Competitors Ally With Comcast In FCC P2P Filings 220
crocoduck writes "Right before the deadline passed for filing comments in the FCC investigation of Comcast's traffic-management practices, telecoms and other cable companies submitted a slew of comments defending Comcast's actions to the FCC. 'Just about every big phone company has filed a statement challenging the FCC's authority to deal with this problem. AT&T, Verizon, and Qwest all submitted lengthy remarks on February 13th, the last day for comments on the proceeding (parties can still reply to comments through the 28th). "The Internet marketplace remains fundamentally healthy, and the purported 'cure' could only make it sick," AT&T's filing declared. "At best, the network-management restrictions proposed by Free Press and others would inflict wasteful costs on broadband providers in the form of expensive and needless capacity upgrades — costs that would ultimately be passed through to end users, raise broadband prices across the board, and force ordinary broadband consumers to subsidize the bandwidth-hogging activities of a few."' P2P fans have also weighed in."
Needless capacity upgrades? (Score:5, Insightful)
Shut up, cut your salaries for a couple quarters, and invest in the goddamn infrastructure.
i've said it before and i'll say it again... (Score:4, Insightful)
Lies, lies, lies. (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously, if they were *just* throttling the connection, there wouldn't be a problem. They were basically "disconnecting" the file transfer. This is analogous to a telephone operator listening to your phone conversation & cutting you off if she doesn't like what you're talking about.
Can't stop the signal, Mal (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think that word means what you think it... (Score:3, Insightful)
People aren't going to stop transfering data over the internet just because the telecoms say so. The trend is towards larger files, faster downloads, and more data. We NEED more bandwidth. Just because you don't want to be bothered with upgrades, doesn't make the upgrades unnecessary.
Expensive and Needless? (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe if they advertised lower peak speeds and limited their customers to those speeds and charged a premium for higher speeds, we wouldn't have this problem.
Watershed Moment (Score:5, Insightful)
Take a step towards unrestricted bandwidth, build a new economy based on the innovative development of new business models using this bandwidth as a utility.
Or
Allow the telecommunications oligopoly to produce a network ghetto, stove-piped and metered, and watch the US economy stagnate, and fall behind the rest of the developed world.
Duh (Score:2, Insightful)
Unlimited comments (Score:5, Insightful)
After the comment period ended, they should have announced that certain comments were rejected because they were too long (beyond an arbitrary amount determined after the comment period) or contained too much legalese, since they didn't want to have make the other commenters "subsidize the [resource]-hogging activities of a few."
Comments on the matter (Score:2, Insightful)
I don't agree with bandwidth shaping by isp's. I feel that I am paying them my hard earned money for my 10/1 connection and I should be able to receive that bandwidth when I want/need it. However having worked for a web hosting company I do realize how much bandwidth cost and how difficult it can be to get the proper peering where and when you need it. I can see why ISP's are filtering at this time (but still can't agree). I think that torrents and other peer to peer software has its use. Sometimes this use is illegal however who is the ISP to judge. I personally use a server at a hosting provider with a 100mb connection and unlimited bandwidth to download my torrent files (all legal linux distros and such of course). This keeps me from saturating my home ISP's bandwidth for days while I download a few gigs of data.
I think that there is a big grey area that we are going to have to come to an agreement. I think that the end users who use more bandwidth should have to pay a premium and those who are more of a casual user who might actually utilize their connection 1 day a month for some software updates or to download some songs from iTunes should be allowed to do as they please. I personally always get the premium plan from the provider with the most available bandwidth knowing full well during peak hours I will not get anything close to what the claim I have. I think it's a loose loose situation and unfortunately we as consumers are going to loose financially.
A Bunch of Bull (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Yep (Score:5, Insightful)
Look, it was no secret as to what Comcast was jumping into when they decided to get into the internet business. In fact it seems pretty obvious that they were quite clear on the fact that bandwidth would keep increasing to the point that people would just get their video directly from the source, instead of paying them to be a gatekeeper middleman. What they were hoping for was that they could use their monopoly power to stifle the internet so that their monopoly would not crumble in face of actual competition. So far they have been successful. Now that people are starting to cry foul, they are trying to pretend that they are the victims.
