Ed note: Sites like Slashdot are pitching this FCC filing as fresh news, but it is not. Comcast transitioned to the following mechanism by December 31, 2008. We are covering it today for the sake of discussion, and to offer facts–not FUD–to the public about what the US’ largest ISPs are doing to manage their networks.

A 2008 filing by Comcast (PDF) with the US Federal Communications Commission sheds light on the company’s throttling practices. The filing came as a result of the FCC’s 2008 Internet Policy Statement (PDF) which obligates ISPs to be transparent about their network management practices.

The entire throttling mechanism is centered around the Cable Modem Termination System, or CMTS. Comcast’s network contains 3300 CMTS units in the US, each serving approximately 4400 customers.

The throttling process begins when a CMTS approaches a congested state described as greater than 15 minutes of  >70% upstream utilization or >80% downstream utilization. Comcast calls this a Near Congested State, or NCS.

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The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) is currently overseeing a proceeding regarding the future of net neutrality in Canada. ISPs and music groups have been lining up with objections and claims that such regulations would stop them from bandwidth throttling, content blocking and graduated response penalties.

One ISP, Videotron, was vehemently opposed to net neutrality and offered an interesting take on the matter: network neutrality “could be beneficial not only to users of Internet services but to society in general.”

And so on with an itemized list of big content/ISP mantras: The Pirate Bay is evil, musicians need to make money, bandwidth throttling is essential, copyright copyright copyright, punt no-gooders from the interwibble, etcetera.

Canadian law professor Michael Geist was astonished by the groundswell of anti-consumer policies.

“That any ISP could demonstrate such hostility toward its own customers provides a clear indicator of the utter lack of broadband competition in Canada and serves as a warning that the New Zealand fight could eventually make its way here,” he said.

Virgin Media customers in blighty may be dismayed to learn that the cable ISP is extending its throttled hours and lowering the threshold required to trigger throttling.

Users in the Preston area are being subjected to these new crop of rules which are itemized below:

• The 10AM – 3PM and 4PM – 9PM peak hours are being combined into a contiguous 10 AM – 9 PM block for Saturday and Sunday.
• Where users were once allotted Saturday/Sunday bandwidth of 1000MB for 10AM-3PM and 500MB for 4PM-9PM, users will now receive 1250MB for 10AM-9PM, resulting in a 250MB cut for the same time span.
• Weekday users who exceed their caps will be throttled for up to seven hours instead of the current five.
• Weekend users who exceed their caps will be throttled for up to ten hours instead, instead of seven.

It’s Saturday, and that means there’s a crippling dearth of interesting news as all the boffins and spinners have headed home for the week. As all goes quiet on the western front, we’ll take a step back and look at what this past week brought us. Without further ado, paste your peepers to our Saturday recap:

• Adobe’s CEO says that the firm is working closely with Apple to develop a functional Flash runtime for the iPhone. Is it true? Carefully-worded fabrication? There are arguments for both sides.
• Using the new D0 stepping, Intel is preparing to release the Core i7 975 EE. While the pricepoint for this chip approaches $ridiculous, the more important question is: What can this new stepping offer us? The good news is that it’s also being released to the Core i7 920 very shortly.
• Microsoft announced that there will be six separate editions of Windows 7. Thankfully only two of those editions are primed for OEM/retail focus.
• Cox Communications, one of the US’ largest cable ISPs, recently announced that it planned to trial congestion management techniques in the Kansas and Arkansas markets. One of our readers reported that the congestion management may be erring into protocol blocking territory.
• Google is enabling Chrome support for extensions in the spring.
• Microsoft has put security concerns at ease by announcing that Windows 7’s UAC functionality will prompt the user when any change is made to it, regardless of the defined alert level.
• On the Netbook front, Intel has released details of an updated Atom platform capable of 720p playback. On the NVIDIA side of the coin, their robust Ion platform has moved a few steps closer to retail availability.

Charter Communications, America’s fourth largest publicly-traded ISP, has announced that it intends to implement bandwidth caps effective February 9.

As with all such congestion management plans, Charter justifies the policy by citing the customer experience. “The update is occurring in order for Charter to continue providing the best possible experience for our Internet customers,” said a Charter spokesperson. “More than 99% of our customers will not be affected by our updated policy, as they consume far less bandwidth than the threshold allows.”

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On Monday we reported that Cox was preparing to trial congestion management techniques in its Kansas and Arkansas markets. Less than a week later, we’re receiving word that Cox may be up to more than throttling traffic.

Icrontic reader Samuel Devoran tells us that Cox Communications may be outrightly filtering select protocols:

Legal bit torrent no longer works at all through Cox Communications. I started a legal download 7 hours ago. So far no data has transferred. Just to be sure I found several other heavily seeded legal torrents to test. Not one single byte of data has come through. Uploading is also dead in the water. As someone involved with web development this is a major, major problem. Uploading and downloading from SVN, Sourceforge, Apt repositories and YaST repositories (at least) has been completely crippled.

