p2pnet - rss feed: Comcast throttling widespread, says FCC
p2pnet news | Freedom:- Canada isn’t alone in facing net neutrality / throttle shaping issues.
Here, Ma Bell is the largest ISP and in the US, the honour falls to Comcast and both north and south of the border, regulators have been tasked to decide how the two telecom giants should be handled as they try to impose their own bandwidth regulation, claiming they’re being forced to do so by P2P file sharing.
Canada’s Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission opens hearings tomorrow, and in the US, the FCC has just decided, “further concerns about tactics the company has used to restrict Internet users who share movies and other material,” have been raised, says Reuters, going on:
“Testifying before Senate lawmakers, U.S. Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin said Comcast had used a ‘blunt’ technique to impose broad restrictions on peer-to-peer file-sharing.”
Contrary to some claims, “it does not appear that this technique was used only to occasionally delay traffic at particular nodes suffering from network congestion at that time,” Martin said in prepared remarks before the Senate Commerce Committee.
Should the government step in?
No, says Martin, in response to Comcast’s claim that the FCC doesn’t have the legal authority to enforce its open-Internet policy.
But, “I do not believe any additional regulations are needed at this time,” Reuters has him saying, adding, “I also believe that the commission has a responsibility to enforce the (open-Internet) principles that it has already adopted.”
As Comcast grandly revealed, recently, it’s planning a ‘P2P Bill of Rights and Responsibilities’ for users and ISPs.
This is akin to a rapist announcing he’ll start classes in self defence for women.
In Canada, ISP TekSavvy is organising a net neutrality rally in Ottawa on April 29.
“We want to provide a service for our customers, not police them,” CEO Rocky Gaudrault told p2pnet.
Slashdot it! . 
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Reuters - FCC chief again critiques Comcast net tactics, April 22, 2008
grandly revealed - Comcast P2P ‘Bill of Rights’ No! Really!, April 15, 2008
net neutrality rally - Net neutrality rally: Ottawa, April 29, April 23, 2008
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April 23rd, 2008 at 11:08 pm
It seems that Bell is stretching the truth a bit more than we thought about why traffic shaping is supposedly needed.
http://gigaom.com/2008/04/22/shocking-new-facts-about-p2p-and-broadband-usage/
Here’s an interview of Arbor Networks CTO Danny McPherson. Arbor Networks makes network management and traffic shaping tools for the ISPs and he has interesting data on bandwidth usage.
According to him, only 20 percent of traffic is P2P applications. During peak-load times, 70 percent of subscribers use http while 20 percent are using P2P. Http still makes up the majority of the total traffic, of which 45 percent is traditional web content that includes text and images. Streaming video and audio content from services like YouTube accounts for nearly 50 percent of the http traffic.
That would mean, from a traffic shaping point of view it’s not even a that useful to throttle p2p users since all the lag is actually caused by Youtube and it’s cousins - and Bell certainly has these statistics. “I wonder why they would say that?”