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. 
2GB/hour? 3? 8?
At least they're better than ATT, if only by shades.
The problem lies in how Comcast is going about it. Rather than slowing all traffic in and out of the user's connection, they are tampering with the packets themselves. Meaning they're intercepting information and in some cases, tossing it overboard.
CENCORSHIP IS UNCONSTITUTIONAL AND ILLEGAL AND THAT IS WHAT THIS IS. I ADVISE EVERYONE TO CANCEL COMCAST AND FIND A SATELITE PROVIDER OR ANYONE THAT DOES NOT ENGAGE IN THIS BEHAVIOR. BOYCOTT COMCAST EVEN IF YOU DON'T USED BIT TORRENTS.
reference docket numbers 07-52 and 08-7 when filing by paper or submit your filing
electronically by going to http://gullfoss2.fcc.gov/prod/ecfs/upload_v2.cgi and enter proceeding
numbers 07-52 and 08-7. Filing instructions are provided at
http://www.fcc.gov/ownership/comments.html.
I work with one local ISP and there policy is slow down some apps between 8am and 5:30 pm because they have businesses and home users going through their main site.. ((as do all ISP)) they can not risk having businesses get a slow conenction because of music downloads and other apps like that...
Blocking an app actually is the easy way out and does not cause more stress at all..not sure where that idea comes from but it is not true... I could go into a 5 page explaination here but nobody wants to read it
I bet you will whine harder when your on demand movie is stuttering and skipping because of BT traffic.
So the limits are clearly already a network management tool and not a technical problem.
tim
Like the stock market, someone has to loose money so someone else can make it.
Web request...ie hitting enter or clcking a link requires very very small amounts of up stream..ie to the server traffic... now maybe we should discuss tcp vs udp and then ports and rebroadcasts and routing...
connection. Comcast several times simply shut off our outgoing
mail without warning. The explanation was that too many outgoing
mail messages were being sent. But they were unwilling to say how
many was too many, and the claimed it was all automated and
there was nothing anyone could do about it. I put in a qwest DSL
connection in addition to the comcast, just to have a reliable way to
send outgoing email. I hate these turds.
When they get their way and they can decide what flows normally and what doesn't flow normally, you can bet that EVERYONE will be affected by this in some way or another.
This is exactly WHY we need to pressure our politicians to not pander to corporate lies. If they feel that their network is being overloaded it is time that THEY scale it to accept/handle all of the extra bandwidth needs that are on the way, and growing more popular every day.
the innocent several MB of stuff I try and send to/from my
business so I don't have to burn fossil fuel constantly and so I
can use tools like Remote Desktop and timbuktu to access my
business. It's a monopoly for all intents and purposes, and
behaves exactly as we would expect. Please, MORE REGULATION!
I know this is a dirty word, but whatever idiots think that the so-
called free market will solve their problems should stop drinking
the Kool Aid. I can agree that IF we had a free market it might
solve a few problems - - but the monopoly or duopoly of
internet services is anything but free. "Free Market" seems to be
the mantra of someone who is in the process of ripping you off.
Really there are two problems: 1) the whole issue of available bandwidth is being obfuscated by Comcast for marketing purposes, and 2) they're not throttling my bandwidth usage, they're throttling certain operations by certain programs. If they can throttle just BitTorrent then they can, for example, limit the bandwidth of Firefox users to half what they give IE users. You really want to pay for that?
The problem is that Comcast purposefully oversells it's bandwidth. Much like how Airliners oversell tickets all the time.
If everyone actually got what they paid for, the entire Comcast network would go down in flames.
really want to do is control what goes over the network. Lke make
sure you can onloy download movies they sell and not from some
other service like itunes. That's what this is all about: they're
establishing the right to pick and choose what goes over their
network, and the loser is gonna be the consumer. If you don't like
it, hook up with the other cable company. ha ha.
for instance the right to illegally have/gain access to an un-paid for copy of art/song/program.
but liberals are not interested in the rights of lawful restrictions on people planning to blow up America, because that would be aweful to restric those "rights". I don't see anywhere that people have the right to plan to blow up America in any laws, and I don't see anywhere that people have the right to have something they didn't purchase.
what "liberals" are fighting for. A few things need to be said
here. The issue of intellectual property is not a
liberal/conservative issue. I am sure you will find plenty of
unpaid copies of songs/art/whatever on conservative computers
as well as liberal. And to think that "liberals" don't love our
country and want to prevent it being blown up? What are you, on
crack? Probably. I think you need to flush your collection of
misguided labels down the toilet and start using your mind to
think about issues and people on a direct, one-to-one basis.
Using your useless labels to define what "people" do and think is
counter productive. If "liberal" means some kind of restriction on
unlimited torture, lack of due process, reducing military trials
instead of civilian trials and so on, well, call me a liberal. You
might as well call me a Constitutional American, because as I
read it, all these things are illegal under our mutually-agreed-to
constitiution, yet are violated every single day that our non-
liberal administration continues to abuse everything and every
one in sight.
http://www.fairhavenbiblechapel.org/MacDonaldtechResults.html
-Andrew
we need a community owned public network like the internet was originally supposed to be. with no servers in the network. just dumb fiber and optical switches. any intelligence would be on the periphery.
we need a mesh network that is free from control and surveillance, and has the potential to go as fast as we can make it go.
this kind of corporate behavior is a perfect demonstration why we need democrats in the white house so that we can regain our status in this country as having the best internet. we invented it after all. these cable companies are keeping us at speeds from 15-20 years ago. we should be seeing multi-gigabit upload speeds by now, and they're bottlenecking us.
i don't say to stop them. i just say build the internet II with multi-gigabit upload/download speeds for everybody, and if the cable companies want to compete, fine. let them. we should make them work for all that free public right of way they get to use to network us.
oh and by the way, if a road paving company came and told me they'd be searching my car every single time i drove, i'd be pissed about that too. they have no right even looking at what kind of packets we send/receive.
anyway.. turning the argument to the president is foolish. and your car...yes the police look at it every time you drive by them... same as a router looks at every packet that flows through it...
of course I am sure you have an invisible cr in your garage.
I bet your local community college offers some classses to understand computers and how the internet works or does not work
- 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.
- Like this Reply to this comment
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- the internet is like roads.
- by iamafractal February 13, 2008 3:22 PM PST
- It's not just an analogy.
- Like this View reply
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Showing 1 of 3 pages (117 Comments)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.
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.
Commcast should improve its network or give realistic specifications for how it can be really used.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.