More on Comcast's Broadband Throttle Plan

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?"