Level 3 concurs: Comcast appears to be prioritizing traffic

Since 1986 - Covering the Fastest Computers
in the World and the People Who Run Them

Translation Disclaimer

Subscribe | Sign In

Visit additional Tabor Communication Publications

Tabor Communications
Corporate Video

HPC Market Watch

Level 3 concurs: Comcast appears to be prioritizing traffic

By: GigaOM

Comcast may have given users a break on Thursday by raising its monthly data cap to 300 GB, but Level 3, the backbone Internet provider and content delivery network, wants people to know that Comcast is still likely prioritizing its Xfinity traffic over others’.

Comcast may have given users a break on Thursday by raising its monthly data cap to 300GB, but Level 3, the backbone Internet provider and content delivery network, wants people to know that Comcast is still likely prioritizing its traffic over others’. The issue is an important one even with the new cap, because if Comcast is prioritizing its own traffic, it is violating the terms of its merger with NBC-Universal.

In a blog post Thursday afternoon, Andrew Dugan, SVP of Network Engineering & Architecture, and Nasser El-Aawar, principal network architect, use a service called Wireshark to test out claims that Comcast is prioritizing its Xfinity on demand traffic that users access via the Xbox. Much like Bryan Berg, who kicked off this kerfuffle with a post on Comcast labeling packets and then accusing it of prioritizing packets, the Level 3 engineers detailed their tests and provided graphs showing that Netflix traffic was degraded on the network when it was congested while the Xfinity traffic going over the Xbox was unaffected.

From the Level 3 post:

While there are a number of factors that can influence download performance for Internet traffic, it appears to us that Xfinity consistently gets good performance in both the congested and uncongested tests, while Netflix traffic is significantly impaired when the home connection is congested. These results seem to be consistent with the practice of prioritization.

Comcast has denied that it prioritizing traffic and instead claims it is marking packets so it can exempt them from the cap and create a “logical” separation. The argument seems to depend on Comcast saying it is creating a logical, but not a physical separation of its traffic by labeling it, with the other side pointing out that this logical separation has physical effects that look an awful lot like physical prioritization.

Comcast has depended on technicalities before when it argued that it did not block peer-to-peer traffic back in 2007, but merely delayed the traffic. But as a result of those delays, the packets were dropped, thus blocking the P2P flows for users.

However, Level 3 is not exactly a neutral party. It is a content delivery network for Netflix, and in 2010 was in a very public spat with Comcast over peering, after Comcast demanded Level 3 pay it for the additional traffic it was sending over its network. The issue faded away and its resolution wasn’t publicized.

Despite Comcast’s efforts to raise its cap and render questions about how it handles its Xfinity traffic via Xbox moot, it appears that those questions are still as relevant as they were before Comcast tossed users 50 extra gigabytes per month.

Comcast van image courtesy of Flickr user Titanas.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

Stock Market XML and JSON Data API provided by FinancialContent Services, Inc.
Nasdaq quotes delayed at least 15 minutes, all others at least 20 minutes.
Markets are closed on certain holidays. Stock Market Holiday List
By accessing this page, you agree to the following
Privacy Policy and Terms and Conditions.
Press Release Service provided by PRConnect.
Stock quotes supplied by Telekurs USA
Postage Rates

RSS Feeds

Feeds by Topic

Feeds by Industry

Feeds by Content Type

Subscribe to All Content

All

June 19, 2013

June 18, 2013

June 17, 2013

June 14, 2013

June 13, 2013

June 12, 2013

June 11, 2013

June 10, 2013

June 07, 2013

Feature Articles

My Supercomputer is Bigger Than Yours!

Contributing commentator, Andrew Jones, offers a break in the news cycle with an assessment of what the national "size matters" contest means for the U.S. and other nations...
Read more...

Alternatives Emerge as Linpack Loses Ground

Today at the International Supercomputing Conference in Leipzing, Germany, Jack Dongarra presented on a proposed benchmark that could carry a bit more weight than its older Linpack companion. The high performance conjugate gradient (HPCG) concept takes into account new architectures for new applications, while shedding the floating point....
Read more...

Intel Snaps New Grips to HPC Hook

Not content to let the Tianhe-2 announcement ride alone, Intel rolled out a series of announcements around its Knights Corner and Xeon Phi products--all of which are aimed at adding some options and variety for a wider base of potential users across the HPC spectrum. Today at the International Supercomputing Conference, the company's Raj....
Read more...

Read more HPCwire features...

Short Takes

Developers Tout GPI Model for Exascale Computing

Jun 19, 2013 | Supercomputer architectures have evolved considerably over the last 20 years, particularly in the number of processors that are linked together. One aspect of HPC architecture that hasn't changed is the MPI programming model.
Read more...

Supercomputers: Not Always the Best for Big Data

Jun 18, 2013 | The world's largest supercomputers, like Tianhe-2, are great at traditional, compute-intensive HPC workloads, such as simulating atomic decay or modeling tornados. But data-intensive applications--such as mining big data sets for connections--is a different sort of workload, and runs best on a different sort of computer.
Read more...

Gordon Flashes Its Versatility in HPC Workloads

Jun 18, 2013 | Researchers are finding innovative uses for Gordon, the 285 teraflop supercomputer housed at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) that has a unique Flash-based storage system. Since going online, researchers have put the incredibly fast I/O to use on a wide variety of workloads, ranging from chemistry to political science.
Read more...

Supercomputers: Still the King of the HPC Hill

Jun 17, 2013 | The advent of low-power mobile processors and cloud delivery models is changing the economics of computing. But just as an economy car is good at different things than a full size truck, an HPC workload still has certain computing demands that neither the fastest smartphone nor the most elastic cloud cluster can fulfill.
Read more...

TACC Longhorn Takes On Natural Language Processing

Jun 14, 2013 | For all the progress we've made in IT over the last 50 years, there's one area of life that has steadfastly eluded the grasp of computers: understanding human language. Now, researchers at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) are utilizing a Hadoop cluster on its Longhorn supercomputer to move the state of the art of language processing a little bit further.
Read more...

Read more headlines...

Best Practices in Big Data Storage

05/10/2013 | Cleversafe, Cray, DDN, NetApp, & Panasas | From Wall Street to Hollywood, drug discovery to homeland security, companies and organizations of all sizes and stripes are coming face to face with the challenges – and opportunities – afforded by Big Data. Before anyone can utilize these extraordinary data repositories, however, they must first harness and manage their data stores, and do so utilizing technologies that underscore affordability, security, and scalability.

Progress in Parallel: the Bull Parallel Programming Center

04/15/2013 | Bull | “50% of HPC users say their largest jobs scale to 120 cores or less.” How about yours? Are your codes ready to take advantage of today’s and tomorrow’s ultra-parallel HPC systems? Download this White Paper by Analysts Intersect360 Research to see what Bull and Intel’s Center for Excellence in Parallel Programming can do for your codes.

View the White Paper Library

HPCwire Live! Atlanta's Big Data Kick Off Week Meets HPC

Join HPCwire Editor Nicole Hemsoth and Dr. David Bader from Georgia Tech as they take center stage on opening night at Atlanta's first Big Data Kick Off Week, filmed in front of a live audience. Nicole and David look at the evolution of HPC, today's big data challenges, discuss real world solutions, and reveal their predictions. Exactly what does the future holds for HPC?

Webinar: Mellanox Virtual Modular Switch, the Most Efficient 40GbE Aggregation Switch Solution

Join our webinar to learn how IT managers can migrate to a more resilient, flexible and scalable solution that grows with the data center. Mellanox VMS is future-proof, efficient and brings significant CAPEX and OPEX savings. The VMS is available today.