Cox Confirms P2P Throttling > Lawyer double-speak

Lawyer double-speak

said by Cox hack :

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Cox does not prohibit the use of file-sharing services for uploads or downloads, or discriminate against any specific services in any way.

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I hear you. But in 5 hours I'm going to get woken up from my drug induced dreaming to a ranting 27 year old demanding I explain throttling to her .. again.

I'd bet my last dollar that this type of blocking will not go away even if net neutrality legislation is passed. The cable & telco companies lobbying efforts ar emuch too large to just get a carte blanche law passed saying all traffic is equal. Besides all traffic isn't equal and anyone who has tried to support a large network knows that.

I see a lot of people talking about they don't need to block p2p because they have caps. Do you think if thier caps were working they would spend millions of dollars to install the hardware needed to do this type of traffic blocking?

Caps don't work in all cases. Sometimes you can have just a couple of really casual p2p users hitting the dslam or node at the same time and wreck havoc. That may be the along downloading they do all month, but if it happens at the right time you are disrupting service for dozens of other people.

Its fairly simple, let's say COX expects 10% return on thier network, but they see that based on current user patterns they need to buy more bandwidth. They can do this at thier own expense, say pay for the upgrades and live with 8% returns, or they find out where all the traffic is coming from, and BOOM you find out that 5% of your users take up almost 80% of your bandwidth and the number one thing is p2p file sharing.

So rather than spend $$$$$$$ to buy more bandwidth you spend $$ to block the heavy bandwidth using apps and you get to keep your 10%.

What else do you expect them to do?

Even if that law is passed, who other than a US Federal Attorney General will file charges? If the legal system won't accept any cases based on the law, is there still a law?