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Talk about an odd couple. Cable giant Comcast said Wednesday that it will work with Vonage to help ensure Vonage's Internet phone service works well over its broadband network.

The Comcast/Vonage alliance follows other similar announcements made with other Internet companies, as the cable operator tries to convince customers that it's not looking to kill competitive services that run over its network.

Last year, Comcast was discovered slowing down peer-to-peer traffic on its network. At first the company denied it was filtering traffic. Then it admitted it had slowed down some types of traffic to manage congestion on its network. Net Neutrality proponents and consumer advocates were outraged and feared Comcast's actions were attempts to control content flowing over its network.

The outcry against Comcast has been so strong, that the company said it would work with peer-to-peer companies BitTorrent and Pando Networks to find new ways to manage its traffic. And in March, it said that it would move to a protocol agnostic network management solution by the end of the year. And in June it began testing a network management system that will slow down during times of congestion for heavy bandwidth users regardless of the application they are using.

"This collaboration with Vonage, and our outreach to many key participants in the Internet community, demonstrate that we are committed to provide network management solutions that benefit consumers and competition" Tony Werner, Comcast Chief Technology Officer, said in a statement.

But what makes the alliance with Vonage interesting is that Vonage is a direct competitor to Comcast. Vonage sells a voice over IP phone service that competes directly with Comcast's own VoIP phone service.

"Although we're competitors with Comcast, this understanding helps our two companies work together to balance the needs of network management with consumers' ability to freely access the services, applications and content of their choice," Louis Mamakos, Vonage Chief Technology Officer, said in a statement.

Video may have killed the radio star, but it doesn't have to kill the Internet.

That is if Internet service providers can figure out how to keep up with the video-driven bandwidth demand on their networks. Peer-to-peer technology provider BitTorrent says it can help.

Video consumes more network resources than any other media distributed on the Web. Even poor-quality video from YouTube eats up more bandwidth than e-mail, music downloading, and voice over IP services. And when you throw full-length high-definition video into the mix, you're talking about even more bandwidth. Depending on the compression used, a single HD video stream can eat up 20 megabits per second worth of bandwidth.

And as consumers subscribe to faster and faster broadband connections at home and sites like YouTube and Hulu come online offering all kinds of video choices, more people are watching video on the Web. According to ComScore Video Metrix, Americans are currently watching upward of 10 billion videos online a month. By the end of 2007, online viewers averaged more than one video a day.

This is just the beginning. ABI research forecasts the number of viewers who access video via the Web will nearly quadruple in the next few years, reaching at least 1 billion in 2013.

This summer's Olympic Games in Beijing marks the first real test of online video as NBC embarks upon the most ambitious online video project ever. NBC plans to offer 3,600 hours of live programming from Beijing, which translates to about 212 live hours for each of the 17 days of the Olympics. The majority of this viewing will be delivered online.

All this video is great for viewers, who are able to pick and choose what they watch and when. But for Internet service providers like the phone companies and the cable operators, it represents a massive challenge. Some providers, such as Comcast and Time Warner Cable, are testing out new ways to deal with "bandwidth hogs" or individual users who use an inordinate amount of bandwidth.

Last month, Comcast began testing a new system that will throttle back or slow down traffic during times of congestion for heavy bandwidth users. The new system was developed after Comcast faced stark criticism for singling out and slowing down peer-to-peer traffic.

Meanwhile, Time Warner Cable, which says it faces the same capacity headaches, also began testing a new billing system that charges customers who exceed their limit for uploading and downloading material.

P2P as a solution, rather than a problem
Eric Klinker, chief technology officer for BitTorrent, which has commercialized the peer-to-peer technology, says that what the cable operators are doing is a good start. But more can be done to help operators deal with the onslaught of video.

For one, peer-to-peer protocols, such as BitTorrent, which are often cited as major headaches for network operators because of the big file transfers they enable, need to be utilized rather than singled out as a source of the problem, he said.

