Comcast goes to tiered internet
By Leslie Poston
Comcast has recently been accused of throttling traffic, especially to specific sites like BitTorrent. In response the company is being investigated by the FCC for P2P throttling. The company that originally petitioned for the FCC to investigate Comcast is Vuze.
Up until now, bandwidth throttling and unfair practices had been categorically denied by Comcast. Instead of addressing the issue of its discrimination against both legitimate and illegitimate P2P users, Comcast has decided to change its Terms of Service instead.
Changing the Terms of Service after the FCC opened an investigation is really shutting the barn door after the cows are out in terms of fighting the FCC challenge on its practices up until this point. However, the new Terms of Service language is much more in line with the FCC’s own bandwidth use language. the new Terms of Service language for Comcast reads:
“According to Section III of the revised ToS, Comcast ‘uses reasonable network management practices that are consistent with industry standards.’ The company points out that it is not alone in the practice, saying that ‘all major’ ISPs engage in some form of traffic shaping. Comcast does it to keep its subscribers from suffering the heartaches of ’spam, viruses, security attacks, network congestion, and other risks and degradations of service’ and to ‘deliver the best possible Internet experience to all of its customers.’”
The earlier filing by the FCC and revelation that Comcast was punishing any and all BitTorrent users prompted a slew of instructional posts about how to defeat the throttle, like this one from TorrentFreak. Not necessarily kosher, but P2P users simply will not be denied. Even recent bandwidth punishing price hikes from companies like TIme Warner can’t slow down the internet revolution, though they can certainly make the internet less universal by ripping it from the hands of all but the richest people.
Adding a bandwidth throttling clause has proven to be a sign of pending tiered bandwidth pricing for other companies. Without the aspect of bandwidth throttling and user usage control, the tiered pricing schemes don’t work as planned.
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February 10th, 2008
They can certainly make the internet less universal by ripping it from the hands of all but the richest people
And thats what the plan is.. I’ve been in some of the board meetings with the big guys, and they know piracy can’t be stopped. This is the approach they are taking after an unofficial agreement with major media companies.
They wish to make this a universal approach, worldwide via IFPI.
Increase cost of internet and or introduce mandatory Usage caps in and effort to slow piracy.