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Comcast Agrees To Stop Slowing Traffic

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March 28th 2008
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traffic.jpgADOTAS — Cable operator Comcast Corporation agreed yesterday to change its practices in the wake of accusations that it impedes traffic to peer-to-peer sites. The move was a response to the Federal Communications Commission’s demands, but it looks like Comcast may not have gone far enough to please the powers that be.

Kevin Martin, the chairman of the FCC, said he would continue probing the management practices of broadband providers.

“I am pleased that Comcast has reversed course and agreed that it is not a reasonable network management practice to arbitrarily block certain applications on its network,” Martin said in a statement.

“While it may take time to implement its preferred new traffic management technique, it is not at all obvious why Comcast couldn’t stop its current practice of arbitrarily blocking its broadband customers from using certain applications,” he added.

Comcast said it would adopt a new capacity-management technique that will free up Internet file-sharing services that eat up bandwidth – it added that the company will not discriminate among different applications.

“We will have to rapidly reconfigure our network management systems, but the outcome will be a traffic management technique that is more appropriate for today’s emerging Internet trends,” Tony Werner, Comcast Cable’s chief technology officer, said in a statement.

Consumer groups and online companies claimed that Comcast blocked certain file-sharing services – such as BitTorrent and Vuze – in violation of the FCC’s 2005 net neutrality principles. In November, Comcast admitted that it slowed traffic to handle overwhelmed networks.

Comcast said it would work with BitTorrent and other companies to work out how far it could go in managing traffic issues and that a “protocol agnostic” system would be in place by the end of this year.



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