Matthouse

Comcast caves, goes back to “normal” traffic management

As a follow up to my previous post about Comcast, in which I jumped on the blogger bandwagon, Comcast seems to have had a change of heart. According to this press release, Comcast has agreed treat peer-to-peer file sharing protocols with the same priority as any other packets. The PR-speak has a lot of fluffy stuff in it, but that’s pretty much what it boils down to.

This is an important development, because it means Comcast saw the writing on the wall, both in backlash from its customer base (which translates directly into lost customers), as well as the impending reprimand (or worse) from the FCC. Apparently, net neutrality (wikipedia) still exists, which is extremly good news for the consumer. In short, it means that if you buy an internet connection from Comcast, they will no longer restrict what protocols you can use with it, but will instead concentrate only on throttling your total bandwidth usage (which is what every other ISP in the world does).