The Net Neutrality saga continues onwards, with no shortage of surprises or new developments.
1) The first piece of news is that Comcast might not be telling the truth in terms of what it's doing from a traffic management perspective on its Internet service. Comcast, in an 80-page disclosure of its traffic management, noted that it was only delaying peer to peer filesharing traffic when the network was congested. In a public statement yesterday by the FCC's Kevin Martin, "It does not appear that this technique was used only to occasionally delay traffic at particular nodes suffering from network congestion at that time. Based on testimony we've received thus far, this equipment was typically deployed over a wider geographic area or system, and is not even capable of knowing when an individual … segment of the network is congested".
While this may or may not be true, this does reveal one fundamental issue with respect to Comcast - in the absence of more transparency, nobody trusts what anybody is saying anymore, especially Comcast. More than anything Comcast is fighting for the right to keep the government out of its business, and while the FCC doesn't really want to be playing this role, it's been put in the position where it will look very bad indeed if it gives Comcast a free pass. With Comcast's traffic management policies using Sandvine gear, these proceedings continue to beat on Sandvine's stock price, which closed at .40 yesterday.
2) Cogeco Cable was called out yesterday by P2P video company Vuze as being the second worst ISP globally in terms of interfering with peer to peer traffic. This will no doubt build on a growing discontent in Canada with respect to the ISP community, particularly with Bell already implementing a heighted level of peer to peer shaping, and Rogers and Shaw also highlighted in the Vuze report.
The bottom line here is that the Net Neutrality debate appears to be gaining momentum and not getting resolved to any great degree, particularly in the U.S. and Canada. A worry might be that these debates start to spread to other geographies as well as companies that will be relying on P2P as a distribution method take their fights globally. Clearly, this would be a bad thing for deep packet inspection companies like Sandvine, Allot, Arbor, and Cisco as this could serve to delay deployment plans for the technology at global carriers over the coming years.