[ NNSquad ] Re: Comcast announces tests of "protocol agnostic networkmanagement"

[Richard Bennett <richard@bennett.com>]

Sorry, David, but I'm not buying that. Comcast played a Clinton game 
when asked if they were blocking P2P, and gave a literal answer: they 
didn't block, they delayed. And the experience of those of us who happen 
to be Comcast customers was and is consistent with that assertion. We've 
been able to run BitTorrent and other P2P applications on the Comcast 
network successfully all along. Comcast simply reduces the number of TCP 
streams that BitTorrent can use for unattended seeding by about 50%, not 
down to zero. So their PR statements were at least as accurate as those 
of the critics, and in fact more so than the statements of many critics.

But even if Comcast had flat-out lied about what they were doing, that's 
no excuse for people like this Hansell character blatantly 
misrepresenting what the new system does.

Is it a Black List? No, it's not.
Does it prevent anyone from getting fair share of the wire? No, it does not.
Does it put heavy users on a dirt road for hours at a time? No, it does not.

There is a credibility issue here, but it's not on Comcast's side.

RB

David P. Reed wrote:
> Richard Bennett wrote:
> > The takeaway is that you can't please everybody, so you may as well 
> > not even try.
> Why is this the takeaway?  The sentence above makes no sense to me. 
> Comcast seems to be trying to earn back lost trust, in a number of 
> ways.   That takes time in the real world.  Once you blow trust, e.g. 
> by trying to cover up what you are doing or spin it, you need to earn 
> it back.  In the real world, you have to win over your critics, and 
> accept that some will remain skeptical for a while.
>
> Perhaps they could have avoided losing trust by opening up 
> transparently about use of Sandvine and not just "slowing" traffic in 
> a minor way.  Instead they took a high-risk PR strategy (deny and 
> deflect and claim not at all to be doing what they were measurably 
> doing).   They hired "seat-fillers" at an FCC adminstrative law hearing.
>
> This kind of behavior does NOT lead many people to be generous in 
> deciding to trust again.
>
> I tend to think that inside the company there are people who did not 
> support their choice of PR strategy and the lack of transparency.  But 
> their face to the world has not reflected this.

--
Richard Bennett