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Carrier Services
Comcast and FCC square off (again) over VoIP treatment
Investigates possibility of lesser QoS for third-party VoIP traffic
by Doug Allen
It’s a good bet Comcast didn’t see this one coming: as one of the last acts under outgoing Chairman Kevin Martin, the FCC has issued an inquiry to Comcast, seeking clarification on a recently posted Comcast FAQ about Network Management that states high-bandwidth subscribers to third-party players like Vonage or Skype using Comcast’s infrastructure could receive lower-quality VoIP service. The same text lists no such caveats about its own VoIP service.
"We seek clarification with respect to an apparent discrepancy between Comcast's [September 19] filing and its actual or advertised practices," Dana Shaffer, chief of the FCC's wireline competition bureau, and Matthew Berry, FCC general counsel, wrote in a letter to Comcast. "Comcast states that [a bandwidth hog] may find that his 'VoIP call sounds choppy' [but] draws no distinction between Comcast's VoIP offering and those offered by its competitors."
To provide a little context, the text of Comcast’s filing states, “During times of actual network congestion, when a [bandwidth hog’s] traffic might be delayed, there are a variety of effects…[like a ] webpage loads sluggishly, a peer-to-peer upload takes somewhat longer to complete, or a VoIP call sounds choppy. Of course, the same thing could happen to the customers on a port that is congested in the absence of any congestion management; the difference here is that the effects of any such delays are shifted toward those who have been placing the greatest burden on the network instead of being distributed randomly among the users of that port without regard to their consumption levels.”
A little background: after investigating claims of service restrictions, access blocking and per-session bandwidth caps beginning in 2007, the FCC issued an enforcement action requiring Comcast to switch to a network management system that did not discriminate against particular high-bandwidth protocols, such as P2P (see FCC to telcos via Comcast: “No more rate-throttling”). Comcast formally complied with the decision, presenting a detailed, more transparent network management policy platform last September. Comcast officially moved to the protocol-agnostic system at the end of 2008, setting a 250 Gbps per month per subscriber cap on bandwidth. Its new traffic management platform, based on Sandvine and Camiant equipment, can impose temporary rate-throttling on specific session for as much as 10 to 20 minutes, but does not target such streams by protocol alone, but rather amount of bandwidth consumed.
Nowhere in the finding does Comcast say it reserves priority treatment for its own VoIP traffic over its wholesale customers — who in this case are also competitors — but the implication of preferential treatment for its own subscribers while potentially penalizing over-the-top providers certainly raises questions for the FCC. To follow up, the FCC has asked Comcast for details on its network management platform and how it treats and controls VoIP traffic from its own facilities-based vs. wholesale VoIP customers.
In addition, Shaffer and Berry have formally requested that “Comcast explain any reason the commission should not treat Comcast’s VoIP offering as a telecommunication service—a service subject, among other things, to the same intercarrier compensation obligations applicable to other facilities-based telecommunications carriers. We understand that Comcast is not yet complying with such intercarrier compensation obligations.”
This is not the first time Comcast has had to resolve a dispute over the treatment of over-the-top service provider customers. It signed a so-called collaborative agreement with Vonage Holding Corp. that guaranteed that regardless of network management policies applied, Vonage VoIP QoS would not be impacted. However, this agreement does not extend to any other wholesale VoIP customers or over-the-top vendors.
The FCC has set a deadline of Jan. 30, 2009 for Comcast to respond to its request for clarification. Comcast says it is in full compliance with the FCC’s congestion management order, and is reviewing the FCC’s current request.
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