Comcast’s woes over their network management practices seem to be without end. It would help if the company would just fess up, stop it and move on, but this has not been their strategy so far.

The head of the Federal Communications Commission said Thursday he will recommend that the nation’s largest cable company be punished for violating agency principles that guarantee customers open access to the Internet.

The potentially precedent-setting move stems from a complaint against Comcast Corp. that the company had blocked Internet traffic among users of a certain type of “file sharing” software that allows them to exchange large amounts of data.

“The commission has adopted a set of principles that protects consumers access to the Internet,” FCC Chairman Kevin Martin told The Associated Press late Thursday. “We found that Comcast’s actions in this instance violated our principles.”

Martin said Comcast has “arbitrarily” blocked Internet access, regardless of the level of traffic, and failed to disclose to consumers that it was doing so. (Yahoo)

There’s a deeper problem at work in all of this. It’s the endless ongoing effort by the cable guys and telcos to artificially create bandwidth scarcity. The only real scarcity is in the capacity their last mile infrastructure, which they have continuously refused to adequately upgrade. The larger internet continues to scale up exponentially, with operating costs in a free fall moving closer to zero every day. At the risk of repeating myself: more competition in the last mile will fix the problem without FCC intervention.

I’ve long  had the suspicion that the heartburn AT&T and the cable guys get from P2P is more about getting paid more for content delivery and avoiding the necessary investment in infrastructure to accommodate users demands. The fact is ISP revenue is up and the cost of capacity is in free fall. This makes providing more capacity at current prices levels very profitable, just not as profitable as raising prices without making new investments.

In the connected world, bandwidth capacity must continuously increase. At the same time we must find ways to do more with less. Anyone within minimal understanding of technology can look at P2P vs server to client content delivery will discover that P2P is an exponentially more efficient way of delivering a large file or stream. That takes us back to the debate about getting paid more to deliver content and avoiding new investment, which seems to be what the cable guys and the death star are really interested in.

Mark Wegleitner, Verizon’s senior vice president of technology agrees with me on the efficiency of P2P:

Peer-to-peer is a distribution enabler. But often when people talk about P2P, it gets lumped into a category with things that are bad, mainly because it takes up so much capacity on the network. But whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing, there is underlying technology for P2P that can be used to everyone’s advantage to get content like video, which everyone is asking for, distributed in the most efficient way.

We conducted some tests with the P4P group and Yale University, and showed that customers have a better experience, and we use fewer resources, when we used the P2P technology. It’s really a win-win situation for us and the customer.(Cnet)

I’ve often postulated here that the cable guys are feeling threatened by streaming video. New web only original programming is becoming more common, and is taking some viewers from their closed systems. They’ve been heavy handed about “managing bittorrent” claiming it consumed 80% of its capacity to deliver illicit content. Not only is the claimed 80% out of line with reality, but the fact is legitimate programming from services like Revision3 and Joost are delivered via bittorrent and traffic is growing as more viewers discover them. In the last year, the cable guys’ premium content providers have begun to offer ad supported streams free to anyone with broadband access. People like consuming content on demand as opposed to on a schedule, prior success of the VCR and Tivo proves it. With greater convenience, more programming will eventually find a larger audience. With content going directly from producer to consume , the long term viability of the closed content distribution system model is not viable. In other words, the cable guys’ 150 channel set top box business will be on life support soon.

Naturally, the cable guys are not going down without a fight. While publicly, they have stated network management and tiered service levels are needed to evenly distribute scarce resources, it’s only a small part of the bigger picture:

….given the fact that the company (Comcast) previously promised that it only managed traffic during times of congestion, only to have those claims disproved, we might have to take the term “network congestion” with a grain of salt. Also unsettling is the fact that the company hasn’t revealed any further details about what constitutes a high-bandwidth user and how limited those users will be during times of congestion. If Comcast chooses to roll out this type of technology, it will have to be upfront with its customers about what the exact limitations are. And given the company’s secrecy throughout the Bit Torrent fiasco, I wouldn’t hold my breath for that kind of transparency.

