Comcast Mends Its Ways

Ars Technica reports: Comcast says that, as of December 31, it has turned over a new leaf, network management practices-wise. The new-and-hopefully-improved "protocol agnostic" system the company unveiled to the Federal Communications Commission in September is now in effect.

"We have deployed the new technique throughout our network and turned off the P2P-specific technique everywhere in the network," Comcast spokesperson Sena Fitzmaurice told Ars.

The company informed the FCC of the changes in a statement filed on Monday. "Comcast will continue to refine and optimize these congestion management practices to deliver the best possible broadband experience for our customers," company Vice President for Regulatory Affairs Kathryn A. Zachem promised the Commission. The announcement also discloses updated acceptable use rules for Comcast customers.

From A to B

Even before the FCC told Comcast to mend its network management practices, the company had pledged that it would take a different approach to the problem. As Ars has reported, a month after the FCC's Order sanctioning the company in August, Comcast outlined what and how the ISP would change. Its September 19 filing with the Commission described the old system in Appendix A, and the new one in Appendix B.

As Comcast put it, Plan B "will not manage congestion by focusing on the use of the specific protocols that place a disproportionate burden on network resources, or any other protocols." Instead, the emphasis will be on the traffic of consumers who "are using the most bandwidth at times when network congestion threatens to degrade subscribers' broadband experience and who are contributing disproportionately to such congestion at those points in time."

Comcast's revised acceptable use policy page discloses that its network management activities may involve "temporarily lowering the priority of traffic for users who are the top contributors to current network congestion."

Specifically, the revised system abandons "deep packet inspection" in favor of a "shallow" method that targets congestion rather than suspicious protocols (e.g., BitTorrent). In some instances, some users will see their traffic reclassified as "Best Effort" rather than the default "Priority Best Effort." If the congestion gets heavy, said tagged traffic could be delayed, Comcast says, but the new method strives to localize the delays so that the least number of Comcast customers see an impact on their service.

"We have instituted the congestion management practices described in Attachment B of our September 19th filing throughout our high-speed Internet network," Comcast told the FCC on Monday. The company's updated network management policy page says that, based on trials of the new system, "on average less than 1% of our customers would likely be impacted by [the updated] congestion management technique." /p>

The use page also outlines Comcast's bandwidth cap policies: 250 Gigabytes a month for high speed Internet customers, and no more. "Use of the Service in excess of 250GB per month is excessive use and is a violation of the Policy," Comcast says. The company reserves the right to suspend those who stray beyond this limit, or request that they subscribe to a commercial-grade level of the service.

Quite a few pretty fundamental changes here--many of them prompted by the FCC's action in August, a decision that, paradoxically, Comcast is challenging in federal court.

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Laura Rich is a co-founder of Recessionwire, which provides news, advice, perspective and humor about the recession and the recovery.