Comcast’s throttling deemed illegal by the FCC
- July 30th, 2008
- 5 Comments
In the wake of the FCC versus Comcast brouhaha, wherein Comcast has been accused of illegally slowing down connections to file sharing services like BitTorrent without informing its cable internet subscribers first, the Federal Communications Commission has ruled that Comcast acted outside of the law.
According to a report in the Washington Post, the five-member panel will formally vote this Friday, although three of the five members have said that they’ll vote against Comcast. FCC Chairman Kevin Martin “is not expected to fine Comcast, according to industry insiders and members of the FCC who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the ruling is still pending.”
The ruling is expected to set precedent for future complaints. Roger Entner of IAG Research says, "This is a slap on the wrist for Comcast, but it will be a cutting off of the hand for the next provider who violates rules." It’s important to note that the throttling BitTorrent connections isn’t the issue at hand, it’s that throttling connections without making it clear to your customers is the problem. So the practice can, and likely will, continue. It’ll just need to be much more transparent in the future.
db (Who am I?)
3 months ago
yeah, like them dropping Usenet and not kicking back to the consumer. NY’s AG, “DUI” Cuomo strikes a blow against child porn, and kills Usenet.
Yeah, I’m voting for him on election day.
Rich (Who am I?)
3 months ago
Basically… as long as they tell you their going to give you sub-standard service… they can do it.
Steve Reilly (Who am I?)
3 months ago
When is the real issue going to surface - That Comcast’s business model is severely flawed! The more users they sign up for internet services the slower the network goes for everyone! It’s the nature of a coaxial cable connection, the band width is limited and finite.
Would you tell the world that the more business you get the worse the service will get? They are covering their butts with the full knowledge that their technology only gets slower with time, perhaps even the “Slowskys” will even enjoy Comcast at the speed at which they are more comfortable with some day soon!
former comcast employee (Who am I?)
3 months ago
That’s not the real problem. If they wanna make things faster all they need to do is open up another channel, which they have hundreds of, so speed isn’t a problem. You notice how u have 999 channels but only 500 of them are active? If they opened up just one of those channels to cable internet, it would be the equivalent of another node open. That’s a myth that the DSL companies perpetuate, and cable companies are inadvertantly perpetuating by telling u that bit torrent is using up all the bandwidth.
The problem is with the rates they are charging us. The US pays through the nose for broadband service. On avg it only costs about 15-20 bucks per customer for maintenance(network maintenace, customer service, blah blah blah), yet it costs us about 55-60 dollars on avg for broadband service. Broadband prices have been going up for years at an alarming rate. While at the same time the quality of service has been deteriorating.
At one point in time, speeds were unlimited, than they were capped to 6mb, than 5, than 3. Why bother adding more services to broadband (ie voip, phone service) and at the same time restrict service by adding caps to speed and the amount you can download. The tiered pricing models will keep getting worse, and more restrictive because that’s just been their track record. If we don’t complain more, prices will just keep going up, and service will just keep getting worse.
b-rad (Who am I?)
2 months ago
If you want to download a free low-budget homemade movie - 30kbps…ughhhhhhhh, but if you want to get a movie from our Bell Sympatico website that sells movies, 550kbps 24/7
Wake up people, throttling is 100% illegal.
Too bad the big ISP’s have enough cash to be incredibly far up the governments ass. I won’t expect to see anything done about this illegal activity.