Uncommon Wisdom: A SearchTelecom.com blog:

net neutrality

Sep 23 2008   1:59PM GMT

Comcast traffic management: Sign of the future?



Posted by: Tom Nolle
Comcast, Broadband, FCC, net neutrality, Peer2Peer

Comcast’s response to the FCC on its traffic management policies seems to promise a future where operators may be moving to metered capacity or to pay-for-excess plans like those already adopted elsewhere. The network operators who provide broadband access to the Internet have, for years, complained that applications were being created that drove their traffic up and generated no compensatory revenue. YouTube is the most popular example. The most immediate problem for cable operators, however, has been the P2P and server activity that congests the narrow, shared, uplink cable provides. The interesting fact is that solving this problem and creating a broader pay-as-you-go strategy for traffic in either direction creates a similar strategy, and we believe access operators are preparing to begin to turn the tap overall unless they can figure out how to monetize.

Jul 11 2008   9:10PM GMT

Comcast to face net neutrality sanctions



Posted by: Tom Nolle
net neutrality, Comcast, FCC

Reports out of Washington D.C., suggest that the FCC’s Martin will recommend a sanction against Comcast for violating its net neutrality principles, but it is not clear (since those principles were not an “order” in a legal sense) whether the decision will have any teeth. Comcast, furthermore, has already changed the way it manages traffic, focusing on users and not applications. The move by the FCC is thus popular with consumer advocates and meaningless, but it may show that the FCC will come down harder on deep packet inspection (DPI)  for gleaning behavioral data from ISP streams.