Comcast and BitTorrent Inc. last week agreed to bury the hatchet and work together to try and make BitTorrent software run more smoothly on Comcast's network. The deal ends a contentious battle between the two companies that saw users and the FCC lambaste the company after it admitted delaying the transmission of data among BitTorrent users at peak times.
When legislators and some advocacy groups began to play hardball and suggest Comcast was intentionally blocking BitTorrent's P2P file sharing for its own gain, the issue earned some serious cred and the two foes began to play nice. Comcast has agreed to reconfigure its network management systems, creating a traffic management technique "more appropriate for today's emerging Internet trends." For its part, BitTorrent tacitly acknowledged Comcast's need to allocate bandwidth, with the understanding it no longer would be targeted by the company.
Comcast said it's deploying wideband Internet services using the DOCSIS 3.0 standard in about 20 percent of its households by the end of this year. It also plans to more than double the upstream capacity of its residential Internet service in several key markets by year end 2008. "We plan to take advantage of multi-carrier technology to further increase upstream capacity for all of our broadband customers in advance of the full DOCSIS 3.0 roll out," Comcast said.
For more:
- Read the Philadelphia Business Journal story
- And Comcast's release