"I think what Comcast and Time Warner Cable are doing is a great first step," Klinker said. "It gets ISPs out of the business of deciding which applications are important and which aren't. But there are enhancements to the peer-to-peer protocol, in particular, that can make it easier on all ISPs."

Peer-to-peer technology has gotten a bad rap for years. Since the days of file-sharing networks like Napster, which allowed people to exchange songs on their computer hard drives with others on the Internet, peer-to-peer technology has been demonized in the press. But the truth is that peer-to-peer technology actually allows large files like videos to be distributed more efficiently. And as more video makes it way onto the Web, it's increasingly being used. In fact, peer-to-peer traffic accounts for about 43 percent of all traffic on the Internet, according to a recent study by the network management company Sandvine.

The way peer-to-peer works is that when a user requests a video, the peer-to-peer network queries other users in the network and takes pieces of the file from different peers and sends it to the user requesting the file. This distributed architecture means that content owners don't have to assemble large and expensive data centers. It also means that a content distributor doesn't have to pay for expensive high-speed links to serve up an entire file from a single server farm.

That said, peer-to-peer protocols in the wild can eat up lots of bandwidth because peers on the network can silently and continuously upload pieces of files from their computers all day and all night, seeding dozens or hundreds of file requests. And because upload capacities are generally much slower than downloads, it can create bottlenecks and capacity crunches on the last mile of service providers' networks. For network operators that are already capacity-constrained, this phenomenon can dramatically affect performance for all users.

The enhanced version of peer-to-peer
Peer-to-peer companies, such as BitTorrent and Pando Networks, have recognized this problem and have been working with service providers, such as Verizon Communications, Comcast, and others to come up with solutions. Verizon and Pando Networks have been working on a project called P4P, which advocates ISPs share information about their network topography and use an enhanced version of peer-to-peer to locate peers in close proximity to the file request. Getting files locally can help reduce the expense associated with carrying peer-to-peer files over long distances.

BitTorrent, whose founder created one of the most popular peer-to-peer protocols used today, has also been working on a solution. The company has developed its own enhancement to the peer-to-peer protocol that tells peer-to-peer applications to stop seeding the network with content when the network is congested.

For example, if a teenager starts playing an online video game at the same time his mother makes a voice over IP phone call and his little sister is downloading music from iTunes, the protocol will tell the peer-to-peer movie application that is running in the background on their family computer to stop uploading bits of the Spider-Man movie that had been ordered from an online movie rental service and is now stored on a hard drive in their home. Instead, the network will search for the content on another peer that is on a network that is less congested.

"If there is contention in the network, my application will back off," Klinker said. "And it will automatically and seamlessly find someone else in the network to complete uploading that content. The video quality is never disrupted, and the user never knows where the content is coming from."

BitTorrent has already tested the enhancement with more than 10 million users and it's currently working with the Internet standards body, the Internet Engineering Task Force, to standardize the technology so that other peer-to-peer companies can embed it in their software client.

Klinker said that new technologies, such as the one developed by his company, as well as efforts on the P4P enhancements will help ISPs manage and control their networks so that even more video can make it to the Web without crippling the infrastructure delivering it.

And once service providers learn how to harness peer-to-peer, they will be able to develop business models that reap the benefits of the technology. For example, Comcast, Verizon, or any other TV provider could add peer-to-peer software to the set-top boxes sitting in their customers' living rooms to create a distributed peer-to-peer movie network. Instead of serving up on-demand movies from their own servers sitting in expensive-to-run data centers, these TV providers could leverage the content already stored on their customers' set-top hard drives.

"The cable and phone companies are already spending capital to put set-tops in everyone's home," Klinker said. "They could use that same hardware as part of their content distribution model. Then the user pays the electrical bill. And they pay for the bandwidth. It's just much more efficient."

Klinker said a solution, such as this one, requires a slightly different business model from BitTorrent's current business model. But he said that it's something the company is investigating.