It always amazes me how many people will defend someone who is clearly trying to screw them.
Another car ananolgy (Score:5, Insightful)
It's outrageous that they can say that with a straight face! This seems like a perfectly obvious sign that their infrastructure is in a serious need of an upgrade in order to maintain competition with the up-and-coming technologies that are being, or are already, released. This has me fuming.
Selective throttling == CENSORSHIP (Score:5, Insightful)
Comcast unilaterally decides that some content is good and some bad - and that should just plain be illegal.
I know many are opposed, but I don't mind the actual *throttling* itself, if it were just protocol-neutral. I cannot accept, however, that Comcast gets to decide that I can't use the rated capacity of my line (you know, the number they tout in their PR) to download Ubuntu with a bittorrent client, while my neighbor can max out his identical connection downloading movies over HTTP or FTP.
(And, no, the actual *content* shouldn't matter either, of course, that's just a feeble attempt at highlighting the inherent stupidity of the method).
Requiring an ISP to have enough capacity to enable ALL its customers to max out their connections would be monumentally wasteful, no question. However...
What Comcast, and any other ISP should do, is actually tell you what you are buying, up front, so that it's possible to make an informed purchasing decision. E.g.:
6Mbps down, 1Mbps up. Rated bandwidth available at least 90% of the time. Minimum bandwidth of1Mbps down, 256kbps up (except in case of equipment failure).
The ISP can then throttle users with this connection in times of peak load, but still protocol (and content) neutral!
If they wanted to get really advanced, they could give their users the ability to use some kind of QoS feature, so that e.g. a user could choose to prioritize http and ftp over, say, bittorrent. Or to prioritize whatever port #s the user's favorite multiplayer game uses, so that using the internet connection for other stuff introduces a minimum of lag on gaming.
In any event, there's just no justification for saying that my downloading Ubuntu or whatever should be throttled in favor of some idiot streaming porn over HTTP. (OK, maybe if it's porn... bad example... you get my drift, though)
Re:Western countries' telecoms seem crotchety (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Watershed Moment (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Watershed Moment (Score:3, Insightful)
The other problem is that the FCC seem to be a terrible regulator. A bigger display of craven grovelling in the general direction of those that are supposed to be regulated I've not seen since, well,
Re:Lies, lies, lies. (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Yep (Score:3, Insightful)
"I think this problem is indeed about the few people trying to max out their "unlimited" connections, and the rest of us paying for it."
If they don't want people to think the connection is unlimited, maybe they should tell people about it up front. If they think that killing P2P connections during peak usage is a good idea for most people, maybe they should boldly tell their customers about this great feature instead of lying about it until confronted with evidence. They have shown themselves to be unworthy of trust. They deserve no sympathy.
Greedy toughing ... again! (Score:2, Insightful)
I give you the precedent: "let them eat cake".
Re:Why Did They Wait Until The Last Day? (Score:3, Insightful)
The longer you leave bullshit sitting on the kitchen table, the more chance for someone to notice the stench and loudly blame the guilty party for having the gall to bring it to the breakfast table.
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Re:Watershed Moment (Score:5, Insightful)
As the Internet becomes the delivery agent for more entertainment venues and other uses that have yet to be foreseen, implementing QoS becomes more questionable. Let's say a similar device to the AppleTV is created and released by a competitor to Apple. Let us also assume that Comcast is permitted to enforce QoS for various services. Comcast could then give preferential treatment for QoS to one content provider over another which puts Comcast in the position to either extort one or both companies or lock competitors out of the market (for Comcast subscribers).
By allowing ISPs to implement QoS to limit some types of use, we are allowing ISPs to dictate how data services are used. Depending on how draconian they are about QoS, this could reduce innovation for data services which will then cause this part of the economy to stagnate.
Right now we are mostly talking about movies, however in the future (maybe as little as 3-4 years) we may be talking about something a little more dear to you personally. Allowing them to do this to something you don't care about will set a precedence that will make it easier for them to do the same to something you hold dear later.
