An Inconvenient Truth

In Monday’s FCC hearing [video link] on Comcast’s network management practices, Vuze, a video sharing Website that uses P2P technologies to enable near zero distribution costs, apparently argued that BitTorrent does not hog bandwidth. Real World IT’s George Ou responded with a wonderfully cogent and fact-based response that demonstrated BitTorrent was a gigantic upstream bandwidth hog.

As more and more upstream heavy applications (e.g., VoIP, online gaming, etc.) are adopted by the market and push the limits of asymmetric broadband networks, carriers are going to need to devise better network management strategies than simply throttling specific applications if they are going to avoid regulation, PR nightmares, customer dissatisfaction and lost revenue. Might I suggest starting with better network planning?