"It's interesting enough that we're in discussions and testing some scenarios with ISPs," he said. "In general, service providers move slowly. So nothing will happen overnight. But I think we'll see some interesting changes within the next three years."

Correction: This story misstated a quote from Tom Tauke, executive vice president of public affairs and policy for Verizon. Tauke said that it was in the best interest for the FCC to make a decision on the Comcast/BitTorrent case. He did not say that it was in the best interest for the FCC to make a decision against Comcast.

LAS VEGAS--Executives from AT&T and Verizon Communications said Tuesday that it's important for the Federal Communications Commission to take action in the Comcast debate over slowing down certain forms of peer-to-peer traffic in order to prove that legislation is not necessary when it comes to Net neutrality.

Jim Cicconi of AT&T (left) and Tom Tauke of Verizon (right) appeared on a panel together at the NxtComm trade show Tuesday.

(Credit: Marguerite Reardon/CNET Networks)

Comcast, the largest cable provider in the U.S., has been under fire for months after it was discovered the company had been slowing down peer-to-peer traffic on its network. The company claimed it had singled out peer-to-peer, file-sharing traffic, because it was eating up an inordinate amount of bandwidth, which caused degradation across the rest of its customers.

Consumer groups were incensed by the tactic, and the blogosphere filled with criticism. And as a result the FCC has been examining whether Comcast violated any of the agency's Net neutrality principles. A hearing was held earlier this year, and the FCC is expected to make a ruling on the matter sometime this summer.

Jim Cicconi, senior executive and vice president for legislative affairs for AT&T, and Tom Tauke, executive vice president of public affairs and policy for Verizon, told an audience at the NxtComm trade show here that it's important for the FCC to make a decision in this case to show that the agency's Net neutrality principles are enough to keep service providers honest.

"It's in the best interest of the industry for the FCC to make a judgment on the Comcast/BitTorrent case," Tauke said. "None of us want to be in a world where there is a sense that nobody is watching what is going on. We have the FCC and the Federal Trade Commission, which have authority to enforce some policies in this area. And if they do their jobs properly, they can make positive contributions on how the Internet develops."

Cicconi agreed, saying that the FCC has the opportunity to prove to Net neutrality supporters and Congress that it can enforce its own policies and keep the Internet open.

"The Comcast case has brought the debate over Net neutrality into specifics," Cicconi said. He added that this is important because up until now the discussion has centered on hypothetical problems. And creating new laws to deal with problems that haven't yet occurred could be disastrous for the industry.

When it comes to your broadband connection, Google wants you to know that it has your back.

The Internet giant is developing a suite of tools to help broadband users identify traffic discrimination by their Internet service providers, according to a report in The Register.

"We're trying to develop tools, software tools...that allow people to detect what's happening with their broadband connections, so they can let (ISPs) know that they're not happy with what they're getting--that they think certain services are being tampered with," Google Senior Policy Director Richard Whitt said Friday morning during a panel discussion at the Innovation '08 conference in Santa Clara, Calif. "If the broadband providers aren't going to tell you exactly what's happening on their networks, we want to give users the power to find out for themselves."

Whitt argues that innovation among application developers will stagnate without neutral networks, and he wants to see consumers join an "arms race" for Net neutrality--the idea that network operators shouldn't be allowed to discriminate against content or applications or charge extra fees.

"The forces aligned against us are real. They've been there for decades. Their pockets are deep. Their connections are strong with those in Washington," he said. "Maybe we can turn this into an arms race on the application software side rather a political game."

Whitt would not say when the tools will be available or how they would work, but did indicate that Google engineers had been working on them for a while.

The issue came to a head last August when TorrentFreak reported that Comcast was surreptitiously interfering with file transfers by posing as one party and then, essentially, hanging up the phone. Comcast denied the allegation, but tests conducted by the Associated Press showed Comcast was actively interfering with peer-to-peer networks even if relatively small files were being transferred.

