September 2008

Steve Schmidt, a senior adviser to Republican presidential candidate John McCain said Monday that The New York Times is "completely, totally, 150 percent in the tank" for Democratic nominee Barack Obama. At issue was an article about McCain campaign manager Rick Davis's time lobbying for an organization that carried the banner for recent bailed out mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Comcast will use equipment from Sandvine, Camiant and a third yet-to-be-determined vendor to temporarily throttle back the speeds of the heaviest Internet users during times of network congestion, the operator disclosed in regulatory filings. "The goal of Comcast's new congestion management practices will be to enable all users of our network resources to access a 'fair share' of that bandwidth, in the interest of ensuring a high-quality online experience for all of Comcast's [high-speed Internet] customers," the operator said in the FCC filings. Sandvine, in a statement Monday, said terms of the agreement have not yet been finalized. Based in Waterloo, Canada, Sandvine demonstrated the Fairshare system at The Cable Show '08 in May. Comcast acknowledged that it currently uses Sandvine's Policy Traffic Switch 8210 to limit the number of upstream connections certain P2P applications can initiate. Under the new technique, Comcast will use the vendor's Fairshare tool to determine when a cable modem termination system (CMTS) port is close to being congested. In addition, the MSO said it will use Camiant's PacketCable Multimedia servers to instruct a cable modem termination system (CMTS) which specific modem should be curtailed. A third component, an Internet protocol detail record (IPDR) server, will analyze cable modem volume usage, but Comcast said it has not yet selected a vendor. Comcast expects to cut over to commercial deployment of the protocol-agnostic systems starting Nov. 15, with its entire footprint converted by Dec 31.

Public Knowledge asks, "Why ... does Comcast need both its real-time network management system and the 250 GB monthly cap on consumer usage? Will consumers end up paying more for less bandwidth to use? Is it fair to consumers to punish them based on usage lower than the advertised speed? Is it a problem to punish a consumer now for what transpired on the network 15 minutes ago, even if a customer not contributing to congestion at the moment? Will there be anticompetitive aspects to limiting consumer use of video over the Internet, but not on the Comcast cable network?"

Federal Communications Commission member Jonathan Adelstein used One Web Day, an annual global celebration of the Internet's impact on society, to press for a more prominent national broadband strategy. "Contrary to some views, I believe broadband penetration does matter -- we need to tap all our resources," he said. Broadband is slower and more expensive in the US than it is in the countries with which we compete internationally and "consistently, the data tells us something is wrong," he said. Adelstein added that even if the country was #1 by all measures, "we [would] still need to press in a public/private effort to stay on top, as technology evolves."

[Commentary] Last week, Daily attended a Senate hearing in person for the first time. But out of the 23 Senators on the Commerce committee holding this hearing there were only three in attendance: committee chairman Sen. Inouye, Sen. McCaskill, and the infamous Sen. Stevens (aka Mr. Tubes). Over the course of the hearing three other Senators showed up but by the end there was only Chairman Inouye. but the Chairman made the most of the opportunity. He shared his belief that broadband is just as important an innovation as the printing press, that it's a shame we don't have this universally available and utilized, and that something must be wrong if we who were the pioneers of the Internet are now not much better off than a third-world country. Two are important points he made are: one, if we have no broadband policy, than this becomes a political issue, which it has, pitting left vs. right at a time when we need to all be working together and when we're all in general agreement that broadband's important and we need to be doing more to spur deployment and adoption; and two, he expressed his frustration over the fact no one can tell him how much it'll cost to get these networks built and fully utilized. He implored the presenters to send him and his colleagues more hard data about costs, efficacy, and the like, that they're starving for information to help guide their decision-making. He even went so far as to say that he's got no problem putting in an earmark, he just needs to know for what, how it will help, and what it will cost.