Comcast, the second-largest broadband provider in the U.S., has filed a court appeal of a U.S. Federal Communications Commission ruling last month saying the company couldn’t delay some peer-to-peer traffic on its network.
Comcast on Thursday asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to review the FCC decision, saying the commission had no hard rules against the company’s network management practices. The FCC’s net neutrality principles, adopted in 2005, set out general guidelines, but no specific prohibitions, Comcast said.
Last week, Comcast announced it would put a 250GB-per-month bandwidth cap on residential customers. Customers may get a warning if they go over the monthly cap, and after their first warning, Comcast will suspend their service for a year if they go over the cap a second time.
A spokesman for Public Knowledge, among the three organizations that asked the FCC to investigate the Comcast BitTorrent traffic throttling, said he was not surprised by the appeal. “We expected that they’d appeal,” said Art Brodsky.
Comcast’s traffic management was unveiled by press reports in late 2007. The company didn’t tell its subscribers that it was slowing BitTorrent and other P-to-P traffic until the press reports. Comcast later said it was slowing P-to-P traffic only during times of network congestion, but FCC Chairman Kevin Martin and some independent tests suggested Comcast was slowing that traffic around the clock.