Old Comcast Traffic-Shaping Technique Actually “New” Traffic-Shaping Technique
by John Paczkowski
Posted on April 17, 2008 at 11:24 AM PT
Comcast is apparently too busy drafting its “P2P Bill of Rights and Responsibilities” to bother attending the daylong hearing into its dubious “network management” practices. An odd decision for a company so intent on “clarifying” the practices ISPs should use to manage P2P applications running on their networks. But according to a company spokesperson, Comcast (CMCSA) “felt the issues specific to us were well covered at the first hearing, and the focus of this event should be broader than any individual company’s issues.”
Broader issues? Like reasonable network-management practices? The responsibility to deliver traffic fairly? Service disclosures? The sort of issues that might figure prominently in a “P2P Bill of Rights?”
Guess not.
Anyway, Comcast has already scrapped its policy of deliberately slowing some traffic flowing over BitTorrent and other P2P networks, so there’s really no need for Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin to bust its chops anymore. As Mitch Bowling, Comcast’s senior vice president and general manger of its Internet service, told the New York Times, Comcast’s new policy is to slow traffic based on usage pattern, not application. “[Our new technique] will be based purely on individual consumption by consumers,” Bowling said. “Anything in addition to that is outside the scope of what our network management goal is.”
So the company plans to throttle traffic to the customers that use the most bandwidth. Hmmm. I wonder who those might be? The folks who use the Internet for email and Web browsing or those who use it for downloading digital media?
Comments
It’s pretty clear that the old ways of managing broadband traffic — when people were using it mostly for email and accessing web pages — don’t match the new ways that people are using broadband (for downloading/viewing multimedia and other big content). The old business models don’t seem to match either.
Time to look at new ways to manage traffic — ones that focus on improving the customer experience.
One way is P2P caching (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P2P_caching). It is used a lot by international ISPs, who face the double whammy of high consumer demand for multimedia content from the US and high bandwidth costs (particularly of international transit links).
P2P caching lets ISPs optimize bandwidth while delivering a better experience to all subscribers – P2P users and non-P2P users alike. So, it’s one way to relieve network congestion without rebuilding the infrastructure or resorting to restrictive traffic management techniques. When combined with business policies, P2P caching can provide a much more intelligent way to manage media delivery – one that doesn’t tick so many people off.
Posted by Janice Brown at April 19th, 2008 at 7:15 am