Ergo, there is no paid prioritization except from the people who have paid for prioritization. Checkmate. ;)
NO COLLUSION!
So let me get this straight... (Score:2)
... Comcast supports a ban on paid prioritization, as long as they can circumvent the ban?
Yeah, real effective ban you got there.
Corporate Speak (Score:3)
Comcast Corporate Speak: Let us double dip and force paid prioritization, but we'll only do it with limited services restricted to all the things we wanted paid prioritization for in the first place.