OPINION: Traffic jams on broadband

Last year, the Associated Press conducted a series of tests that involved transferring portions of the King James Bible over Comcast’s broadband network using the BitTorrent protocol. What it discovered was that at certain times, Comcast was intentionally degrading BitTorrent service—a practice also called throttling—apparently in an effort to free up bandwidth for other uses and applications.

Those results were quickly confirmed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which conducted its own tests.

At first, Comcast denied throttling BitTorrent. Once the evidence became undeniable, however, it fell back on a utilitarian argument: By its nature, BitTorrent traffic consumes a great deal of bandwidth. On a shared network like a cable system, where multiple households share a single connection to the Internet, a small number of users running BitTorrent can degrade service for everyone using that connection.

Comcast’s answer: selectively degrade BitTorrent so other users won’t be affected.

Read the full column at ContentAgenda.com.