So, we’ve established that while technically “neutral,” both Time Warner and Comcast’s new network management techniques are not without their share of issues. There is still, however, one very large elephant left in the room: the fact that both Comcast and Time Warner are cable television providers. And as we all know, despite the industry’s constant invocation of the P2P bogeyman, at present, the largest bandwidth hog is actually streaming video. Clearly, the emergence of online video is something that cable video providers find very threatening and by capping off bandwidth usage, they’re effectively killing two birds with one stone; discouraging users from using their Internet connections for video while increasing the efficiency of the network. Is this anti-competitive? It sure seems like it. But is it anti-neutral? Technically, no. While Time Warner and Comcast both deliver video and Internet service via the same pipe, the two services live on separate networks. (Public Knowledge)

I am sorry to repeat myself so often, but if the cable guys had any real competition, none of this would be happening.

While the average broadband user inthe UK fares better than his American counterpart, there is still little serious competition in fixed line access. Plus, the UK’s 2 wild and crazy guys can behave just as badly as ours. As further proof that a doupoly does not foster adequate competition to best serve the the public good, the UK cable monopoly is now mimicing the American one.

The decision follows recent regional testing of extended restrictions in London and the North West. Previously the brakes were only slammed on for five hours if limits were exceeded at any point between 4pm and 9pm.

Now, “M” customers who bust 900MB during the day will have their theoretical maximum download halved from 2Mbit/s to 1Mbit/s. “L” and “XL” users’ usual headline speeds of 10MBit/s and 20MBit/s will be slowed by three quarters if they break daytime download limits of 2400MB and 6000MB respectively.

The download thresholds for the daytime throttling period are double those of the evening period, which also restricts uploads.(The Register)

To Virgin’s credit they are investing in providing 50MBPS speeds and are spelling out how heavy users access will be throttled. I’m not giving them a pass, they are doing this purely because they can. With more competition Virgin would be building more capacity and managing users less. How do I know? Look to Paris. No provider there is throttling or complaining about heavy users. What makes Paris different is robust competiton.

Tony Werner, Comcast CTO says that his company will begin to manage heavy users during peak hours rather that protocols in this video interview with Cable Digitial News.

Obviously, if implemented, this will make a few who are most likely paying for higher level service tiers very unhappy. While efforts to more equitably manage existing capacity are understandable, they should not be done at the expense of creating more capacity. With new bandwidth intensive content and services coming daily the common user will consume more bits than last years heavy user very soon. Expanding capacity would be Comcast’s only option if we had real competition.

When you have a small number of competitors in a business, like the US has in the broadband access business, providers tend to create artificial scarcity and ration service. It’s almost a natural law. another one of those oddly natural laws is the 80 / 20 rule. 80% of users of any product will use 20% of a resource and 20% will use 80% of a resource. I matters not if it’s free refills on coffee, or the beer that is bought and paid for by the bottle, it holds true for both. It’s also true of bandwidth usage and should be expected by providers as a normal metric of their business.

Om Malik recently interviewed Danny McPherson, CTO of Arbor Networks, a supplier of network-management and traffic-shaping tools to carriers. You would think he would naturally concur with the Comcast line that the majority of traffics is peer to peer, but his data includes some very unexpected numbers:

The P2P stats are the ones that came as a complete surprise. Like you, I have read many reports that suggest P2P applications account for the majority of the traffic on high-speed networks. But McPherson’s data suggests otherwise:

• 20 percent of traffic is P2P applications
• During peak-load times, 70 percent of subscribers use http while 20 percent are using P2P
• Http still makes up the majority of the total traffic, of which 45 percent is traditional web content that includes text and images. Streaming video and audio content from services like YouTube accounts for nearly 50 percent of the http traffic. It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone — streaming TV shows from Hulu and videos from YouTube have been on a major upswing, as noted by our colleagues over on NewTeeVee. (GigaOm)

It would seem that the 80 / 20 rule also applies to P2P traffic. As for the bandwidth “hogs”, Telcos have been building network capacity using the 80 / 20 rule since the days of the rotary telephone. The cable guys should certainly understand this as well since they’ve also been fixed line voice providers for over a decade.

