Following reports that Comcast isn’t net neutral, Consumerist blog has acquired several leaks from Comcast insiders, claiming that they do indeed use Sandvine for packet shaping, and that customer service representatives are being told nothing about how the network technology works, only to inform customers that they do not do what it is they’ve been accused of doing.
This from the memo that has been leaked to the Consumerist:
If a customer asks:
I read that Comcast is limiting customer access to BitTorrent. Is this true?Respond:
No. We do not block access to any applications, including BitTorrent. We also respect our customers’ privacy and don’t monitor specific customer activities on the Internet or track individual online behavior, such as which websites they visit. Therefore, we do not know whether any individual user is visiting BitTorrent or any other site.
I spoke to some folks that I know who are fairly high up in data center operations for different hosting and Internet service providers, and they tell me this line may be technically correct. They probably do throttle traffic, just not BitTorrent traffic specifically, and the talking points don’t address throttling.
A separate posting from the Consumerist discloses an insider’s tales that in the Comcast trouble-shooting system there is a list of third-party vendors. Sandvine was on the list. Going back to the leaked memo, though:
Are you working with Sandvine as these reports claim?
Respond:
We rarely disclose our vendors or our processes for operating our network both for competitive reasons and to protect against network abuse.Please do not deviate from the responses above. If you have any questions about this issue, please reach out to Brian Becker, Gene Bridges or [Michael S. Groman].
Clearly, the customer service representatives are given plausible deniability, as the memo doesn’t talk about what is going on, just what to say, and what they are being told to say seems to fly in the face of what is actually going on.
I’ve spoken to some folks I’ve had the chance to meet who happen to work in Comcast CSR, and they say that these mentioned folks do indeed work in Comcast, and they they do hold the positions that the memo claims they have. This lend a certain authenticity to the memo (one of the folks I emailed pointed me to Brian Becker’s LinkedIn profile).
Certainly isn’t looking good for Comcast at this point..
R|mail.