In response, the Federal Communications Commission announced it would investigate the charges, and in May, a bill was re-introduced into Congress that would rewrite U.S. antitrust law to prohibit network operators like AT&T and Comcast from blocking, impairing, or discriminating against "lawful" Internet content, applications, and services or from charging extra fees for "prioritization or enhanced quality of service."

Google has long argued that it's necessary to enact new regulations barring such activity, while broadband operators like AT&T and Comcast counter that the market will solve any perceived problems.

Comcast will start testing a new method for managing traffic on its network this week that targets heavy Internet users.

Starting Thursday, Comcast will test a new system that will throttle back or slow down traffic during times of congestion for heavy bandwidth users. The initial tests will be conducted in Chambersburg, Pa. and Warrenton, Va. Later this summer the company plans to expand testing to Colorado Springs, Colo.

Comcast, the largest cable provider in the U.S., has been under fire for months after it was discovered the company had been slowing down peer-to-peer traffic on its network. The company claimed it had singled out peer-to-peer, file-sharing traffic, because it was eating up an inordinate amount of bandwidth, which caused degradation across the rest of its customers.

Consumer groups were incensed by the tactic, and the blogosphere filled with criticism. The Federal Communications Commission is currently looking into the situation to see if Comcast has violated any of its Net neutrality principles.

Comcast has since begun working with peer-to-peer providers and has said that it will not target specific applications on its network. But the company contends that it still must find a way to better manage traffic on its network. And these latest tests, which will run in each market for a month, are meant to help the company figure out the best method for managing its network.

This latest approach is focused on individual users and does not target a specific application. If the network is congested, Comcast will slow down traffic for customers who are using over a certain threshold of bandwidth, regardless the applications they are running.

Comcast isn't the only cable operator struggling to keep up with bandwidth on its network. Time Warner Cable, the second largest operator in the U.S., has expressed similar concerns. The company said earlier this week that it will begin testing a new metering system in Beaumont, Texas.

The way it works is that subscribers who go over their limit for uploading and downloading material will be charged $1 per gigabyte. The test will only apply to new customers in the test region. The tiered pricing will work this way for the Internet portion of subscription packages that also include phone or video use: At the low end, users will pay $29.95 per month for service at a speed of 768 kilobits per second, with a 5GB monthly cap. At the high end, users will pay $54.90 per month for service at 15 megabits per second, with a 40GB cap.

It will be interesting to see how customers react to the both tests. Will the Comcast broadband hogs even notice their traffic has been slowed? And will Time Warner's customers take a beating if they go over their limits? I guess we'll know more when these tests are completed. Until then, if you're a customer in either of these tests, please let me know how it's going. You can reach me at maggie.reardon@cnet.com or feel free to post your comments on this blog.

Comcast is befriending another peer-to-peer software company in the hopes of finding a way to harness the power of P2P without choking its network.

On Monday, Comcast, the largest cable operator in the U.S., said it was entering a strategic relationship with the start-up GridNetworks, a company that makes software to manage peer-to-peer video traffic.

Comcast also said it has invested in the company's $9.5 million first round of funding, which was led by Panorama Capital. Cisco Systems also invested in this round of funding. Specific financial details of the funding have not been disclosed.

Comcast has become very interested in peer-to-peer companies after the company was accused last year of blocking or slowing down peer-to-peer traffic. The cable company argued that it was simply trying to manage its network, which has been overrun by customers using peer-to-peer applications. But the Federal Communications Commission and several consumer groups didn't buy the argument. After public pressure, Comcast said it would stop singling out specific kinds of traffic.

Other reports have recently surfaced that another cable operator has also been slowing down or blocking peer-to-peer traffic. Cox Communications was accused last week of slowing down BitTorrent traffic.

Peer-to-peer software can be both a curse and a blessing to service providers like Comcast and Cox. It distributes bandwidth-intensive content more economically than the traditional client-server model because it uses computers throughout a network to distribute pieces of the content. But even though the peer-to-peer model can dramatically cut costs for content distributors, it still uses an inordinate amount of bandwidth, which can choke some networks.

