Media Wonk

Comcast backs off on plans to slow traffic for heaviest users, sort of - August 22, 2008

(Guest Wonk) A day after telling Bloomberg that it plans to slow traffic to its heaviest users by 20 minutes during peak times, a Comcast spokesman is now saying it hasn't made a final decision on that. 

Comcast tells IDG News Service that it could slow the traffic, or as the spokesman is quoted in the piece, make it so that traffic of Comcast's heaviest users is "de-prioritized." (How's that for PR-speak?)

He also tries to soften the move even more by saying that traffic could be slowed for as little as a minute, just enough time to unclog the network. 

Comcast says the "fair share" plan is just one of the techniques it is working on to manage traffic on its network.
I don't know, reading through this second story, it sounds a lot like the first, with Comcast just trying to make it sound nicer. 

I'm more curious what it all would mean for all these video services that are just getting started. Sure, P2P users tend to be the biggest burden on Internet traffic (and really, isn't this just Comcast's way of going after BitTorrent traffic without directly going after BitTorrent traffic, which the FCC has slapped it for?) 

But video players Hulu, Netflix, Amazon.com, major networks, etc. are all hoping for viewers that turn into heavy users of their new ad-supported and streaming video services. 

And one of the biggest turnoffs to users watching web videos is crappy video quality, slow and jagged playback, which could happen if traffic was slowed by their ISP. 

Content delivery networks and P2P companies are all at work on more efficient ways to deliver traffic on the net, whether it is with multicasting or P4P and other solutions. Does this just push them to pick up the pace? 

-- Jennifer Netherby

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