Intellectual Property Law

Comcast CTO: P2P Uses Half of Upstream Capacity

By Cynthia Brumfield

(Philadelphia, PA) Although regulators and consumer advocates suspect that cable operators had ulterior anti-competitive motives for messing with P2P traffic, cable's top technologists characterize the distributed computing protocols as pure and simple network hogs. During a general session here at the Society of Cable Television Engineers' CableTec Expo, Comcast CTO Tony Werner was asked why Comcast chose to implement a bandwidth management system that only targeted P2P.

"Because that's what consuming 50% of our upstream capacity and that's after management practices," he said. "The only other way that we know of is to look at users who are consuming a lot of bandwidth," Werner added, explaining how Comcast is switching to a new, protocol-agnostic management technique.

Here's how that new technique will work: in situations involving excessive bandwidth consumption (say where 2% to 3% of users are consuming 50% to 75% of bandwidth), the traffic for network hogs will get lower priority. Even in those situations, however, the offending users will still get speeds that are far better than DSL, Werner claims.

Cox CTO Chris Bowick came prepared with statistics to demonstrate just how much bandwidth heavy users consume. One "uploading" offender transferred consumed 681 gigabytes during the past month, which translates into the equivalent of 178,000 uploaded songs or around 888 hours of video. This person "maxed out the upstream for every second of every day." Another offender, this one a download hog, transferred 1.5 terabytes of data over the past month, the equivalent of 377,000 songs or 1,833 hours of video.

Full post as published by IP Democracy on June 25, 2008 (boomark / email).