Comcast to FCC: redefining reasonable and consistent

Our friends at Comcast have been spending a little time trying to put a positive spin on their network management practices for the inquiring minds at the FCC. If I were one of the inquiring minds, right now I would have a headache.

Following the coverage from the blogosphere, I can offer a few more the more troubling revelations. From from The Register:

Comcast explains that its BitTorrent busting is “not based on the content of the files users are sharing or the identity of the users who are doing the sharing.” And it’s responsible for all those italics.

But then the company describes exactly when - and to a certain extent how - it “manages” P2P traffic. It’s techniques -

• only affect the protocols that have a demonstrated history of generating excessive burdens on the network
• only manage those protocols during periods of heavy network traffic
• only manage uploads
• 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”)
• only delay those protocols until such time as usage drops below an established threshold of simultaneous unidirectional sessions.

So there you have it. Comcast throttles your BitTorrent uploads only when you’re most interested uploading them.

And from Ars Technica a good explaination of the underlying technology:

To understand the system, it’s important to realize that each household with cable lacks an individual line back to the central office. Instead, homes are wired up to local nodes, with every home on that node drawing from the same pool of bandwidth. In the Comcast network, each node typically serves 450 households, but when as few as 15 BitTorrent upload sessions are running concurrently, all 450 homes can see their network access impeded enough to be noticeable when surfing and making VoIP calls. This is due to a second feature of cable networks (and ADSL networks): upload bandwidth is far more limited than download bandwidth.

These networks were built to suck data from the center of the ‘Net to the edges. P2P inverts that model, pulling data directly from other users along the edge of the network. This creates a problem for Comcast, which asserts that it applies no blocking, delaying, or throttling to downloads, no matter how many are proceeding simultaneously on a local node.

But Comcast doesn’t delay all P2P uploads, either. According to its filing, network management only kicks in “when P2P unidirectional upload sessions (i.e., sessions where a computer is only uploading and not simultaneously uploading and downloading) reach a predetermined congestion threshold in a particular neighborhood.” The goal here is to stop unattended machines from using significant upload bandwidth, though Comcast says that the “delay” is removed once the “number of active uploading sessions drops below that threshold.”

And a very good summery from the Inquirer:

Comcast won’t acknowlege that preventing Internet access is the opposite of providing it. The FCC needs to understand that Comcast is trying to dictate to its users, and to the FCC itself, the terms under which it will operate Internet access services. The FCC simply must not let Comcast get away with any of it.

The FCC will have failed in its regulatory obligations to protect the subscribers to Internet services if it rolls over on this crucial test of Network Neutrality and permits Comcast, which is the second largest ISP in the US, to become the real incarnation of Dilbert’s dread “Mordak, the Preventer of Information Services.”

At best we have a complete disconnect between marketing and delivery at Comcast. The network they currently operate was built to replace dial up and its class of applications. As technology advanced, they upgraded little and oversold . That’s the reality, and the rest is spin.

One other thing bothers me. The US tech press. All of the posts I have presented were drawn from UK based blogs. A quick scan of Cnet and MSN finds only global warming scares and rants about how Republicans are ruining the world. Hey guys, either write about tech or got to work for Slate.