2 posts tagged “comcast sucks”

By BRAD STONE
The New York Times
Published: March 28, 2008

SAN FRANCISCO — Comcast, the country’s largest residential Internet provider, said on Thursday that it would take a more equitable approach toward managing the ever-expanding flow of Web traffic on its network.

The cable company, based in Philadelphia, has been under relentless pressure from the Federal Communications Commission and public interest groups after media reports last year that it was blocking some Internet traffic of customers who used online software based on the popular peer-to-peer BitTorrent protocol.

Comcast said it would change its fundamental approach to playing Internet traffic cop. Instead of interfering with specific online applications, it will manage traffic by slowing the Internet speeds of its most bandwidth-hogging users when traffic is busiest.

“In the event of congestion, the half percent of people who are overutilizing an excessive amount of capacity will be slowed down subtly until capacity is restored,” the chief technology officer for Comcast, Tony G. Werner, said. “For the other 99.5 percent, their performance will be maintained exactly as they expect it.”

Mr. Werner said he hoped to have the new system in place by the end of the year.

The change was part of an announcement by Comcast on Thursday that it had been working with BitTorrent, a company that was co-founded by the creator of the BitTorrent protocol. The start-up, based in San Francisco and supported by venture capital, helps media companies deliver their files over the Internet using BitTorrent technology. Consumers also use the protocol to share large files like movies.

The companies said they have been working together for the last year on ways to optimize BitTorrent applications for the Comcast network. They said they would publish their findings to Web forums and standards groups so that other software makers, peer-to-peer services and I.S.P.’s could adopt them.

“What we really want is not only for Comcast to be a better network but for all networks to be better,” the president of BitTorrent, Ashwin Navin, said.

Comcast has taken a public flogging since its network management practices came to light. Consumer groups filed a complaint with the F.C.C. and asked it to declare the cable company in violation of the commission’s network management principles.

Comcast’s practices were subjected to additional scrutiny at a contentious commission hearing in Cambridge, Mass., last month. Another hearing is scheduled at Stanford in Palo Alto, Calif., next month.

Thursday’s announcement will not necessarily end the cable company’s public troubles. Comcast and BitTorrent said their collaboration showed the corrective power of the market and obviated the need for further federal oversight. But in a public statement, the commission chairman, Kevin J. Martin, vowed continued scrutiny and expressed concern that the old filtering practice would continue at least through the end of the year.

Marvin Ammori, general counsel at Free Press, one of the public interest groups that petitioned the F.C.C., urged the commission to continue pursuing the matter. “The only reason Comcast came to the table and made a deal with BitTorrent is because of the unrelenting pressure,” he said.

Many proponents of the network neutrality principle, which would require I.S.P.’s to treat all Internet packets equally, have expressed a preference against any sort of filtering and urged Comcast and its rivals to instead invest in adding bandwidth.

Mr. Werner of Comcast, showing little patience for that argument, said that Internet service providers in Japan, with the fastest network speeds on the planet, had to manage their traffic.

You'll forgive me if I don't believe you?

By MARK JEWELL
The Associated Press
Wednesday, February 27, 2008

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- The organizer of a federal hearing at Harvard Law School on Comcast Corp.'s treatment of subscriber Internet traffic on Wednesday said "seat-warmers" apparently hired by the company prevented other attendees from getting in.

Comcast has acknowledged that it hired an unspecified number of people to fill seats, but said the seat-warmers gave up their spots when Boston area Comcast employees who were advised about the hearing arrived.

But Catherine Bracy, the administrative manager at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, said most of the three dozen seat-warmers who arrived hours before the Federal Communications Commission hearing's start on Monday remained during the event's opening hours, as many other members of the public were turned away.

Bracy said she saw a couple of the hired people dozing in the front row during opening remarks.

"I think it's disingenuous to say they were holding spots for Comcast employees," Bracy told The Associated Press, a day after advocacy groups that filed an FCC complaint over Comcast's network management accused the firm of trying to stifle debate at the hearing.

Bracy said when she arrived at 7:15 a.m. as doors opened for the 11 a.m. hearing, none of the 35 to 40 people waiting to get in appeared to know what the hearing's subject matter would be.

"No employees came in to take those seats when the event started," Bracy said.

Comcast spokeswoman Sena Fitzmaurice said it hired seat-holders only after an advocacy group called Free Press urged its backers to attend.

"For the past week, the Free Press has engaged in a much more extensive campaign to lobby people to attend the hearing on its behalf," Philadelphia-based Comcast said in a statement.

Fitzmaurice declined to comment further Wednesday in response to Bracy's statements.

The event featured hearty applause - some in response to comments from a Comcast executive who testified before the FCC's five commissioners, and some in response to Comcast critics' testimony.

The practice of hiring people to fill seats in advance of public hearings isn't unknown in Congress and other forums, but Comcast critics said this case was unique.

"First, Comcast was caught blocking the Internet. Now it has been caught blocking the public from the debate," said Timothy Karr, director of an advocacy campaign backed by a coalition including Free Press. "The only people cheering Comcast are those paid to do so."

FCC spokesman Robert Kenny declined to comment.

The hearing came in response to complaints before the FCC that Comcast, the nation's largest cable company, hampered file-sharing traffic on its cable-modem service. The company has repeatedly said that its traffic management practices are necessary to keep other Internet traffic, like Web content, flowing smoothly.

During the hearing, FCC commissioners signaled that they were looking for greater openness from Internet providers about their traffic management practices, and were ready to step in to enforce the agency's "open Internet" policies.

In addition to serving as the event host, Harvard's Berkman Center has another tie to the controversy. A codirector at the center, Charles Nesson, is among the parties that signed a petition along with Free Press asking the FCC to find that such practices violate agency policies.