[Infowarrior] - Comcast and BitTorrent agree to 'collaborate'

[Richard Forno]

Comcast and BitTorrent agree to 'collaborate'
Posted by Anne Broache | 4 comments

Update 10:15 a.m. PDT: Comments from Rep. Edward Markey and FCC Chairman
Kevin Martin added.

It's official: Comcast and BitTorrent are calling a truce.

Ever since the cable giant admitted to disrupting file-sharing traffic based
on the BitTorrent protocol, a very public debate has erupted over what
constitutes appropriate "network management" by Internet service providers,
and with it, a resurgence of calls for Net neutrality rules that would
prohibit such practices.

But as companies are wont to do when regulators are breathing down their
necks (read: the Federal Communications Commission), the companies announced
that they're going to become collaborators. Whether the deal is enough to
satisfy policymakers scrutinizing Comcast's behavior, however, remains to be
seen, as it's already drawing some measure of skepticism.

The "collaborative effort" doesn't mean that Comcast will give up on
managing the way traffic flows through its network.

Rather, Comcast said it will work on reconfiguring its networks so that, by
year's end, it manages data in a "protocol agnostic" way. Comcast has
confessed to "delaying" uploads to the BitTorrent protocol at peak
congestion times, but the new process would apparently involve managing
traffic based on how much bandwidth consumers use, rather than what sort of
applications they're running.

It's not clear what levels of bandwidth use would trigger such steps. As a
Comcast vice president said during a recent FCC hearing about his company's
network management practices, the cable operator tells its customers what
broadband speeds they can expect, but it doesn't spell out how much
bandwidth they're allotted. Instead, it says that subscribers are entitled
to use the service in a way that doesn't degrade other subscribers'
experiences. (In an interview with News.com's Declan McCullagh on Thursday
morning, Comcast Vice President Joe Waz said no "bandwidth caps" are planned
and offered some more details on the company's plans.)

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