About a year ago, Comcast’s “network management” techniques got a lot of negative publicity–mostly because of the way they slowed people’s connections, or cut them off entirely. In fact, Federal Communications Commission was brought in to investigate its widely criticized anti-BitTorrent filtering.
(BitTorrent is an advanced peer-to-peer sharing technology that allows users to share music, movies, software, and other intellectual property. It works by splitting up files into tiny bits of data that can be shared in any order. Eventually after sharing a file with others, the speed for downloading increases, thereby taking the burden off of the servers and putting it on the users.)
The FCC Chairman, Kevin Martin, said the question was, “Are they reasonable network practices?” He added that “when they have reasonable network practices, they should disclose those and make those public.”
One blogger put it this way: “Many ISPs routinely filter the traffic on their networks. …the fact that a major ISP is now filtering yet another class of Internet traffic should not be major news–except for two factors: BitTorrent traffic accounts for upwards of 25 percent of U.S. Internet traffic, and the techniques used by Comcast are essentially the same as those used by the Great Firewall of China.”
Another blogger said that Comcast was surreptitiously interfering with file transfers by posing as the client, and then disconnecting. Tests by the Associated Press seemed to prove that Comcast was actively interfering with peer-to-peer networks, even if relatively small files were being transferred.
One blogger/customer noted that while clocking his internet speed, he noticed that regularly got only a portion of what Comcast was promising. One customer even took Comcast to court over their phrasing of offering an “always-on” connection in their press and promotions. But the fine print seems to have been more binding than the press release.
The final word may be this headline from Reuters news from only a few weeks ago: “Comcast beats forecast but loses subscribers,” of course, they attribute it to “recession and competition”, but it could simply be poor customer service and bad press.
The moral of the story for internet users: measure your internet speeds and read the fine print!