FCC says Comcast illegally throttled P2P traffic

This is great, in that it allows for people to choose how they want to use their bandwidth. The unfortunate side effect here is that Comcast and others are going to be forced to limit bandwidth in some way to keep their networks going, since packet inspection isn’t an option anymore.

What they SHOULD do is limit people’s bandwidth to a level that they can handle on their network and sell that. The idea that they oversell to compete is ludicrous, as ther only competition in almost any market is DSL who has much lower speeds to begin with. If they can’t offer the speed they’re selling, then at the very least they should offer a guaranteed lowest speed, with faster speeds when available. The marketing is simple – service : 10 megs down, 128K up, with burst speeds of up to 5mb up.

What they will do instead is implement metered connections so that they can charge heavy users much more than they do now. This way, they can keep charging normal people what they do now, and charge “heavy” users double or triple the monthly cost. This will ABSOLUTELY hurt things like digital distribution of media like television, internet radio, online backups, Netflix streaming movies, and so, so many other awesome technologies that we have been waiting decades for. In the end, we’re going to end up much more screwed than we are now, I fear.

I think one thing we can count on is that the cable companies will do everything they can to avoid improving their infrastructure with Fiber connections, new hardware on the aggregation points, DOCSIS 3, etc. From what I understand, the hardware at the aggregation points is the issue, but the cable companies don’t want to invest in the hardware because the payout is decades down the line, and they have to report quarterly results. Long term investment in infrastructure just doesn’t pay when you have to report your profits and losses every three months.

The silly thing is that if P2P vendors and protocol authors would simply modify their code to be bursty rather than constant, we could avoid a lot of this mess.

Our only hope is Verizon rolling out FIOS in more major markets to give these companies some competition, or government intervention in building the infrastructure required to move beyond copper.