Last October, Associated Press reporter Peter Svensson reported that internet service and cable behemoth Comcast was blocking file sharing activities by its customers and competitors. Comcast was using a nefarious cracker technique—sending forged reset packets (TCP RST)—basically telling the receiving computer to “hang up the phone.”
Comcast’s president of its interactive division, Amy Banse, subsequently admitted as much to the Web 2.0 conference audience.
As a result, Jon Hart filed a lawsuit against Comcast, alleging violation of federal computer fraud laws, federal advertising laws, and the company’s own contracts with its customers.
The outrage against Comcast grew and in January (government wheels turn slowly), Federal Communications (FCC) chair Kevin Martin announced the agency would investigate complaints.
In what turned out to be a comedy of corporate errors, the FCC’s hearing was held at Harvard in Feburary. Comcast hired seat-warmers—sleeping seat-warmers—off the street to keep its opponents in the network neutrality and common carriage debate out of the hearing. David Cohen, Comcast executive vice president, said in so many words that the company had to block file sharing traffic because there wasn’t enough bandwidth for its customers. Most surprisingly, Martin told Comcast that the FCC is “ready, willing, and able” to punish network providers that violate the commission’s access rules.
Seeing which way the wind was blowing, late last month Comcast—after steadfastly defending its traffic-blocking actions as necessary—announced that it would no longer block BitTorrent traffic and would treat all types of internet traffic equally.
This week Comcast announced a new service offering 50Mbit inbound/5Mbit outbound bandwith internet service for the outrageous price of US$150 per month. The new service was launched in my hometown, so I was interested in seeing how the corporate media handled this chain of events.
The Saint Paul Pioneer Press certainly wasn’t shy about it’s coverage. Four, count ‘em, four, stories on Comcast’s new service with nary a mention of the provider’s traffic-blocking, hearing packing, and—as it turns out—baldface lies about bandwidth scarcity.
- Comcast’s new service offers serious speed
- Twin Cities first to ride Comcast’s express Internet service
- Twin Cities will get first crack at superfast Comcast service
- New Comcast service offers serious speed
You have to be kidding me. Four stories by two seasoned technology journalists and not a single question about Comcast’s misdeeds. You have to wonder if Ojeda-Zapata (who’s a friend of mine) and Suzukamo were instructed by their masters to stay away from the other half of the story. Or worse, if they knew, Pavlovian-like, to do so on their own.
The Pioneer Press conveniently deleted my comment from one of the Suzukamo stories, but to Ojeda-Zapata’s credit he left my comment intact on his weblog.
Here are the questions that need to be asked:
- Why isn’t the service symmetrical?
- Will Comcast host domains, offer static IP blocks, and allow servers on business accounts?
- Will Comcast block any ports on business accounts?
- The reason Comcast gave for blocking BitTorrent traffic was bandwidth scarcity on its network. How does that square with its new offering of eight times greater bandwidth on presumably the same plumbing?
1 - It is 50Mbps down and 5Mbps up. There is no technical requirement for the service to be symmetrical and they may be doing that to help preserve bandwidth for the cable side (keep in mind that this is a new technology sitting atop the old lines and Comcast has deployed in such a way that the cable and VoIP offerings have not taken any dip). Once Comcast is able to dump their analog channels we will hopefully see additional bandwidth on both the download and upload side; however, even when maxed out the DOCSIS 3.0 spec won’t allow it to be symmetrical so Comcast will be at the mercy of the technology itself. Complain to Cisco and CableLabs for that one.
2 - According to my Comcast rep, Business class is available now. $200.00 a month for the 50/5 service (so a $50.00 premium) and $10.00 a month for a block of 5 static IPs. $250.00 install but I believe new accounts with a 3 year contract can get that waived. Call your rep to verify.
3 - Bandwidth to the home does not a network make. Just because the trunks leading to the central office have improved that does not mean that the backhaul bandwidth has. While bandwidth to the home is now radically faster that does not mean the network as a whole has improved its speed.
I’m all for a neutral network, but I also think that torrents need to be taken care of. Torrents have a serious impact on the backhaul lines and as such something needs to be done. The easiest solution is to place distribution servers in front of the back haul so that the connections are local to just the central office and home. This would reduce load across the network and allow us to get much better speeds. All parties benefit, the ISP uses less bandwidth that they have to pay for (it becomes mostly internal) and the customer gets a much faster torrent download. Win/Win IMO. The second method is to start blocking or inhibiting torrents which is what Comcast did, and poorly. Enter public outcry, backlash and bad things. Which happened. But I don’t believe for a moment that Comcast reversed their torrent decision because of the media. Verizon came out with an internal torrent system so Comcast did the same to stay competitive. Heck, look at Fort Wayne where Comcast and Verizon compete head to head! Simple business at work here.
Michael, if I may be so bold, I think you’re looking at this the wrong way. This is the first step in getting real bandwidth to the home. Verizon has been pushing the envelope with FiOS and now Comcast has to answer. $150.00 a month for the equivalent of thirty three T1 lines down or three T1 lines up (or $13,200/mo download speed and $1,200/mo upload speed) doesn’t seem that bad to me. Compare it to what other nations can get and yeah, it’s pretty expensive, so it all depends on how you look at it. But we’re FINALLY starting to move forward. I think that is a very, very good thing.
The media won’t push Comcast, Verizon, Qwest, AT&T;or anyone else to get bigger, fatter pipes. What will push these companies to move forward with a new generation of bandwidth is demand. Pure and simple. We’re starting to see demand, so now we’re starting to see better bandwidth.
Here’s hoping that the trend continues. I believe 4 channel DOCSIS 3.0 can scale to 171.52Mbps download and 122.88Mbps upload speeds and 8 channel can scale to 343.04Mbps download and 122.88Mbps upload. They just need to see demand, ensure their backhaul can take the traffic, then flip the switch!
Benjamin, you’re correct about bandwidth outlined in the DOCSIS 3.0 specification—which has been released since August 2006. Assuming Comcast is deploying the 4-channel flavor, they could have easily offered 50/50 symmetrical bandwidth.
The question remains: why not. I suspect the answer is the provider business model being predicated on consumption, not creation. That’s as sad as it is misguided, and will almost surely come back to haunt the providers and equipment vendors.
Oh, and with regard to degradation on the video side, apparently—to paraphrase Engadget—things aren’t so comcastic over on that side either.
That’s true, Comcast does need some love on the video side. Now the question is, if they gave us 50/50 or 100/100 would that hurt video even more or not? I have no idea, I don’t know how their total bandwidth picture looks.
As I understand it, when they drop off the analog channels a lot more options will be available. Those channels take a serious amount of bandwidth.
What I’m really hoping for is that this will force competition. In our area we have Comcast and Qwest. Comcast is clearly making a move of sorts. Qwest has been silent on FTTH or any bandwidth option past DSL. Hopefully this will force them to think and move.