http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/28/technolo...?ref=technology

Comcast Adjusts Way It Manages Internet Traffic
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By BRAD STONE
Published: March 28, 2008
SAN FRANCISCO — Comcast, the country’s largest residential Internet provider, said on Thursday that it would take a more equitable approach toward managing the ever-expanding flow of Web traffic on its network.

The cable company, based in Philadelphia, has been under relentless pressure from the Federal Communications Commission and public interest groups after media reports last year that it was blocking some Internet traffic of customers who used online software based on the popular peer-to-peer BitTorrent protocol.

Comcast said it would change its fundamental approach to playing Internet traffic cop. Instead of interfering with specific online applications, it will manage traffic by slowing the Internet speeds of its most bandwidth-hogging users when traffic is busiest.

“In the event of congestion, the half percent of people who are overutilizing an excessive amount of capacity will be slowed down subtly until capacity is restored,” the chief technology officer for Comcast, Tony G. Werner, said. “For the other 99.5 percent, their performance will be maintained exactly as they expect it.”

Mr. Werner said he hoped to have the new system in place by the end of the year.

The change was part of an announcement by Comcast on Thursday that it had been working with BitTorrent, a company that was co-founded by the creator of the BitTorrent protocol. The start-up, based in San Francisco and supported by venture capital, helps media companies deliver their files over the Internet using BitTorrent technology. Consumers also use the protocol to share large files like movies.

The companies said they have been working together for the last year on ways to optimize BitTorrent applications for the Comcast network. They said they would publish their findings to Web forums and standards groups so that other software makers, peer-to-peer services and I.S.P.’s could adopt them.

“What we really want is not only for Comcast to be a better network but for all networks to be better,” the president of BitTorrent, Ashwin Navin, said.

Comcast has taken a public flogging since its network management practices came to light. Consumer groups filed a complaint with the F.C.C. and asked it to declare the cable company in violation of the commission’s network management principles.

Comcast’s practices were subjected to additional scrutiny at a contentious commission hearing in Cambridge, Mass., last month. Another hearing is scheduled at Stanford in Palo Alto, Calif., next month.

Thursday’s announcement will not necessarily end the cable company’s public troubles. Comcast and BitTorrent said their collaboration showed the corrective power of the market and obviated the need for further federal oversight. But in a public statement, the commission chairman, Kevin J. Martin, vowed continued scrutiny and expressed concern that the old filtering practice would continue at least through the end of the year.

“It is not at all obvious why Comcast couldn’t stop its current practice of arbitrarily blocking its broadband customers from using certain applications,” Mr. Martin wrote. “Comcast should provide its broadband customers as well as the commission with a commitment of a date certain by when it will stop this practice.”

Marvin Ammori, general counsel at Free Press, one of the public interest groups that petitioned the F.C.C., urged the commission to continue pursuing the matter. “The only reason Comcast came to the table and made a deal with BitTorrent is because of the unrelenting pressure,” Mr. Ammori said.

Executives at Vuze, another software company that creates tools based on the BitTorrent protocol, expressed skepticism that Comcast could be trusted to take a more judicious approach to traffic management. “Comcast has been caught with their hand in the cookie jar and they are trying to come clean,” Vuze’s chief executive, Gilles BianRosa, said. “Right now, I’m paying more attention to what Comcast does rather than what Comcast says.”

Many proponents of the network neutrality principle, which would require I.S.P.’s to treat all Internet packets equally, have expressed a preference against any sort of filtering and urged Comcast and its rivals to instead invest in adding bandwidth.

Mr Werner of Comcast, showing little patience for that argument, said that even Internet service providers in Japan, with the fastest network speeds on the planet, had to manage their traffic.

“It’s like saying we can make all the streets in Philadelphia eight lanes wide and then you won’t need any stop signs,” he said. “You can invest all the money in the world, you are still going to run into certain times when you have network congestion. If you don’t have appropriate techniques to manage it, it’s a problem.”

i'm not sure if this is good news or bad news
on one hand it seems like they are limiting bandwith that people PAY FOR. it says when you sign up that you are going to get certain speed capacities depending on your plan. so if they limit bandwith for somebody who is nearing what they are paying for, isn't that fraud?
maybe somebody more technical could explain how this would help bittorrent networks?

More on this corrupt company just today:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23827953/

http://www.p2pcongestionsettlement.com/

is anyone here going to get in on this?

I was tempted, but then remembered you'd be essentially admitting to illegal downloading. (And yes, there are some legal uses for P2P, but the vast majority do not use those)

Interesting that some of the AT&T propaganda I was fed is actually true.

Remember most ISPs always include speeds up to in the fine print. I guess if comcast guaranteed speeds up to 12 meg, then if they felt that someone was "hogging" bandwidth, they could take him down to his minimum commitment speed, like 10 or 11 meg.

Either way, I'd say that this was some bullshit.

It is bullshit. This is Comcast's backlash to the net neutrality stance the FCC has taken. Since Comcast, AT&T, Cox, etc, are not getting their way, they're going to collar speeds until people cry "uncle".

Just wait until little businesses that rely on high-speed traffic to keep their business afloat (I used to work for one) get told that their bandwidth will be collared during business hours. They'll be the first to call Google and ask, "ummm... is your community-based fiber optic network available yet"?

I read the businesses are not impacted by the collared bandwidth. It's just home lines.

So very glad I dumped Comcast for U-verse last year.

There's a class-action suit afoot as we speak--I could be the recipient of a whopping $16 some year.

Wow - almost enough for a deck of smokes and an espresso in the Bay Area.