Intellectual Property Law

Comcast Spells Out Protocol Agnostic Management

By Cynthia Brumfield

(Light blogging this week and next due to...so many things.)

As usual, Karl Bode at Broadband Reports broke news today when he was the first to report that Comcast will begin testing its new protocol agnostic management system in two markets, Chambersburg, Pennsylvania and Warrenton, Virginia.

Karl got a hold of an internal memo that makes it clear that Comcast will slow down traffic only in cases whether a customer's bandwidth consumption is very high, regardless of the application in use. I got a hold of the communiques (here and here) that Comcast plans to send to its customers and post on its web sites in the test markets.

According to a memo that Comcast will send to customers in the selected markets, the new system will mean "probably nothing" for most users unless "you are an extremely heavy user of Internet resources."

"At the busiest times of day on our network (which could occur at any time), those very few disproportionately heavy users, who are doing things like conducting numerous or continuous large file transfers, may experience slightly longer response times for some online activities..." the memo states.

Interestingly (and perhaps smartly) Comcast is characterizing the new system as one that allows all customers to "have fair and equal access to the Internet," a fresh spin that positions heavy bandwidth users as using more than their fair share of Internet capacity.

Full post as published by IP Democracy on June 03, 2008 (boomark / email).