Level 3 concurs: Comcast appears to be prioritizing traffic

Level 3, the backbone Internet provider and content delivery network, wants people to know that Comcast is still likely prioritizing its traffic over others’.

The issue is an important one even with the new cap, because if Comcast is prioritizing its own traffic, it is violating the terms of its merger with NBC-Universal. Andrew Dugan, SVP of Network Engineering & Architecture, and Nasser El-Aawar, principal network architect, use a service called Wireshark to test out claims that Comcast is prioritizing its Xfinity on demand traffic that users access via the Xbox. Much like Bryan Berg, who kicked off this kerfuffle with a post on Comcast labeling packets and then accusing it of prioritizing packets, the Level 3 engineers detailed their tests and provided graphs showing that Netflix traffic was degraded on the network when it was congested while the Xfinity traffic going over the Xbox was unaffected.