As if Comcast Corp. hasn’t ticked off its internet subscribers enough in the past, now the cable and broadband Internet supplier is ready to add another needle to its own voodoo doll.
The company has plans to slow down Internet service to its heaviest users during its busiest hours when congestion is most likely to ocurr. The top Internet speeds for targeted customers will be reduced for periods lasting 10 minutes to 20 minutes, keeping service to other less busy users moving steadily, according to Mitch Bowling, Comcast’s senior vice president and general manager of online services.
This is Comcast’s answer to the mandate given them by Federal regulators who, on August 1st, ordered the company to develop a new method for managing its Web traffic. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) charged Comcast with improper handling and blocking of peer-to-peer sites like BitTorrent and others.
In an order posted on its Web site yesterday, the FCC gave the Philadelphia-based company 30 days to provide details of its “unreasonable network management practices” and show how they would be changed by year-end. This seems to be one of Comcast’s solutions, to penalize its most active subscribers, which they call hog trafficers
“If in fact a person is generating enough packets that they’re the ones creating that situation, we will manage that consumer for the overall good of all of our consumers,” Bowling said.
Comcast has reported that they currently support 14.4 million Internet users.
For more on this subject read Todd Shields‘ interesting article on Bloomberg.com.
I am of the opinion that Comcast is doing this network wide already. I have been continuously frustrated by being unable to watch Netflix movies online because I believe Comcast has been throttling back my bandwidth. Over the last few weeks I have done a number of test movie views using several (4) different PCs so as to rule out any PC related issues. Also during the process I run a tool that measures my internet speeds. Once I start a movie from Netflix it runs just fine (I rather enjoy this as I have a PC connected to my 50†LCD) and the internet speeds are running 4MB to 6MB. However after an hour the network slows down to a point that makes the movie impossible to watch and Internet speeds have been reduced to 768KB to 1MB. This has happened every time. The fact that each and every viewing is interrupted after 1 hour makes me think that Comcast to throttling may Internet speed automatically based on some sort of predefined rules.
I have always wondered what happens to a company when they get so big. It seems that smaller, younger companies are far more customer oriented. Once a company gets past a certain size it’s all about control. If Comcast’s network can’t handle the needs of their customers they should take all the money we are sending them and improve it. Instead they would rather piss their customers off and send them to Verizon. I don’t get it. Is it any wonder as soon as Verizon FIOS is available in a market Comcast starts losing customers (duh).
I have the Verizon DSL option which I am beginning to investigate. I am also considering both. I understand a dual WAN router can bond a cable modem and a DSL modem into a single connection and manage the bandwidth. I guess I’ll see because I don’t want to give into the conglomerate control that Comcast seems to want to impose