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Comcast's new traffic prioritization

Though Comcast appears to have stopped throttling on their former on-network/off-network basis, it seems like they still haven't given up completely on packet shaping. Take the following screenshots: here I begin downloading a video (legally, mind you).

Bandwidth spike

The download bursts at roughly 4Mbps for about two seconds, then hovers around the 700kbps mark for the rest of the 19mb download.

Normalized bandwidth

If I go to download the next video in the series, I get another spike followed by normalization.

Spike and normalized bandwidth

What clearly seems to be going on here is that Comcast has found a protocol- and IP-agnostic way to throttle data: by optimizing their pipe for smaller HTML transfers, they can still claim 6mbps downlink speeds while throttling large downloads. Figures.

Print | posted on Tuesday, August 26, 2008 2:39 AM |

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# re: Comcast's new traffic prioritization

I am a bit lost. But would you say that the measurements is not that accurate, as shown with the spikes?
8/31/2008 1:15 AM | Antony Shen

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