Companies, such as GridNetworks and BitTorrent, which invented a very popular peer-to-peer protocol, say they can help service providers harness the economic advantages inherent in the peer-to-peer protocol and help them run their networks more efficiently.

Comcast has already struck strategic partnerships to work with BitTorrent and Pando Networks.

"We are interested in the application of P2P concepts in a manner that puts the quality of the consumer experience first, and enables lawful distribution of copyrighted content while also efficiently utilizing the network," Tony Werner, Comcast chief technology officer, said in a statement.

Comcast hasn't said for certain which peer-to-peer technology it will use. But GridNetworks believes its software is uniquely designed to handle video distribution. And as cable operators distribute more high-definition content, they will need even more efficient means of distributing that content.

WASHINGTON--Federal regulators may be probing Comcast's throttling of BitTorrent filesharing traffic, but can they actually take action, if they choose, against the company or any other broadband provider on Net neutrality grounds?

The answer may not be simple. And if the FCC and other regulators are really powerless--in other words, if they need Congress to enact new laws--it means that any threats to take action against Comcast, based on alleged violations of the law today, are merely empty ones.

That's the issue that former staffers and officials from the Federal Communications Commission and Federal Trade Commission took up at an event here on Thursday.

Both the FCC and the FTC have said in the past that they believe they already have ample authority to go after allegations of network operators blocking, degrading, or prioritizing Internet content. They've used that stance to argue against the need for new regulations sought by Google, Amazon.com, and a wide swath of consumer advocacy groups.

FCC Chairman Kevin Martin, for his part, recently reasserted the position, in the context of the Comcast investigation, that his agency can act against complaints of unreasonable network management. Comcast, however, has publicly disagreed, prompting some to speculate that the issue might ultimately get fought out in court--perhaps even the same court that unceremoniously told the FCC it did not have the authority to impose the so-called broadcast flag.

Panelists speaking at Thursday's event also cast doubts on how much power the FCC really has.

The reasons they gave lie in a labyrinthine legal history of how broadband is regulated. Several years ago, the FCC decided to take an increasingly hands-off approach to broadband, or "information," services--a move that the Supreme Court upheld in a 2005 decision. In doing so, the FCC consciously separated those services from telephone services, which have traditionally been heavily regulated and are required to abide by certain nondiscrimination rules.

Although the agency subsequently adopted four broadband "principles" that say consumers have the right to access the lawful content, applications, and services of their choosing and connect devices as they please, those aren't hard-and-fast rules that can be enforced, said Rebecca Arbogast, an analyst with Stifel Nicolaus.

Combine that with a series of recent court decisions that knocked the FCC for overstepping its boundaries--including the one over the broadcast flag--and "there's a very high risk that the commission would be not found to have the jurisdiction to go forward and do something that would constrain wireless companies, cable companies, phone companies from managing their traffic," said Arbogast, who previously served as chief of the telecommunications division of the FCC's International Bureau.

Kyle Dixon, a partner with the law firm Kamlet Shepherd who once served as a legal adviser to former FCC chairman Michael Powell, said the FCC may have the authority to write and enforce Net neutrality rules, but most likely only in a limited sense.

The FCC's Martin has indicated in the Comcast-BitTorrent debate, for instance, that he would like to force broadband operators to disclose more fully to their customers how they manage their networks. If the FCC decides to require ISPs to make such disclosures, such a move is arguably narrow enough to hold up in court because the agency could argue transparency is essential to helping the free market function, Dixon said. (Free-market economists would argue, on the other hand, that no government intervention is required at all.)

But, based on its previous reactions to some FCC rules, Dixon said an appeals court would most likely balk at the agency's attempts to do anything more dramatic--such as writing rules prohibiting ISPs from charging content companies for premium placement, as Net neutrality advocates support.

