9/05/2008

Comcast Appeal's FCC Ruling

As expected, Comcast appealed the FCC's recent decision in the landmark "Net Neutrality" case. Earlier this year the FCC charged comcast with blocking peer-to-peer traffic and made it clear that customers were not adequately informed about this changes to service.Unlike other ISPs who admit blocking P2P, comcast has been denying it:
“The carefully limited measures that Comcast takes to manage traffic on its broadband network are a reasonable part of Comcast’s strategy to ensure a high-quality, reliable Internet experience for all Comcast High-Speed Internet customers and are used by many other ISPs around the world.”

At issue is the definition of "reasonable network management", a term the FCC introduced in a 2005 policy statement. Comcast's recent upgrades to end-user modems installs a product named "PowerBoost" which offers bursts of speed at the beginning of a download. This helps improve load times for small images and the send/receive process for emails but does little for streaming video, voice calls or peer-2-peer communication protocols that rely on a continuous uninterrupted stream of data.

Here is comcast's response to the FCC ruling:


Read this document on Scribd: Comcast Response to Further FP ex parte

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

It's time ComCast and similar service providers began charging for the capacity used by subscribers...People who use an excessive amount of internet capacity may adversely impact other users and raise overall service costs as well as reduce the response time of the internet system.