Here are a few example uses that I see today that could be impacted:
Rights and privileges lost are not easily obtained again.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Yep (Score:5, Insightful)
That's ridiculous. About 10 years ago you could as an average person get at best a dial-up connection that might (theoretically) be able to download at up to 56kbps (actually 53). If you wanted a little better you could pay for ISDN. If you wanted better than that you could pay for a T1.
I know for a fact they were making a profit. Same old copper lines that had been in the ground since 1962, and I had to pay $100 for the connection!
Today you can get a cable modem or DSL for not much more than you'd have paid for dial-up and probably less if you had a second phone line dedicated to your internet access. Technology advanced. The providers improved their infrastructure. Costs came down.
No - this is bullshit. More bandwidth, sure. But it's more expensive, too, and we paid for it in myriad ways (check out the $200 Billion Ripoff [pbs.org] for example). I could get dial up for $10 a month (yea, plus phone line). Now I pay like $55/month, and it would be $15 more if I also didn't buy their "cable TV" service.
The sad fact is that what we have now is more or less what we can collectively afford. It's easy to point to more socialized states and say that a handful of them have faster internet connections. What you seem to fail to consider is that those faster connections were paid for. Most likely it costs the average person in one of those states a lot more for their internet connection, they just don't see it as a separate internet bill. If they do get an internet bill it's not really reflecting the true cost of providing the service.
Comcast alone makes about $1.2 Billion dollars in profit a year. Billion with a "B". Not revenue - *PROFIT*. I think they're doing just fine - maybe they should invest in a little more infrastructure instead of bitching about having to keep up with demand.
I'm no socialist - but Internet infrastructure needs to be either regulated or state supported. It's too critical to be left to these corporations that just want to slow everybody down!! If there was real competition, it might work to motivate these guys to make their customers happy. But there's not, so it doesn't.
If you can live with forcing everyone to pay several times what they're paying now for internet access we can do this too. But don't sit there and spout that we could do better without pointing out that it does actually cost more to do so. I personally find that my cable modem is fast enough and I don't want to pay more than I do per month. I especially don't want to have the money effectively hidden in a bunch of federal budget documents.
As if... Look - this is critical infrastructure we are talking about. Everybody says that when they talk about "security measures" to make sure anybody that tries to cut a trunk line will get put under the ground for the rest of their lives. But we have these clowns running it that think it's okay to just put the brakes on innovation and new business models and growth of the economy so they can squeeze more profit out of the infrastructure that really needs constant upgrades.
Nuke them all from orbit with Network Freedom. (Score:-1, Insightful)
We don't need an FCC because the entire spectrum should be liberated [salon.com]. Doing so would undo sixty years of damage done to world culture by government interference. The last mile problem would go away. The RIAA, MPAA MAFIAA companies and most of what people think of as "major" publishers would be forced to adapt or die. News and entertainment would live and die based on merit instead of payolla. Brainwashing through Faux News would be impossible. Companies that survive of billions of dollars in ad spending each month would collapse and markets for lemons would be much smaller. The US would once again have a free and competitive press and telco. Every other segment of the economy would benefit from having this kind of basic infrastructure function and the value is orders of magnitude greater than $200 billion. Only tyrants would oppose the move to open spectrum and it will take terrible tyranny to keep it from happening.
The "War on Terror" is looking more and more like a fight to impose the kind of laws required to preserve broadcasters, wiretappers and those who manufacture public opinion. The terrorist have not only won, they were in control all along. It is time to bring real democracy and freedom to the US.
Re:Watershed Moment (Score:3, Insightful)
No, the root of the problem is that telcos were given taxpayer subsidies to improve the infrastructure, failed to do it, and aren't being forced to make good on their promise. And on top of that, the right-of-way monopolies they got as part of the deal are the only bits of regulation that are actually being enforced. They're getting all the benefits (from their perspective) of regulation (the locking-out of meaningful competition) without suffering any of the costs (requirement to serve the public interest), and we're getting the shaft! That's the fucking root of the problem!