At Ars Techica, a sober look at Comcast’s explanation of its disruption of the peer-to-peer networking of some of its customers. The story is geeky but detached and fairly presented by writer Nate Anderson:

According to [Comcast’s] filing, network management only kicks in “when P2P unidirectional upload sessions (i.e., sessions where a computer is only uploading and not simultaneously uploading and downloading) reach a predetermined congestion threshold in a particular neighborhood.” The goal here is to stop unattended machines from using significant upload bandwidth, though Comcast says that the “delay” is removed once the “number of active uploading sessions drops below that threshold.”

The major problem seems to be Comcast’s method, which basically involves sending a fake error message that makes the computer in question reset its connection. This graf is ineresting, too:

Throwing more bandwidth at the problem won’t work, Comcast says, because P2P apps will (by design) soak up every available drop of it. In short, there’s no way to fix the problem short of imposing “reasonable network management” on P2P apps to make sure everyone can get along. While the argument has a certain obvious logic to it, one wonders how Comcast is in fact able to handle unlimited P2P downloads without any delay or filtering. Perhaps because it has thrown a lot more bandwidth at the problem?