What Cox has done is not throttling. Cox has completely shut down bit torrent traffic, at least for the time being here in Northwest Arkansas. The WalMart Headquarters is only a mile away. At least WalMart will be affected as well, but they can just throw piles of money at the problem. This is one hell of a start to Cox’s new “throttling” policy: No bandwidth for developers..

Can other users from Arkansas or Kansas weigh in on Mr. Devoran’s experience? Is your traffic being filtered?

UPDATE @ 3:18 PM EST:

Vuze has joined the internet watchdog group Free Press in petitioning the FCC for scrutiny over Cox Communication’s new management policies.

Vuze General Counsel Jay Monahan has taken issue with the new system, and says that Vuze is being treated like a “second class” citizen. “It would appear that under the new Cox regime YouTube and Hulu (and of course Cox services) are high priority, while Vuze’s similar services are relegated to the back of the bus,” he said. “We join Free Press and others in calling for close scrutiny by the FCC of Cox’s activities affecting peer-to-peer traffic.”

Their claim may stand on some ground, as the brouhaha over Comcast’s past indescretion prompted the FCC to demand that all congestion management techniques be open for review. As of yet, no public information has been released regarding Cox’s approach to their new policy.

A 2008 partnership between Google and academia has materialized in the form of the Measurement Lab, a service designed to uncover evidence of protocol filtering and throttling at the ISP level.

The issue of protocol management has become a prominent and contentious issue in the ongoing debate over network neutrality. Since the topic’s abrupt inception in October of 2007, a bevy of United States ISPs have moved to avoid the FCC’s wrath by releasing details of both current and pending congestion management techiques.

While academics and regulators have addressed their mounting concerns with a small array of tools, they have previously lacked both the hardware and the bandwidth to tackle the issue on a grand scale. “Researchers are already developing tools that allow users to, among other things, measure the speed of their connection, run diagnostics, and attempt to discern if their ISP is blocking or throttling particular applications,” the announcement reads. “Unfortunately, researchers lack widely-distributed servers with ample connectivity.”

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Fans of the indiscriminate information super highway on both sides of the pond will be disappointed to learn that US ISP Cox Communications has announced bandwidth management plans while the UK government recently spoke out against the principles of net neutrality.

Cox Communications, the United States’ third largest ISP, has broached an unhappy topic with a recent update to their site which announces impending bandwidth management plans. The proposed congestion management system will ensure that “time-sensitive Internet traffic” is delivered without delay. In exchange, services like Usenet, uploads and peer-to-peer may be temporarily delayed to achieve timely delivery of prioritized traffic.

Like Comcast which has already begun protocol-agnostic bandwidth management trials, Cox cites the consumer experience as the driving force behind their plans. “Management of occasional congestion is just one aspect of intelligent network management, which allows Cox to provide customers the best possible Internet experience,” the update reads. “We also manage our network for the safety and security of our customers, by blocking spam and helping to make our customers less susceptible to viruses and other online hazards.”

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Yesterday Comcast said it planned to continue throttling users on their network with protocol-agnostic traffic management. Comcast plans to impede the speeds of a bandwidth-intensive user “roughly between, probably, 10 and 20 minutes” says Comcast’s senior VP and general manager of online services Mitch Bowling. Comcast’s new approach to operating their network is the first of many such trials in an industry that claims to be struggling to keep up with the demands of its users.

Dubbed “Fair Share,” Comcast alleges that the new technique is for the health of its network. “If in fact a person is generating enough packets that they’re the ones creating that situation, we will manage that consumer for the overall good of all of our consumers,” Bowling said. Users who continue to generate intense traffic, regardless of its intent or purpose, will be managed until the traffic subsides.

The Philadelphia-based ISP recently found itself at the middle of a controversy when it came to light that it was surreptitiously interrupting users of the BitTorrent protocol with artificial packet loss. The ensuing flash mob of angry internet users and internet-era civil rights groups resulted in a public censure for the ISP.

Comcast’s commitment to the same practice on a broader scale is striking some as a disingenuous disregard for the spirit of the censure. Commenters have been quick to point out that the new practice continues in the same vein, while merely targeting additional people.

In light of the recent announcement that the new technology would be undergoing trials in select markets, Comcast was quick to defend itself. In a managed state, a user would have a connection that provided “a really good DSL experience,” Bowling said as he poked fun at competitors.

Proud owners of broadband in the contiguous US know no such silliness as a “Bandwidth cap,” but if greedy ol’ Time Warner has its way, it could be rolling out tiered pricing by the end of the year. If you always scoffed at the Euro broadband market and their draconian (Yet profitable!) restrictions, the mighty dollar is a fine seductress.

Sad.