Comcast Submits Its Network-Management Plan to FCC
Comcast, which has been under scrutiny from the Federal Communications Commission for how it allocates bandwidth for heavy users, submitted its formal broadband management plan on Friday.
Without notification and without posting a policy, Comcast had targeted users who employed peer-to-peer file sharing. Under the new plan, the company will slow speeds for the heaviest users when traffic congestion is the greatest. This will be accomplished by creating a slower lane of traffic for heavy users at those times, a lane that will have lower priority than traffic for other users.
'Very Few Customers" Impacted
In announcing the plan, the company said the new congestion-management techniques will be in place by the end of this year, and that "very few customers will ever be impacted." It added that its "real-world consumer trials have shown that on average less than one percent of our customers will experience anything different."
If an area of the network nears congestion, the company said, the new plan will make sure that all customers have a "fair share of access to the network." Customers using the greatest amounts of bandwidth will be temporarily managed during the congestion period. Comcast said those customers' activities will not be affected, but they could experience longer times for downloading, uploading, playing games, or surfing the Web.
Comcast added that the decision on which customers to move into a slower lane "has nothing to do with aggregate monthly data usage," but is dynamic and based on current and very recent network conditions.
After complaints from consumer groups, the FCC ruled in August that Comcast had been blocking Internet traffic, and ordered the company to submit a compliance plan addressing how it intended to stop what the agency called "discriminatory management practices." The blocking was aimed at users of such peer-to-peer programs as BitTorrent. To complicate matters, Comcast changed its story a few times when asked by the FCC to explain its actions.
In August, the agency gave Comcast 30 days to provide a plan that would change this practice.
May Get 'Out of Hot Water'
Larry Hettick, an analyst with industry research firm Current Analysis, said the new plan "may get Comcast out of hot water with the FCC." It meets the three qualifications he said any bandwidth management should meet, in that it is "clear, reasonable and published."
He noted that the plan is separate from the usage cap of 250GB per month that Comcast currently has in place. Hettick added that this cap was reasonably generous, given that Cox and TimeWarner have limits of 40GB per month.
Comcast's plan is "application-agnostic," he said, targeting users only by their usage during congested periods and not by the applications they are using, which was one of the issues driving complaints by consumer organizations. But Herrick wondered if growth in network capacity and new compression technologies will be enough for this policy to continue when that one percent of heavy users becomes, say, 10 or even 20 percent.