Comcast to FCC: We block only 'excessive' traffic
Comcast is mounting an aggressive defense of its BitTorrent blocking, telling the Federal Communications Commission that its decision to slow some file transfers are absolutely necessary to keep its network operational and have been mischaracterized by critics.
The broadband provider told the FCC that it delays only peer-to-peer uploads--at times when a download is not taking place as well--and then only during periods of peak network congestion.
Here's an excerpt from Comcast's filing on Tuesday:
Comcast's network management practices (1) only affect the protocols that have a demonstrated history of generating excessive burdens on the network; (2) only manage those protocols during periods of heavy network traffic; (3) only manage uploads; (4) only manage uploads when the customer is not simultaneously downloading (i.e., when the customer's computer is most likely unattended) ("unidirectional sessions" or "unidirectional uploads"); and (5) only delay those protocols until such time as usage drops below an established threshold of simultaneous unidirectional sessions.
Although network management practices must respond to new technological developments and necessarily change over time, Comcast to date has not found it necessary to manage traffic associated with downloads, or bidirectional traffic (i.e., uploads that occur at the same time a customer is downloading). P2P file uploads that are underway before the network management threshold is reached are not interrupted, and neither bidirectional file transfers nor downloads--including new ones--are affected. This action is nothing more than the system saying that it cannot, at that moment, process additional high-resource demands without becoming overwhelmed, just as a traffic ramp control light regulates the entry of additional vehicles onto a freeway during rush hour. One would not claim that the car is "blocked" or "prevented" from entering the freeway; rather, it is briefly delayed, then permitted onto the freeway in its turn while all other traffic is kept moving as expeditiously as possible, thereby ensuring order and averting chaos. This is an appropriate analogy to Comcast's management of P2P unidirectional uploads.
This is the most detailed description yet of what Comcast is doing--as recently as last fall, it was still unclear exactly what kind of BitTorrent or other filtering was taking place.
A coalition of liberal advocacy groups including Public Knowledge, along with a parallel request from Vuze, had asked the FCC to stop Comcast from throttling BitTorrent traffic and to declare that the company had violated the FCC's broadband policy principles. They say says consumers can generally use the applications and access the Web sites of their choosing, with an exception for "reasonable network management."
Declan McCullagh, CNET News' chief political correspondent, chronicles the intersection of politics and technology. He has covered politics, technology, and Washington, D.C., for more than a decade, which has turned him into an iconoclast and a skeptic of anyone who says, "We oughta have a new federal law against this." E-mail Declan. 
- Analogy doesn't make sense
- by RantingRanter February 13, 2008 2:00 PM PST
- Roads are built for use by virtually anyone by the state and the government. Sure we get taxed, but guess what every taxpaying citizen is contributing. Commcast is charging a fee for a service and if they can't provide the service they should be forced to fess up and give back money.<br /><br />I find it funny no real times are mentioned for peak time. This in itself allows for them to block at any time they feel its peak time and the usage excessive.<br /><br />While I don't have Commcast, I think businesses like them should realize that shading anything like this is just wrong. I feel Commcast is too excessive and I want to throttle them.<br /><br />Commcast should improve its network or give realistic specifications for how it can be really used.
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- the internet is like roads.
- by iamafractal February 13, 2008 3:22 PM PST
- It's not just an analogy.<br /><br />Comcast, as well as other isps, utilizes public land to lay cables. they have no place telling us what we can do on these public lands. its as much OUR network as it is THEIRS.. much more so, really. they merely lay some wires and put in a few servers, then charge us and control us for that.<br /><br />they have been bequeathed for one reason or another with the free ride that comes along with the ability to charge a profit for the use of our lands by laying those cables.<br /><br />it never should have been like that. and if it always HAD been like that, we never would have gotten to have an internet in the first place.<br /><br />the only reason that the internet even exists is that the government opened up a publicly funded network, the arpanet, to commercial use. you can thank al gore and his 1987 high performance computing act for that.<br /><br />horrible legislation such as the 1996 and 2000 telecommunications laws have severely hurt public development and deployment of internet technology, and slowly but surely, the large corporate isps have been taking over the responsibility and biting off pieces of our network. unfortunately since all they care about is profit, as opposed to innovation, we now lag behind the rest of the world in internet technology.<br /><br />how can these isps, for example, even speak of bandwidth problems when historically fiber optic bandwidth capability has been doubling more than once every 18 months? by now, we all should easily be able to be in the multi-hundred gigabit range, or higher. <br /><br />what is stopping us is these monopolies. we need to take our network back. we need to upgrade it, develop it, and all profit from its enhanced power.
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