Cox to start throttling its broadband based on "time sensitive" protocol use
Under the new rules, web traffic is safe, but FTP, Usenet, P2P and online backups are fair game for throttling.
If you get your broadband through Cox Communications, you're in store for a change to how the company manages your data, as it's putting new throttling programs in place. Just like Comcast was caught doing last year, Cox decided that peer-to-peer traffic, regardless of legal or illegal content, didn't deserve the same traffic priority as all other communication. After Comcast caught the FCC's wrath for the practice, Cox backed off, too. Now it's going forward with a new plan, categorizing all traffic as either time sensitive or not based on the protocol being used.
Under the new strategy, first starting in Arkansas and Kansas next month, whenever Cox's network is overloaded and the company can't deliver the bandwidth you're supposed to be getting, it will start slowing down connections for what it considers non-time sensitive protocols. Of course P2P makes that list, along FTP connections, Usenet, system updates, and "network storage", whatever protocol that's supposed to mean.
Cox seems to have made some pretty odd and arbitrary choices there - you can send big files over a web connection just as easily as with FTP, yet files sent over the web count as time sensitive. Posting messages on web-based message boards gets high priority, but posting messages on Usenet boards doesn't. Then there's the glaring hole Cox is leaving open, that it considers all traffic sent over a VPN, or virtual private network, to be time sensitive. You could P2P to your heart's content with no speed hit so long as you routed the traffic through a VPN first.
This all seems like an overly-complicated solution to the problem, and one that seems likely to draw just as much attention as Comcast did with its protocol-aware throttling. Come on, Cox, just beef up your infrastructure, provide the bandwidth your customers are paying for, and stop fiddling with their data!
This story around the web:
- Trusted sources:
Cox ready to throttle P2P, non "time… [Ars Technica]
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Cox to test new way to handle Internet… [Industry Standard News and Predictions]
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Exploring Cox's New Network Management System… [DSLreports]
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Cox Will Shape Its Broadband Traffic; Delay… [GigaOM]
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Skeptics Eye Cox's New Network Management [Digital Trends]
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Traffic Shaping By Any Other Name is… [Geek News Central]
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Comments (1)
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Anonymous (5:19 PM on Tue Feb 10, 2009)
Regardless of how Cox wants to present this arrangement, at the end of the day they are subjectively discriminating against certain types of traffic within their network, as well as Internet destinations their customers may wish to access.
If allowed to do so, it would contradict the FCC's ruling against Comcast, and it would establish a very dangerous precedent. Today Cox is going to filter FTP, P2P and Usenet traffic, but tomorrow it may be other types of traffic (games, music, instant messaging, etc.) that don't benefit their business for one reason or another.
At the end of the day customers pay Cox for access to the Internet... not part of the Internet, not the Internet that Cox deems worthy of their network... but access to the entire network. I thought the following article had an interesting take on the matter:
http://www.newsadmin.com/usenet_commentary/commentary_020...