What is Comcast Doing?

So with the recent kerfuffle over Comcast's network management policies, it seems prudent right now to ask just what the heck are they actually doing, and why?

The simple answer seems to be that they are limiting activities on their network that tend to hog lots of bandwidth. Fair enough. I'd say they have a right to keep some users from hogging all the network capacity. But here's what I don't understand (and I'm not a network engineer, so maybe some of you out there can clarify this for me): why target specific kinds of traffic or specific applications like peer-to-peer file sharing? Wouldn't it just be simpler (and fairer) to impose a monthly transfer limit for all customers? I could imagine many fair ways to implement this — you could throttle users back to something closer to dial-up speed if they hit their monthly maximum, for one thing. If everyone knew the limit, no one would have any legit reason to complain if they went over it.

But instead, the company is not stating any clear policy, and is instead limiting customer's traffic in ways the customer is never informed about. What are Comcast's rules of the road, and why do none of their customers know what these rules are?

I can think of a couple of reasons why Comcast might be doing things this way. First, I might be wrong about the simplicity of imposing caps. Maybe it is far simpler to just monkey with the specific traffic that comprises the worst of the bandwidth hogging: BitTorrent traffic. In this case, it's a question of expediency.

Or maybe it is simple to impose caps, but Comcast fears a customer backlash if they start clearly stating limitations to customers who will see such limitations as a throttling of their service — in essence, a diminution of service without a commensurate diminution in rates charged. In this case, its a question of Comcast trying to be stealthy, and solve their problem while staying under the radar.

Whatever the reasoning, it's clear that Comcast, by their own admission, is doing something to limit certain traffic generated by some of its customers, without stating any clear policies about what that limitation is, and how it is applied. I'm not saying Comcast can't manage its network. But I think they owe it to their customers to come clean about how they're doing it.

Posted by Kevin Carlson at 12:45 PM  Permalink