Former FCC Commissioner Harold Furchtgott-Roth, an economist, said it's difficult to predict whether the FCC could get away with writing stricter Net neutrality rules or enforcing its policy statement.

"I've always been amazed at the amazing arsenal of legal authority the commission has claimed to have," he said. "I don't always agree with it."

And what about other government agencies? The FTC, for its part, concluded in a report last summer that it already has sufficient authority to investigate alleged misconduct by Internet service providers through its shared antitrust oversight responsibilities with the Department of Justice and through existing consumer protection laws barring unfair and deceptive practices.

Dan Caprio, a private consultant who served as former FTC Commissioner Orson Swindle's chief of staff for more than six years, suggested the report speaks for itself: that the FTC can take action against allegedly anticompetitive or deceptive activities by ISPs.

The FTC may well have those powers, but it doesn't mean they'll actually be relevant to resolving complaints about alleged Net neutrality violations, said former FTC Commissioner Christine Varney.

For example, the FTC could theoretically require ISPs to disclose their network management practices more transparently as a result of a complaint. But, practically speaking, such disclosures may not be all that useful to the average consumer who just wants to surf the Web and doesn't understand the technical underpinnings, suggested Varney, who is now the head of the Internet practice at the law firm Hogan & Hartson. She also questioned the relevance of antitrust law in the Net neutrality debate.

"It's not clear to me there's anything inherently anticompetitive, from an antitrust standpoint, about the concept of prioritization," Varney said. "The tools are there...can they be used effectively? I don't know."

News.com's Declan McCullagh contributed to this report

Cox is the latest Internet service provider to have been found blocking peer-to-peer traffic on its network.

The Max Planck Institute for Software Systems released a survey Thursday showing that 54 percent of Cox subscribers reported having their connections blocked when they tried to share files over the Internet. Comcast has been castigated for a similar practice, but apparently it wasn't the only company engaging in such action, according to the Associated Press.

The blocked connections occurred when Cox subscribers used BitTorrent to download or upload files, according to the results of the survey. Cox has acknowledged a practice called "protocol filtering," but says that's not the equivalent of creating different standards for handling content traveling across its networks.

The survey results will provide another log for the fire started by Net neutrality activists pushing for rules that would prohibit ISPs from enacting different standards for different types of content. The AP said the Federal Communications Commission would look into the matter "expeditiously."

The only Net neutrality proposal to encounter some measure of success in the U.S. Congress is back again for another try.

As foreshadowed at a March hearing, House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers (D-Mich.) on Thursday reintroduced the Internet Freedom and Non-discrimination Act, which passed by a 20-13 vote in the same committee in 2006. Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) is co-sponsoring the bill, but so far, it is not clear whether any Republicans have signed on.

Just like last time, the bill would rewrite U.S. antitrust law to prohibit network operators like AT&T and Comcast from blocking, impairing, or discriminating against "lawful" Internet content, applications, and services or charging extra fees for "prioritization or enhanced quality of service."

"The Internet was designed without centralized control, without gatekeepers for content and services," Conyers said in a statement. "If we allow companies with monopoly or duopoly power to control how the Internet operates, network providers could have the power to choose what content is available."

The five-page measure would provide exceptions for things like "reasonable and nondiscriminatory" network management necessary to keep the network running smoothly and compliance with other laws and court orders.

The bill's introduction comes on the heels of a hearing earlier this week about a Net neutrality proposal in a competing House panel, the Energy and Commerce Committee, which traditionally engaged in turf battles with the Judiciary Committee over certain matters.

Net neutrality, of course, is the idea that network operators shouldn't be allowed to prioritize information that rides on their pipes. Advocates of legislation--including Google, Amazon.com, eBay, and a variety of consumer advocacy groups--argue rules are necessary to keep the Internet free, open, and democratic, so that small start-ups can be on a level playing field with more established companies. Network operators, by contrast, say new rules will stifle investments in new broadband networks and deprive them of the flexibility they need to keep their services running smoothly.