Finally, Some Common Sense Thinking on ComCast and Net Neutrality

Comcast has been a frequent target of my criticism on this blog.  Just do a search for comcast and you will see what I mean.  But when they were lambasted this past week for using technology to stifle the bandwidth hogs that are running P2P applications, and most notably, bittorrent, I had to rise to their defense.

As an internet service provider, Comcast has an obligation to deliver a safe Internet experience to their customers.  This means that users of their network should not be fearful of rampant viruses, spam, or internet attacks.  And if the customers are paying for broadband, they should get a broadband connectivity experience as well.

If delivering this experience means that Comcast has to block Internet attacks, filter email based on content or terminate Comcast connections that are participating in botnets, then so be it.  Its what I would demand of them as a customer.  And if it means that they suppress bandwidth hogs that use 50% of the network to run P2P applications that are likely used to trade copyrighted or pirated content, again, its fine with me.  And its fine with most of their customers too.

But now Senators in Washington DC want to hold hearings on how Comcast filters their own traffic.  This is meddlesome and wrong and it will only cause a doubling of the price for Internet connectivity if ISP’s are no longer allowed to block malicious traffic and are forced to purchase new hardware to meet the demand of P2P users.

Geeks Are Sexy takes on this issue by saying that Comcast was wrong. 

But an excellent article by Rob Malan at Arbor Networks has the other side of the story.  He writes:

What Comcast is trying to accomplish (along with every other carrier on the planet), is how do they provide a good level of service to every subscriber at a pricepoint that has razor-thin margin. It’s not easy. Appetite for high-bandwidth applications are only increasing, they’re roughly doubling every year with no end in sight. However, the distribution of people that use bandwidth is not uniform. I have seen very real empirical data from an MSO near you, where something on the order of 90% of their traffic is generated by less than 10% of their customers. It gets worse, for that same broadband provider, almost half of their bandwidth is consumed by less than 0.5% of the customer base. Yes, you read that right. Guess which kinds of protocols are running 24/7 from that base?

Peer-to-peer file sharing protocols are not the best way to use network resources.

I’m sorry, but Net Neutrality isn’t about letting my sixteen year old neighbor trash my UBR ring by up/downloading 100Gig of porn or stolen movies a month using p2p filesharing protocols. No! It’s about making sure that your Grandmother can get online to read her email, surf the web, and not get her machine owned in the process at a pricepoint that is within her budget.

Net Neutrality, isn’t supposed to be the wild west, where the person with the best client-side networking stack wins the game. It’s about equality, where the bully next door — who has hacked his kernel to ignore TCP congestion control — doesn’t drive your grandmother off the road.

I have to agree with Rob at Arbor on this.