comcast

Comcast has filed a lawsuit against the Federal Communications Commission over its ruling that the company is mishandling some customers Internet traffic.Comcast said in a filing Thursday with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, that it would comply with the FCC decision, but its was appealing the decision and the findings that the company was in violation.

Comcast has announced it will restrict customer's Internet usage starting October 1, in order to provide what it calls the best service to its subscribers.

The broadband network management question has been at the center of the Network Neutrality debate for sometime, but recent scuffles between Comcast and the Federal Communications Commission have brought the issue more scrutiny. Vint Cerf, Google's Chief Internet Evangelist, weighed in on that issue today, suggesting a new model for dealing with cable capacity issues.

It's official, as far as the FCC is concerned, that Comcast's throttling of peer-to-peer traffic was illegal and in violation of the FCC's network neutrality principles. The highly expected ruling came down today, with Chairman Kevin Martin crossing the political aisle to join commissioners Copps and Adelstein, serving Comcast with a cease-and-desist order.

The Federal Communications Commission is set to announce this week that Comcast wrongly throttled the Internet traffic of some of its customers.

That possible sanction for Comcast's admitted use of traffic shaping software to interfere with customer broadband accounts when using peer to peer software apparently evaporated after further review.

By engaging in traffic shaping to slow down heavy users of its Internet service, Comcast may be on the brink of receiving a penalty from the Federal Communications Commission.

Only two countries in the world have ISPs actively blocking or interfering with BitTorrent transmissions: Singapore and the United States. Only one kind of ISP in both countries, though, is doing the blocking: cable. An independent test conducted by Germany's Max Planck Institute for Software Systems showed that Comcast and Cox are both currently interfering with BitTorrent despite recent public and regulatory outrage.