Comcast to Throttle Biggest Bandwidth Hogs
Comcast is running a trial this month in certain areas of Pennsylvania and Virginia, which will reduce bandwidth and speed to customers downloading large amounts of data during peak usage times in order to reallocate bandwidth to everyone else. The trial will run until the end of the month and, if successful, may be implemented in other areas of the country.
As leery as I am about Comcast throttling its customers' connection speeds, this seems like a somewhat fair way to do it. It's like the rule at dinner; you can have seconds once everyone else at the table gets something to eat first. It's much better than just capping every customer at a certain monthly gigabyte limit, like Time Warner Cable is trying to do.
The problem, of course, is that Comcast gets to decide who's "using more than their fare share" of resources. What happens if a customer who generally doesn't use that much bandwidth all month happens to be downloading a large, important file one afternoon?
Although Comcast claims that "network management will only affect a small percentage of users during periods of network congestion," this policy has the potential to rub a lot of people the wrong way. Especially business customers, for instance, who pay for unlimited high speed service and expect to be able to download large amounts of data consistently and reliably.
In other cable industry news, the city of Los Angeles is suing Time Warner Cable stating that the company has caused "major havoc and distress" thanks to poor customer service, long hold times, and raising cable rates after buying out previous cable provider, Adelphia, despite brochures and TV advertisements stating that rates would stay the same.
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While this trial may seem reasonable (compared to Time Warner), the fact that Comcast consistently lied about their bittorrent throttling as well as sending out fraudulent reset packets to disconnct peers was the last straw for me. I'm discontinuing my account with Comcast and going with Qwest DSL and DirecTV. I already have it, in fact. Yes, it's slower, but it is still fast enough to meet my needs. Adios Comcast -- it was the bald-faced lies which forced me to leave you. Lies. Lies. Lies. I detest liars, and Comcast issued lies from their CEO at the top and on down to the lowest-level CSR. I'm not going to miss them at all -- bittorrent works just fine with Qwest and I can actually seed a torrent with a higher upload speed than Comcast.
I agree that this is a fair way to do it. This sounds a lot like the "fairness algorithm" that NetEqualizer bases its shaping on. That seems to go OK in businesses and such. If it works the way it should, more people should benefit than suffer. I guess the "if" is the key here.
I agree that this is a fair way to do it. This sounds a lot like the "fairness algorithm" that NetEqualizer bases its shaping on. That seems to go OK in businesses and such. If it works the way it should, more people should benefit than suffer. I guess the "if" is the key here.