FCC’s Comcast Throttling Deadline At Midnight – As per FCC order, Comcast must clearly document all practices…

19 Sep 2008

Consumer Group Free Press reminds everyone that as per the recent FCC order (pdf), Comcast has until midnight tonight to document their current traffic shaping practices to the FCC as punishment for misleading consumers about degrading P2P traffic. Given the FCC’s “sanction” of Comcast included no fine, didn’t require they do anything they weren’t doing voluntarily, and created no new guidelines — demanding they come somewhat clean was the only thing the FCC really asked of Comcast.

Thanks to hard work by a lot of smart forum users, we already know Comcast was using Sandvine traffic management hardware to forge customer TCP packets and throttle upstream P2P traffic for all users. Thanks to Comcast’s settlement with the State of Florida, we also know Comcast has been simply booting the 1,000 heaviest users from their network. Both the FCC and Florida Attorney General have ruled Comcast misled consumers about the nature of these systems, and failed to notify consumers — in any way — about the imposed limitations of the Comcast network.

Officially however, Comcast has admitted no wrong doing. The nation’s largest cable company believes the FCC’s authority is irrelevant when it comes to network management, so they’ve already filed suit challenging the FCC’s ruling. Still, Free Press seems boundlessly optimistic that this somehow all works out for the best:

“Should Comcast decide to go AWOL and not file, Internet users can trust that the FCC will be an effective cop on the beat. The FCC has made it clear that it will not tolerate anything less than Comcast’s full cooperation to ensure that secret, illegal blocking doesn’t happen again.”

Are we talking about the same FCC? Comcast’s voluntary reaction to the FCC’s investigation was to implement a clear 250GB monthly cap and announce they’ll be throttling the heaviest users back to “DSL like speeds” starting October 1. Does anyone think Comcast will do more? Does anyone really think the FCC cares either way? Stay tuned.

Update: Comcast will issue their filing tonight, the company tells Portfolio.com.

“What I expect is for Comcast to file something incomplete, possibly with a request for the F.C.C. to protect its proprietary data,” says the Media Access Project’s Harold Feld.

Update 2: Comcast spokesman Charlie Douglas directs our attention to the Comcast network management website, where Douglas says they’ll post all of the filings to the FCC this evening. He also offers a quote from Comcast’s Senior Director, Corporate Communications, Sena Fitzmaurice, who has this to say:

“We manage our network for one reason: to deliver a superior, reliable, high-quality experience to every high-speed Internet customer, every time they use our service. As we voluntarily announced in March, we are changing the way we manage network congestion by the end of this year. The new technique does not manage congestion based on the protocol or application a consumer uses. This new technique will ensure that all customers get their fair share of bandwidth every hour of the day, particularly during the busiest periods. Only at the busiest times will we apply our new congestion management practices. When we do so, on average, well under one percent of users had their usage managed for brief periods of time based on our trials. As we roll out these new practices, and continuously improve on them, we’ll make sure our customers are fully informed.”

Customers, do you feel informed?
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