Bottom Of The Barrel

It's Comtastic, unless you use a lot of bandwidth

Comcast says it is now looking at metered billing as a way to maintain bandwidth for all users. This was announced as Comcast begins to test new network management techniques which no longer target specific protocols and applications like San Francisco's P2P file-sharing provider BitTorrent. Now, Comcast is taking a wider look at its users' traffic patterns and throttling the speeds of heavy users at peak times of network congestion. The test areas are Chambersburg, PA and Warrenton, VA, so if you live there and are bandwidth hogs, you may see you speeds drop some. On an interesting side note, after first denying they were using internet shaping techniques, Comcast is now working with BitTorrent, Pando and others to easily identify their traffic and work on management techniques.

This also will be very helpful when the FCC finally gets around to ruling on their previously unannounced traffic throttling. They could claim is was an Alpha stage of their new revenue model [since they basically got caught doing something they shouldn't have been doing in the first place]. Yeah that's it - we were just seeing if we could do for the future. Yeah that's the ticket!

Labels: Technology

posted by TheWino @ 2:23 PM