Updated: Comcast has filed its plan with the Federal Communications Commission detailing how it intends to govern traffic on its network, and says it should affect less than 1 percent of its users. It will start to go live commercially as of Nov. 15, and will be implemented  throughout Comcast’s network by the end of the year. As expected, the plan hews closely to what Om laid out back in March in a piece he wrote after sitting down with Comcast CTO Tony Werner. Essentially, folks using a lot of bandwidth at any one time will see their traffic slowed temporarily. The management will affect uploads and downloads and will be protocol agnostic.

The cable company was ordered to file such a plan last month, after the FCC censured it for throttling peer-to-peer traffic on its network. The FCC determined that the Comcast network management was problematic because it was done without informing subscribers and targeted a type of traffic that might be considered a competitor to Comcast’s cable business. Comcast maintains it did nothing wrong and was trying to maintain a good user experience on its network.

That will comply with the letter of the FCC order (which Comcast is appealing), but we had some additional questions of our own, as we detailed a few weeks ago in our post on the topic. Comcast answered our worry about bandwidth caps with its announcement of a 250GB-per-month limit. Judging from the information on its site about the new plan, Comcast answered all but our questions about who is providing the equipment to enable it’s efforts. Update: Sandvine will be providing some of the equipment as will Camiant. The plan will affect both uploads and downloads whenever the network is congested as detailed below:

Assuming that is the case, customers’ accounts must exceed a certain percentage of their upstream or downstream (both currently set at 70%) bandwidth for longer than a certain period of time, currently set at fifteen minutes.

A significant amount of normal Internet usage by our customers does not last that long. For example, most downloads would have completed within that time, and the majority of streaming and downloading will not exceed the threshold to be eligible for congestion management. And the majority of longer-running applications, such as VoIP, video conferencing, and streaming video content (including HD streaming on most sites) will not exceed these thresholds either.

All in all it looks pretty neutral like it may cause objections, but we’ll be digging through it a bit more and I’ll update the post with more in the next few hours. Update: Theoretically it would be possible to cut off a person’s traffic using this method if the entwork were incredibly congested for a long amount of time. From the filing:

NetForecast, Inc. explored the potential risk of a worst-case scenario for users whose traffic is in a BE state: the possibility of “bandwidth starvation” in the theoretical case where 100 percent of the CMTS bandwidth is taken up by PBE traffic for an extended period of time. In theory, such a condition could mean that a given user whose traffic is designated BE would be
unable to effectuate an upload or download (as noted above, both are managed separately) for
some period of time.

For those who want to check it out on their own, below are links to download the files.

Comcast’s Current Network Management Plan

Comcast’s Future Network Management Plan

Comcast’s Compliance Plan

Comcast recently announced a deal with BitTorrent that left me dazed and confused. It was basically a roundabout way for the cable company to backtrack from its P2P traffic-blocking gaffe. In describing the deal, Comcast tried to shift the focus away from their so-called “network management” — and by extension, the limitations of their network that prompted them to resort to traffic manipulation in the first place.

On Friday, I caught up with Tony Werner, chief technology officer of Comcast Cable, to get the real skinny. When asked to explain the so-called announcement in language a simpleton like me could understand, Werner said: “Historically we had looked at a basket of P2P protocols during peak load times and would slow them down. In the new approach, we don’t do this any more.” In short, no P2P blocking!

Werner said that between one half and two percent of Comcast’s customers can be described as “bandwidth hogs” — users that consume so much bandwidth that it can cause network quality degradation. According to Werner, the company is currently experimenting with software (including that from Sandvine) that would allow them to fractionally de-prioritize the traffic from these bandwidth hogs during peak load times, while at other times, leaving them alone.

Comcast will not discriminate against any protocol, but bandwidth baddies are going to be the ones to suffer. Or at least that’s what I took away from our conversation.

Problem is who’s to say they’re not going to manage everyone’s traffic? Although a company spokesperson assured us Comcast will be clear and transparent with anything related to traffic management, my skepticism stems for Comcast’s past actions. When it comes to traffic management, the Philadelphia-based operator has a checkered past.

Comcast assured the FCC during the Network Neutrality deliberations in 2005 that it would not degrade traffic; it repeated the assurance again in 2006. Yet the company started “traffic managing” that very same year. And now they’re cleaning up their act?

I asked Werner, why manage traffic to begin with? Why not just add more capacity? “You can’t quadruple the size of the streets and take away all the traffic rules,” Werner said.

He said Comcast is not alone in traffic management, that even in places like Japan, fiber operators that sell 100-megabits-per-second connections are managing traffic, too. “A vast majority of ISPs do perform traffic management, including NTT, and the reason we do it is because we want to have balanced traffic performance at peak times,” Werner said. (See here for “Why Shaping Traffic Isn’t Just A Comcast Issue.“)

Of course, my views on broadband align with those of French broadband maverick Xavier Niel, who believes giving people more bandwidth — not getting in their way. Still, his view (and mine) are the minority in a broadband world dominated by large incumbents.

For their part, the incumbents have started to talk about taking a protocol-agnostic approach to traffic management. They have to, otherwise we’ll have more snafus like the ones experienced by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Although the CBC released a torrent legitimately, downloaders had a hard time grabbing the video shows. Werner’s comments and recent throat-clearing by Verizon and AT&T reveals a thaw in ISP views on P2P.

On a larger scale, Werner said traffic management is “very tricky.” “We need to get the whole industry together and tackle this issue,” he said.