Comcast defends practice of slowing P2P traffic

Comcast defends practice of slowing P2P traffic

January 10, 2008 (IDG News Service) -- Cable-modem service provider Comcast Corp. said Wednesday that it would welcome a Federal Communications Commission investigation into its broadband traffic management practices.

A Comcast spokeswoman said Wednesday that the company had not yet received information requests from the FCC. Comcast, in a statement, also defended its practice of sometimes slowing P2P traffic during peak traffic times.

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Well, it's repulsive to just selectively slow it, but "during peak traffic times" I can understand, especially if it throughput for standard usage suffers.

You may not realize it but a lot of ISP's need to monitor the bandwidth especially during peak hours. If the ISP see that P2P is causing the network to be slow during peak hours they may put a bottle neck (Throttle) or cut the bandwidth for P2P so that other customers don't have such a slow network connection. This is the same thing for FTP and other types of connections to the network.

They aren't doing it to stop users for using P2P networks. They are just trying to make sure the network can handle the amount of traffic that is being used. They don't want the network to crash during peak hours. That would be bad for everyone using the network.

I use this idea with my own home network. I have 8 computers that are on the network along with 4 NAS and several gaming system and I set a limit for P2P networking because it can cause the entire network to lock up or slow down so much that the other machines can't connect to the network.

This kind of thing happens all the time. I don't see why this is such a big deal. In the past this really didn't need to be done by the ISP's because they the end users were dialing in to the network. Now with broadband they have to do this. Some users may think the ISP is infrindging on them when in reality the users are infrindging on other users by tieing up the network. Remember to be considerite to the other users of the network. This kind of work has to be done or no one will be able to use the network. You have to remember that the ISP connection to the internet can only handle so much. Every user has to be responsible for the amount of traffic and what can happen if they use too much of the bandwidth on a network. If an ISP was to not do this then they would have to expand their network and charge you (the customer) more for the internet. I am sure that you (the customer) doesn't want to have to pay more for your internet connection.