Comcast, BitTorrent Announce ‘Network Capacity Management’ Talks

In direct response to mounting concerns regarding an investigation into its alleged throttling of P2P applications traffic, cable colossus Comcast Corp. on Thursday announced talks with BitTorrent Inc.  to “more effectively address issues concerning rich media content and network capacity management.”

Comcast said the talks are part of a larger effort to work with the “Internet community” to address these core issues. And in what seems to be an admission that it has partaken in the practice, the company said it plans to have a capacity management technique in place by yearend that is protocol agnostic.

The duo will work to create optimizations for P2P and related technologies.

Comcast has come under heavy fire from the consumer, regulatory and Internet communities for what they claim is directly and adversely affecting the performance of applications accessed on sites that use P2P technology, such as BitTorrent. Comcast has said it’s only performing normal network management.

The heightening conflict has drawn widespread attention from parties concerned that throttling-like activities go against tenets of net neutrality. It also brings questions toe the fore about potential capacity limitations of Comcast’s network, which it’s rushing to upgrade to higher capacity-enabling DOCSIS 3.0 technology.

“While we think there were other management techniques that could have been deployed, we understand why Comcast and other ISPs adopted the approach that they did initially,” said BitTorrent CTO Eric Klinker in a statement. “Recognizing that the Web is richer and more bandwidth intensive than it has been historically, we are pleased that Comcast understands these changing traffic patterns and wants to collaborate with us to migrate to techniques that the Internet community will find to be more transparent.”

Comcast and BitTorrent said they also have agreed to work with “other ISPs, other technology companies, and the Internet Engineering Task Force, to explore and develop a new distribution architecture for the efficient delivery of rich media content.”

Neither company elaborated on the architecture.

“In the spirit of openness and fostering innovative solutions, BitTorrent will take the first step in enhancing our client applications to optimize them for a new broadband network architecture,” said BitTorrent Co-Founder and President Ashwin Navin, in the same statement. “Furthermore, we will publish these optimizations in open forums and standard bodies for all application developers to benefit from.”

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