Comcast,
the country’s largest residential Internet provider, said on Thursday
that it would take a more equitable approach toward managing the
ever-expanding flow of Web traffic on its network.
The cable company, based in Philadelphia, has been under relentless pressure from the FCC
and public interest groups after media reports last year that it was
blocking some Internet traffic of customers who used online software
based on the popular peer-to-peer BitTorrent protocol.
Comcast
said it would change its fundamental approach to playing Internet
traffic cop. Instead of interfering with specific online applications,
it will manage traffic by slowing the Internet speeds of its most
bandwidth-hogging users when traffic is busiest.
“In the event of
congestion, the half percent of people who are overutilizing an
excessive amount of capacity will be slowed down subtly until capacity
is restored,” the chief technology officer for Comcast, Tony G. Werner,
said. “For the other 99.5 percent, their performance will be maintained
exactly as they expect it.”
Mr. Werner said he hoped to have the new system in place by the end of the year.
The
change was part of an announcement by Comcast on Thursday that it had
been working with BitTorrent, a company that was co-founded by the
creator of the BitTorrent protocol. The start-up, based in San
Francisco and supported by venture capital, helps media companies
deliver their files over the Internet using BitTorrent technology.
Consumers also use the protocol to share large files like movies.
The
companies said they have been working together for the last year on
ways to optimize BitTorrent applications for the Comcast network. They
said they would publish their findings to Web forums and standards
groups so that other software makers, peer-to-peer services and
I.S.P.’s could adopt them.
“What we really want is not only for
Comcast to be a better network but for all networks to be better,” the
president of BitTorrent, Ashwin Navin, said.
Comcast has taken a
public flogging since its network management practices came to light.
Consumer groups filed a complaint with the F.C.C. and asked it to
declare the cable company in violation of the commission’s network
management principles.
Comcast’s practices were subjected to
additional scrutiny at a contentious commission hearing in Cambridge,
Mass., last month. Another hearing is scheduled at Stanford in Palo
Alto, Calif., next month.
Thursday’s announcement will not
necessarily end the cable company’s public troubles. Comcast and
BitTorrent said their collaboration showed the corrective power of the
market and obviated the need for further federal oversight. But in a
public statement, the commission chairman, Kevin J. Martin, vowed
continued scrutiny and expressed concern that the old filtering
practice would continue at least through the end of the year.
Marvin
Ammori, general counsel at Free Press, one of the public interest
groups that petitioned the F.C.C., urged the commission to continue
pursuing the matter. “The only reason Comcast came to the table and
made a deal with BitTorrent is because of the unrelenting pressure,” he
said.
Many proponents of the network neutrality principle, which
would require I.S.P.’s to treat all Internet packets equally, have
expressed a preference against any sort of filtering and urged Comcast
and its rivals to instead invest in adding bandwidth.
Mr.
Werner of Comcast, showing little patience for that argument, said that
Internet service providers in Japan, with the fastest network speeds on
the planet, had to manage their traffic.
