Hosted Communications

April 22, 2008

Comcast Opens Up About Traffic Management

By Eve Sullivan
TMCnet Editor

Comcast (News - Alert) – the Cable TV giant – was recently criticized when it slowed a “peer to peer” transmission of the King James Bible, which was sent as a test by an Associated Press reporter.

At two special hearings, held by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC (News - Alert)), the company was excoriated for delaying such traffic.

Peer to peer traffic, which accounts for more than half of all Web traffic, enables computers to snatch music, data and video files from other computers. To assemble one file, a peer-to-peer service can tap into dozens, or even hundreds, of computers around the world.

Though Comcast, which has 13 million online customers, has been taking a low profile, two of its executives gave an interview to USA Today on the subject.

According to Chief Technology Officer Tony Warner, the transmission slowdown occurred automatically when network congestion started to build in the Boston area, affecting other customers. The King James Transmission, which was small, didn’t cause the slowdown, he said.

Once traffic loads got too high, he said, Comcast’s network automatically took steps to avoid further degradation. The result was that some peer-to-peer traffic, including the King James transmission, got delayed. It was never blocked, just slowed, he said.

“The only reason you do something like that is to maintain consistent network performance,” Werner said.

At the FCC hearings, Comcast was criticized for throttling back peer-to-peer traffic as network management technique. “The technique is not unique to Comcast,” said Mitch Bowling, senior vice president of online services.

FCC Chairman Kevin Martin says Comcast should be specific about its bandwidth limitations. “Consumers have to be informed about what they are buying,” he said.

Comcast service contracts say, “excessive usage,” is banned, but no cutoff point is specified. Bowling says there’s a good reason for that because “there isn’t a specific limit.”

According to Bowling, Comcast considers incidents case-by-case and only a handful of people fall into the “excessive use” category. Excessive use is the equivalent of two T-1 lines – big data lines by large corporations, he said.

Eve Sullivan is a TMCnet contributing editor.