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'tis always good when they get a bloody nose
'tis always good when they get a bloody nose
Comcast Turns The Page on Traffic Management
Accused of interfering with the traffic towards certain Internet file-sharing services, Comcast announced the restructuring of Internet traffic management, thus handling all data equally and objectively.
Last November, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission received a complaint against Comcast from a coalition of public interest groups. The company was accused of violating FCC policy by blocking peer-to-peer Internet traffic.
The issue emerged after a simple test by the AP has found that Comcast appears to interfere with the BitTorrent traffic in ways which pose ethics questions and also probably cost the company a lot of money. Specifically, instead of throttling BitTorrent traffic, the company appears to create spoof peers which interfere with the normal peer-to-peer transfers and significantly slow down or even kill some downloads. Furthermore, their test has shown that Comcast appears to "impersonate" existing peers to divert packets.
Although initially the company declared that it was not breaking any of the principles of "net neutrality", it was eventually forced to admit that it does indeed significantly slow down certain peer-to-peer transfers. The move was considered to be necessary in order to prevent the entire network from slowing down because of a few customers that were uploading large amounts of data.
FCC Chairman Kevin J. Martin expressed his concern that Comcast may not change its practices very soon soon. “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 said.
Within this same statement given on Thursday, Comcast representatives also talked about the collaboration with BitTorrent. The two companies have been working together on ways to improve BitTorrent applications for the Comcast network, which, with more than 24 million subscribers, is the largest cable TV and Internet provider in the U.S.
Accused of interfering with the traffic towards certain Internet file-sharing services, Comcast announced the restructuring of Internet traffic management, thus handling all data equally and objectively.
Last November, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission received a complaint against Comcast from a coalition of public interest groups. The company was accused of violating FCC policy by blocking peer-to-peer Internet traffic.
The issue emerged after a simple test by the AP has found that Comcast appears to interfere with the BitTorrent traffic in ways which pose ethics questions and also probably cost the company a lot of money. Specifically, instead of throttling BitTorrent traffic, the company appears to create spoof peers which interfere with the normal peer-to-peer transfers and significantly slow down or even kill some downloads. Furthermore, their test has shown that Comcast appears to "impersonate" existing peers to divert packets.
Although initially the company declared that it was not breaking any of the principles of "net neutrality", it was eventually forced to admit that it does indeed significantly slow down certain peer-to-peer transfers. The move was considered to be necessary in order to prevent the entire network from slowing down because of a few customers that were uploading large amounts of data.
FCC Chairman Kevin J. Martin expressed his concern that Comcast may not change its practices very soon soon. “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 said.
Within this same statement given on Thursday, Comcast representatives also talked about the collaboration with BitTorrent. The two companies have been working together on ways to improve BitTorrent applications for the Comcast network, which, with more than 24 million subscribers, is the largest cable TV and Internet provider in the U.S.
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