Comcast’s Ideas About Bandwidth Move From “Bad” To “Meh”

You may recall the news D reported on about Comcast considering a bandwidth cap. If it were to go through, it would mean surcharges for subscribers that create the most traffic (over 250GB a month). For Internet users such as myself and my fellow writers, this is a big UH-OH, and brings up important questions like, “What the hell happened to my Internet service being unlimited??”

Well, it seems that Comcast has (hopefully) realized this would leave a sour taste in the mouths of their subscribers, and they now propose a new solution: protocol-agnostic traffic management. But before we get into the (non)religious beliefs of connection standards, let me explain how Comcast got to this point.

Anyone who downloads music or movies through services like BitTorrent is using a protocol known as P2P (Peer 2 Peer). It’s an efficient way of transferring files from one person to another both discreetly and quickly. Music afficianados with loose morals tend to use these services to increase their music collection at no cost. Still others will share pirated movies with the world. All of this media making its way around the web amounts to a lot of bandwidth. Bandwidth costs money. And in the case of a cable giant like Comcast, bandwidth is shared. If someone in your neighborhood is going hog-wild on the downloads, Comcast feels it in their wallet. So it may not be that much of a surprise to learn that awhile back Comcast was caught blocking connections that were being made with the P2P protocol in an attempt to manage their bandwidth and save some dough.

Outrage ensued. People were paying for an unlimited connection, and they (rightfully) expected one. Comcast was accused of profiling its users by blocking a specific protocol, and creating havoc for legitimate businesses that use P2P for legal purposes.

Since then, Comcast has been trying to find a way to stretch out their bandwidth without the typical user noticing and without the super user complaining (and the Feds investigating). And that brings us to protocol-agnostic traffic management.

The idea here is that Comcast will no longer look specifically at P2P connections, but instead look at the overall bandwidth being consumed by its subscribers. If Internet traffic gets heavy, Comcast will slow down the connections of the users that are taking up the most bandwidth, and free it up for the users leaving a smaller footprint.

Personally, I think this is one of the saner solutions to come from Big Cable. No one loses their connections, and during busier times of the day, the bandwidth hogs get a slower connection to compensate for the everyday Joe checking his e-mail. It’s certainly not a perfect solution, and most super users out there wouldn’t be thrilled to find their connection moving at a crawl during the early evening (let alone want to pay for it). But until companies like Comcast pull up their britches and start laying down some new lines outside, it’s likely the best solution we can settle upon.

You can read more about the evil-incarnate that is Comcast over at Arstechnica.