The FCC’s look into Comcast’s internet blocking policy… is it fair?
Thursday, February 28th, 2008Earlier this week, The NY Times published an article about the head of the Federal Communications Commission and other senior officials considering taking steps to discourage cable and telephone companies from delaying the downloads and uploads of heavy Internet users.
Here are my thoughts on the subject…
The practice of limiting bandwidth utilization on a sustained bandwidth basis is extremely invasive to the media and entertainment industry. Imagine you are a professional journalist or a citizen journalist. You PAID and you PAY for a monthly contract with your Internet service provider for a guaranteed upload speed and download speed. And you just happen to have some footage that you’ve captured of a news-worthy event. And you start uploading that content to a news organization. Let’s say that you shot this on mini-DV tape which captures content at 25 mbits/sec (megabits/sec). And you have a “premium upload/download” package that “guarantees” you 5mbits/sec upload and 10 mbits/sec download. Now, in theory, you’re uploading 25 mbits/sec content and you can do this at a sustained 5 mbits/sec. (in other words, a 5:1 ratio. 1 second of video you want to send will take you 5 seconds). Well, that means your 50 seconds of video should take 250 seconds. So, you start uploading it and it seems to be going at the rate that’s part of your service level contract. But, say, 40 seconds into the upload you start to see a pronounced slow down of the upload. And, as time goes by, the upload progress bar is moving even slower. You are a victim of your provider throttling down your upload speed. And the ramifications? It’s great that you got the only footage of a newsworthy event. Now, why don’t you forget about uploading it and get in your car and drive the tape to the television station?