Intellectual Property Law

Study: Comcast, Cox Throttle P2P Round-the-Clock

By Cynthia Brumfield

A study by the German Max Planck Institute for Software Systems has purportedly revealed that despite Comcast's contention that it throttles P2P applications only during periods of peak congestion, in fact the nation's top cable operator "blocks" BitTorrent applications at all hours of the day.

Moreover, another top cable operator, Cox Communications, does the same thing, according to the study. The Institute actually conducted global tests to find out which ISPs are messing with P2P activity and found that this kind of behavior really only occurs in Singapore and the U.S., and that in the U.S. Comcast and Cox are the primary culprits.

Ben Scott, policy director of Free Press, which is widely circulating the study's results, said this is proof that you can't trust cable companies.

Consumers have no reason left to trust their cable company. This independent study confirms that Comcast is still blocking its customers from using popular applications -- despite the FCC's investigation and widespread public outrage. And worse, the harmful practice appears to be spreading through the marketplace. Unimpeachable research from network engineers in Germany now demonstrates that Cox Communications is also blocking Internet content, lining up right behind Comcast.

Update: Comcast just sent me the following statement in reaction to the study.

Comcast does not, has not, and will not block any websites or online applications, including peer-to-peer services like BitTorrent. We have acknowledged that we manage peer-to-peer traffic in a limited manner to minimize network congestion. While we believe our current network management approach was a reasonable choice, we are now working with a variety of companies including BitTorrent and confirm our March announcement that we will move to a protocol-agnostic network management technique no later than December 31, 2008.

Full post as published by IP Democracy on May 15, 2008 (boomark / email).