Telecommies

Bill Toland of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette asks, “Is it traffic management or is Comcast just being a bully?”

Richard Bennet wrote a great article yesterday in the San Jose Mercury News entitled, In neutrality debate, carriers get blamed for Net’s weakness. Highlights blow:

Little light came from the Harvard hearing, where FCC Chairman Kevin Martin badgered Comcast’s solitary witness with loaded questions and failed to display any insight into broadband carriers’ management challenges.

Bennet addresses the P2P software issue.

Peer-to-peer applications are designed to consume a disproportionate share of network bandwidth, so carriers have to limit their traffic to provide good service to most of their other users. Japan, with the fastest residential broadband in the world, applies similar practices, having learned that adding capacity isn’t enough. Peer-to-peer consumes the largest share of the pipe, no matter how big the pipe is…

Broadband carriers struggle to balance cost, performance and fairness, all the while hectored by well-meaning activists oblivious to the Internet’s real technical underpinnings…

The public is unlikely to benefit from the FCC’s protracted hearing process unless there’s a change of emphasis. Comcast has already announced upgrades to its network that will make it more application-agnostic, so the basis of the complaints is already moot.

$19 Billion for Spectrum

In case you haven’t been following the FCC auction of old TV airwaves, here’s a brief outline of the key points.