Barry Levine, newsfactor
Called Fair Share, the system is intended to limit the heaviest Internet users over short periods of time.
'Time-Out' Mechanism
In an interview with Bloomberg news service on Wednesday, Mitch Bowling, Comcast senior vice president and general manager of online services, described the proposed "time-out" mechanism. Users who reach the top download limits will have their bandwidth reduced to DSL speeds for 10- to 20-minute periods, after which it would return to normal.
The new approach, he said, will move toward looking at congestion issues as triggers for bandwidth management, rather than at the kinds of applications being used, such as the peer-to-peer application BitTorrent.
At the beginning of this month, the FCC found the cable company used "unreasonable network-management practices" in blocking P2P programs such as BitTorrent, and that it had repeatedly changed its story when asked by the FCC to explain its actions. It gave the company 30 days to provide a plan to change this practice by the end of the year.
News media had reported that Comcast was secretly blocking users' P2P traffic, and two consumer-advocacy groups, Free Press and Public Knowledge, filed a complaint which led to the FCC decision.
'Clear, Reasonable and Published'
Larry Hettick, an analyst with industry research firm Current Analysis, said the three most important things Comcast needs to do is provide a policy that is "clear, reasonable and published."
One of the main reasons the cable company "got into hot water with the FCC," he said, was because it was reducing bandwidth for users without telling them and without making clear what the policy was.
Hettick pointed to an approach used by satellite-service provider HughesNet. Depending on the speed you sign up for, he said, you get a certain amount of data downloading per 24-hour cycle. "For example," he said, "if it's a T1 level, you get 500 megabytes of downloading per day."
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