Comcast announces bandwidth throttling in FCC filing
As part of the sanction by the FCC for its package hijacking of BitTorrent traffic, Comcast was ordered to file a new network management plan with the FCC by midnight Friday. Comcast complied with the order and announced that it would use bandwidth throttling a new congestion management technique as its new network management plan:
It will identify which customer accounts are using the greatest amounts of bandwidth and their Internet traffic will be temporarily managed until the period of congestion passes. Customers will still be able to do anything they want to online, and many activities will be unaffected, but managed customers could experience things like: longer times to download or upload files, surfing the Web may seem somewhat slower, or playing games online may seem somewhat sluggish.
This protocol-agnostic bandwidth throttling plan is expected to be deployed nationwide by the end of December 2008. With its 250GB cap set to go live in October and now bandwidth throttling on tap for December, it looks like we will not be having a Comcastic Day.
Tags: Bandwidth, Comcast, internet, ISP, throttling
Oh, thats just plain fuck up! Time for me to look for another cable company.
Permalink | Reply
Has anyone used a service such as Vongo? Each movie download was at least one to two gigs. If you want to watch a movie every night or just cache a few extra, grab some albumbs off of iTunes or another music store, and throw in a little bit of streaming radio you get throttled? Wow. While this may not be typical of all customers, how can the assumption be made that all customers with high bandwidth are automatically bittorrent users? Is it our fault that their network infrastructure was built way back when a 1MB connection was the max offered since your neighbors shared the bandwidth coming in to the neighborhood? If I was one of the people at Comcast pushing these inititatives, I would be on the lookout for WiMax and LTE solutions that other celluar companies will be offering in the upcoming year(s), that is if they don’t cap you off at 5GB/mo as well.
Permalink | Reply
Dear Comcast,
Verizon has won a franchise to string their FIOS to my city and my home. The day it lights up for customer use, I’ll be taking my $160+ per month of internet and tv and phone service to them. Congratulations on an idiotic set of policies that (especially how badly you’ve ignored my City for years) are pushing your best customers elsewhere.
Permalink | Reply
160 a month cox costs les than that?
Permalink | Reply
It’s amazing how people hit comcast as if they were doing this because they want to. If you choose to actually use intelligence and READ you could very simply notice they were ORDERED BY SANCTION to do this….besides no normal user would ever…..EVER get close to 250GB of usage!
If you wanna be childish in thought and attitude and stick to the blame game hit the FCC…..no one ever educates themselves enough to find the source, just the big name behind it, grow some cells people.
A normal user only uses 2GB-3GB of usage a month. In order to meet 250GB you would have to:
50 MILLION emails at .5kb each
download 62,500 songs at 4MB each
AND download 125 standard def MOVIES at 2GB each
Permalink | Reply
“besides no normal user would ever…..EVER get close to 250GB of usage! ”
The bandwith throttling has absolutely nothing to do with the 250gb cap. Sounds like your the one needing the education.
This is what the throttling is about “It will identify which customer accounts are using the greatest amounts of bandwidth and their Internet traffic will be temporarily managed until the period of congestion passes.”
Permalink | Reply
Let’s face facts… First, Comcast was NOT ordered to do this “by sanction”… all the FCC ruled was that they could NOT throttle only P2P traffic, as had been discovered. This did not mean “hey, but you can throttle EVERYONE instead”. The bottom line is this: Comcast is protecting their cable service by limiting your use of Vongo, Apple TV, Netflix streaming, and every other streaming entertainment service, including such innocuous sites as YouTube (which uses bandwidth for Flash videos). I think it’s time the FCC sees this for what it is… anti-competitive, and stops it, and also goes further in prohibiting Comcast’s involvement with the Clearwire WiMax venture, where they will impose their same draconian rules.
Permalink | Reply