Comcast switches to slowing down P2P

The heaviest users among Comcast's broadband customers should expect to see their massive file sharing creep to a crawl for periods of time. I'll solve the bandwidth problem at the end.


Comcast tried blocking peer to peer traffic with a series of connection resets, a practice the company initially denied. AP discovered the shenanigans, resulting in the FCC giving Comcast a slap on the wrist over their network management procedures.

Now, Comcast plans to try something completely different. They won't block their customers; as John Paczkowski said on Digital Daily, Comcast will settle for throttling their heaviest users:

As expected, the FCC gives Comcast 30 days to explain those practices in detail and how the company plans to change them by year’s end.

And just how does Comcast plan to do that? By slowing Internet service for heavy users for 10 to 20 minutes, regardless of the programs they use, with a new system called “Fair Share.”

So instead of throttling applications, Comcast will throttle subscribers.

Comcast called this "managing the consumer" in a Bloomberg piece. Instead of making the service unavailable for paying broadband customers, Comcast will slow it down to a point of virtual non-performance.

Some Comcast customers will favor this practice, as the trading of large files tends to revolve around copyrighted material. Depriving someone of the opportunity to swiftly grab a copy of The Dark Knight off a torrent in order to make service quicker for the majority of customers won't generate much sympathy for the person taking up that bandwidth.

Availability of bandwidth in sufficient capacity to drive the video future of the Internet seems like it would be the focal point for solving the problem of heavy usage. Communities broaden roads to handle more traffic, so why not do the same for Internet infrastructure?

It's a question more people should ask of the companies that could have made greater strides in this area, going all the way back to the Telecommunications Act of 1996. The Act came about to push competition for broadband services, where telcos would work to get the fastest possible connections to the home and sell consumers all kinds of services through it.

Still waiting for that? Me too, I'm paying $50 per month for the privilege of 3Mbit downstream DSL.

Over a decade passed by, very few homes ended up with true high-speed connections. We're stuck as a nation behind a lot of the world with relatively crappy broadband service, for which we pay dearly for the privilege.

Correcting this will require a Tennessee Valley Authority-style effort, a massive Depression-era federal work project that brought electricity to thousands of citizens who simply may never have received it.

Internet may not be as critical as electricity, but the continued shift to a digital society and making services available to anyone with a web browser does suggest citizens ought to be able to get on the Internet.

Kevin Martin thinks it's important. He just happens to be chairman of the FCC.

The shift of manufacturing jobs away from the United States to international destinations, no matter how free trade advocates want to spin it, left people out of work in America.

Priming the job pump by getting people working at ground level on delivering fiber to those 80+ million households that somehow got overlooked from 1996 on by the telecoms might deliver replacement careers for the jobs that hopped over our borders.

It's got to be a better investment in the country than a one-time economic stimulus check.