Comcast's seat-warmers at the FCC hearing.
Posted on 02/26/2008 10:52:17 PM PST by HAL9000
Excerpt -
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (AP) — Comcast Corp. on Tuesday acknowledged hiring people to fill seats before the start of a contentious federal hearing on how the company manages its broadband network, allowing its employees to take those seats when the filled-to-capacity hearing started.Many people were turned away before Monday's Federal Communications Commission hearing at Harvard Law School, leading critics to accuse Comcast of stifling debate over the company's practice of favoring some forms of Internet traffic over others.
Comcast said it hired people to hold seats only after an advocacy group called Free Press urged its backers to attend.
"For the past week, the Free Press has engaged in a much more extensive campaign to lobby people to attend the hearing on its behalf," Philadelphia-based Comcast said in a statement.
After Free Press on Tuesday accused Comcast of using unfair tactics, Comcast spokeswoman Sena Fitzmaurice confirmed to The Associated Press that the company hired people to fill seats after the hearing room doors opened at 7 a.m. and before the 11 a.m. start. As Comcast employees arrived, they replaced the hired seat-warmers. Fitzmaurice declined to say who or how many were hired, how the company found them, or how much they were paid.
~ snip ~
(Excerpt) Read more at ap.google.com ...
This is a tough one! I hate Comcast’s plan for the internet and the free-market solution of finding a new provider won’t work since they have a city-wide monopoly on the cable lines.
Of course, the last thing I want is the federal government getting involved telling ISPs how to run the internet - even if its starts off with good intentions and ‘traffic neutrality.’
Gizmodo also has this story. They have a picture of people with Highlighters to identify each other.
http://gizmodo.com/361202/pure-evil-comcastards-paid-people-to-take-up-seats-and-cheer-in-net-neutrality-hearing
In general, I am opposed to more regulation.
BUT, net neutrality is one of the few places where I welcome it. There are too many parts of the country which have a very small number of broadband providers, and the Comcast rinkydinks have to be nipped in the bud.
Net Neutrality is not a panacea but allows the freedom of the Internet to continue to grow and innovate without control in the US (can’t affect changes in China/Iran/Europe). Comcast does not want a fair hearing and debate for the company wants their products and services only on their “network.” Comcast pushes their VOIP plan to grab part of the telephone companies “business.” Comcast cuts off bit torrent users that sends videos to the Comcast user/client but it sucks bandwidth that Comcast can be using to have paid “movies on demand” for their server that sucks bandwidth. Comcast does not want to innovate and compete they want to control and dominate - the ISP wars are continuing again.
I am a Comcast broadband user in Maryland. I download TV shows rather than watch them on the boob tube.
At first, last year, Comcast cut me off after a set number of Gb download, but they soon switched to limiting my bandwidth. I am paying for 5 gb/s, but Comcast limits me to 800 kb/s when I download for more than 10 seconds.
Their excuse is that they are keeping their “limited” bandwidth open for other users, so that heavy users do not clog up the system.
I run an ISP so I understand the challenges.....
Cable Ethernet providers aggregate their traffic at about a 20:1 ratio. In other-words, for every 1MB of network Internet access they own they sell (20) 1MB customers. This coupled with the type of network they provide, shared Ethernet, requires them to rate shape their customers.
Of course, they could lower their aggregation rates to 5:1 but this would increase network cost (hence price) 400%.
Everyone wants cheap Internet, some of the heavy users upset the business model for the carriers.
The solution would be for carriers to raise the rates significantly across the board for everyone as they decrease the aggregation rates.
Telling businesses “no, you don’t get to shortchange your customers on the services you sold them”, “no, you don’t get to play shell games to cover up the fact that you sold 500% of your bandwidth”, “no, you don’t get to hack into connections and send forged ‘stop’ packets”, etc are part of one of government’s basic functions (suppression of fraud).
Comcast: protecting bandwith for stupid people who don’t know how to use the internet.
actually the forged stop packets happes consistently with the calling card operators. They have quietly written code into their call handlers which “drop” every Xth call. This generates a new reconnect fee for the hapless calling card buyer.
You can see reality coming...the providers and the telephone guys know that there is a limit to this entire mess. If 30 percent of America goes into turbo-users...downloading movies and video...the networks won’t be able to handle it.
So they are quietly hinting that they are going to different rates. Flat rates...are about two years away from ending completely (my humble opinion). The heavy users? They better get used to $100 to $200 a month fees. The majority of the public won’t pay for that...so they will go to a lesser fee of $50 a month...to get lesser speed and preserve what exists currently.
The amusing thing here....in vast parts of my homestate of Bama....56k is the best you can hope for. I’ve talked to folks from part of Idaho...who get the same deal. We are all trying to take as much as possible....but the current network isn’t going to deliver that. We will be fairly shocked at the rates they offer for massive downloaders.
Okay, ISP guy, it's like this:
If you have X amount of bandwidth to your upstream and you sell 10X bandwidth to your subscribers, you're a typical ISP.
Now if you also sell your subscribers unlimited bandwidth and then keep them from actually use it, you're a fraud.
If you violate RFC's in order to preserve your oversubscription then you're a ... well... if I call you what I really think I'd get banned.
Bottom line: People want what they signed up for. If you foolishly sold them unlimited Internet and now want to defraud them because they are ***GASP*** actually USING IT, then that's too bad for you.
You have no right to your business model. Just because oversubscribing your upstream lines isn't working out like you planned isn't a reason to defraud your customers.
My company clearly states it’s policies and only rate shapes abuse level customers as specified.
If those customers want to exceed their current program we offer them alternative plans that will meet their expectations.
The major carriers don’t bother nor care, they’ll abuse their base and take the attitude of “so sue me”.....
Their size and resources will wear down the most ardent user. Really, how much money is a $29.95/month user going to spend on legal fees to get true full speed access for the plan they chose....
Their size and resources will wear down the most ardent user. Really, how much money is a $29.95/month user going to spend on legal fees to get true full speed access for the plan they chose....
And that's why we have governments.
That's why the FCC is looking at Comcast.
May be of interest.
This is precisely why I prefer my 5mbps DSL connection. Sure it's not as fast as cable CAN be, but it's as fast as it's supposed to be every time I sit down at the computer and use it. Also, since cable is pretty much shared Ethernet, I've always wondered if the same security issues are in play as they would be on a LAN(sniffing). Since you seem to know some things about cable internet, is this an issue? I do know you can't see traffic of others behind your home cable modem on your home computer, but could someone access the physical network somewhere along the 'path' and 'see' traffic of others? I know this is very unlikely to happen on the PPOE connection that DSL uses because the protocol is more secure than plain old 802.3 Ethernet with no security mechanisms being used. Also, with DSL you are on a dedicated circuit to the DSLAM at the provider's CO, which on its own makes the possibility of any eavesdropping minimal.
You have more faith in the FCC than I......
Having testified several times before the FCC, both written and verbal, I’ve concluded that they are little more than a shill for the “big boys”.
You must be close to the DSLAM because the max rate speed of ADSL is 6MB and since the signal is analog it degradates over distance.
Most DSL users get nothing near what is advertised when it comes to speed. Also, the DSL provider does oversubscribe their customers generally at the rate of 12:1.
Check latency and jitter, most DSL is not suitable for VoIP service, at least not at business quality, perhaps light residential.
But you are still vastly superior to cable modem service....Good gosh, when the little crumb crunchers unload from the yellow cheese box at 3:00pm each day and logon to their myspace accounts to begin downloading pictures, whole neighborhoods worth of cable ethernet crawl to a halt.....
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.