Providing bandwidth becomes exponentially cheaper every year, but it does require a commitment to invest proportionally in plant and equipment to keep up with increasing demand. If you have little competition it’s easier and cheaper to create scarcity and ration. The creation of mythology like networks being overwhelmed by illicit P2P traffic is part and parcel of creating the scarcity myth.

It appears that Comcast is not the only one play games with TCP resets on Torrents according to the blog Torrent Freak. Here be the list of expected offenders –

If you are interested there is a plug in you can use to determine what is happening to your Torrent traffic. It is clear that Comcast is the leader but they are not alone as the table indicates.

We’re big fans of Steve Gibson’s weekly security net cast. It’s good to see one of the most popular tech shows on the net take on Third Pipe subject matter. In the program Steve discussed the issues of net neutrality, congestion and more. Our own expert, Dr. Dog, has already chimed in on the subject matter. We welcome Steve’s unique perspective to this uniquely Third Pipe discussion.

Security Now show 139

After fighting to keep file sharing off of their network, Comcast is making a public about face and working with BitTorrent. While it could be largely a PR move, use of the technology could have benificial uses in Comcast’s content distribution.

Comcast Corp. says it will stop targeting BitTorrent on the Internet, according to an announcement to be made today.

Seeking to defuse tensions in a government investigation, Comcast says it will halt its practice of interfering only with BitTorrent file-sharing programs when the Internet congests and slows speeds for everyone.

The Philadelphia cable company also will boost broadband capacity to make it easier to transmit online video and other rich media, it says. At times, BitTorrent accounts for 50 percent of the traffic on the Internet, with 40 million to 45 million users around the globe.

As part of the agreement, BitTorrent Inc., based in San Francisco, will make its free software more efficient and will make sure software developers learn of those efficiencies. (Philly.com)

Comcast’s actions rarely live up to the extent of their PR spin. Until we see evidence that real action has been taken, I’m calling this a ploy to get the FCC dogs off their trail. Please prove me wrong Comcast!

[Dr. Dog] Not only do I concur, but doubly so. I figure somebody on the tech side got to management and informed them that a tech battle between them and FOSS would end badly for Comcast. They probably read the first draft of the RFC proposal for the next iteration of P2P and realized the jig was up. Comcast would have faced a continual escalating ports royal with equipment upgrades with no end to the capital drain.

It will be interesting to see if the stick to this proposal. Still does not solve their long term problem with TVoIP. That is a bigger fish that will require attention. And as it is right now I don’t see how they can turn those folks off. It would seem to be a legitimise use of bandwidth. Just like channel 276 on their own service.

After fighting to keep file sharing off of their network, Comcast is making a public about face and working with BitTorrent. While it could be largely a PR move, use of the technology could have benificial uses in Comcast’s content distribution.

Comcast Corp. says it will stop targeting BitTorrent on the Internet, according to an announcement to be made today.

Seeking to defuse tensions in a government investigation, Comcast says it will halt its practice of interfering only with BitTorrent file-sharing programs when the Internet congests and slows speeds for everyone.

The Philadelphia cable company also will boost broadband capacity to make it easier to transmit online video and other rich media, it says. At times, BitTorrent accounts for 50 percent of the traffic on the Internet, with 40 million to 45 million users around the globe.

As part of the agreement, BitTorrent Inc., based in San Francisco, will make its free software more efficient and will make sure software developers learn of those efficiencies. (Philly.com)

Comcast’s actions rarely live up to the extent of their PR spin. Until we see evidence that real action has been taken, I’m calling this a ploy to get the FCC dogs off their trail. Please prove me wrong Comcast!