Comcast Buries Broadband Policy News in Friday Evening Wasteland; Users Instead of Apps
This story was written by Rafat Ali.
Comcast (NSDQ: CMCSA) has announced its new policy on broadband access management, something it was required to do by FCC within 30 days of August 20. The formal plan details how it plans to manage its broadband network, and rather than targeting applications like P2P, it will slow down traffic for heaviest users instead at peak times. This will be done by creating a second stream of traffic for recent heavy users that will have a lower priority when compared to its other customers, reports WSJ. In this way, Comcast gets around some net neutrality provisions in that it doesn't discriminate against content or apps from specific companies. This comes after Comcast also introduced its monthly usage cap of 250GB per users...this cap will go into effect starting October 1.
The company said it had been testing this approach for three months in five cities and will implement it country wide by end of this year. It also boasted that in the test markets, it didn't get a single complaint. Meanwhile, Comcast provides details of its plan here in its network management section. Here's how it describes its technique: "It will identify which customer accounts are using the greatest amounts of bandwidth and their Internet traffic will be temporarily managed until the period of congestion passes. Customers will still be able to do anything they want to online, and many activities will be unaffected, but managed customers could experience things like: longer times to download or upload files, surfing the Web may seem somewhat slower, or playing games online may seem somewhat sluggish."
By Rafat Ali