But if I watch that same episode through the Xfinity Xbox app, it doesn't use up my cap at all," he wrote. "For example, if I watch last night's SNL episode on my Xbox through the Hulu app, it eats up about one gigabyte of my cap. Netflix CEO Reed Hastings isn’t convinced, as he described in a Facebook post last month. Comcast shall not prioritize Defendants’ Video Programming or other content over other Persons’ Video Programming or other content.” “If Comcast offers consumers Internet Access Service under a package that includes caps, tiers, metering, or other usage-based pricing, it shall not measure, count, or otherwise treat Defendants’ affiliated network traffic differently from unaffiliated network traffic. Under the regulatory conditions of Comcast’s merger with NBC Universal, it is not allowed to prioritize its own services above those of others. Netflix, Vint Cerf remain unconvinced of Comcast's arguments That’s the policy question you want to ask.” AdvertisementĬomcast did not respond to questions from Ars before this article was published. “The Xfinity isn’t inherently faster, but it’s a separate lane. “Is it OK to have one lane for all the Internet traffic and another lane for Xfinity?” Eckersley added. In a sense, the company is merely providing a separate-but-equal channel to serve bits to customers. Once there, the request is sent on to the video-on-demand host, which responds by serving the video to the customer.ĭefining DSCP values is typically done by the end host (in this case, Comcast’s video host), or may be included later downstream by an ISP that offers “integrated services.” Those might include TV, phone, and Internet, as a way to preserve a certain quality of service for various applications. Here, Comcast is arguing that it’s not giving CS5 traffic a higher priority when compared to its normal Internet service. That is the company’s central hub for a group of cable modem subscribers. When a Comcast customer starts the Xfinity app on the Xbox, that request for video data is sent out from the Xbox, through the router and cable modem, and then to the cable modem termination system (CMTS). The company is taking advantage of this 6-bit field in the IP header of each packet as a way to distinguish the Xfinity traffic as it is sent down to the customer. This has a range of values from CS1 (lowest value, also known as “bulk”) to CS5, which takes higher priority. These have names like Class Selector, Assured Forwarding, Expedited Forwarding, and others. In this case, Berg and Dan Rayburn both showed that Comcast appears to be primarily using the Class Selector value to distinguish its traffic. Within that DSCP value, there are a number of ranges of possible sub-values defined as a way to manage traffic. But the company states, “that is not their only application-and that is not what they are being used for here.” Advertisement
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Berg concluded that this constitutes “reasonable evidence of the prioritization of traffic in violation of the terms of the Comcast/NBCU Consent Decree.”Ĭomcast acknowledges it is applying a different quality of service value (known in the industry as Differentiated Services Code Point, DiffServ, or DSCP value) that normally denotes priority levels for traffic. Last week, Bryan Berg, the CTO of San Francisco startup Mixed Media Labs, wrote a detailed post that showed how Comcast appears to be favoring the Xfinity traffic.
“This is definitely in a gray zone,” said Peter Eckersley, the technology projects director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, in an interview with Ars. It comes down to how “prioritization” is defined-if the company would be found to be favoring one type of traffic over another, that would be a violation of federal regulations. The short answer: Comcast is doing some type of traffic management. So what exactly is Comcast doing? Who’s right, and why does it matter? Many argued this means Comcast is prioritizing traffic, a charge the company denies. But it's a claim that appears to not actually be true.
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The effect is that the Xfinity TV service has its own dedicated channel on a given Internet connection, through what Comcast calls a “separate service flow.” At the time, Comcast claimed it was serving its Xfinity TV service through a “private IP network” rather than the public Internet.
Recently, a few bloggers conducted tests that seem to show Comcast’s traffic to its Xbox 360 running Xfinity TV On Demand, which does not count against a user’s usage cap ( as announced in March), uses a different type of traffic routing.