It seems Comcxast are trying to dig themselve out of the pit they dug themselves by arbitrarily attacking filesharers.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/06/05/comcast_blacklists/Comcast is testing a brand new means of throttling traffic on its cable-based internet service.
For at least a year - and maybe more - Comcast has used TCP reset flags to throttle BitTorrent and other peer-to-peer traffic, claiming that P2P file sharing causes severe congestion on its network. But after some heat from the US Federal Communications Commission, the company says it will drop the practice by the end of the year, adopting a means of controlling network congestion that's protocol agnostic.
And it looks like it has settled on a general method.
The tests in Pennsylvania and Virginia will be followed by a third in Colorado Springs, Colorado later this summer. In each market, Comcast will use a different breed of hardware - and a different set of rules - to control congestion. The company will then determine which setup makes the most sense for a nationwide roll-out.
Today, a Washington, D.C. law firm announced a trio of state-based suits that accuse the big-name ISP of "deceiving and misleading" consumers.
"Comcast has essentially not given consumers what they paid for," says August J. Matteis, Jr., a partner with Gilbert Randolph LLP. "They didn't disclose and they lied about what they were selling to consumers. They were throttling [P2P traffic] and they didn't tell people about it and they covered up that they were doing it."
The suits - filed in California, Illinois, and New Jersey - follow a similar suit the firm filed in D.C. back in February. All four are based on state consumer protection laws. Another Commcast-BitTorrent suit is pending in federal court.
I really cant understand why these ISP companies are so shy about stating what they will be testing and when, unless of course they have already selected the "management" system they want and are just going the through the motions.
Of course long time readers of the news section here will be fully aware this sort of technology is often deployed by companies who dont wish to invest in the correct level of network capacity and claim network congestion is a problem but strangely only when they offer an online video service, how remarkable.
