FCC Seeks Clarification of Comcast VoIP Practices

January 23, 2009

By Mike Peters

In a letter to Comcast, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has requested clarification as to why there appears to be a discrepancy between Comcast's September 19 filing - which details the company's broadband network management practices and its planned deployment of protocol-agnostic network management practices - and its actual or advertised practices.

Comcast Protocol-Agnostic Network Management Practices

In the filing Comcast states that if consumers use 70 percent of their provisioned bandwidth for 15 minutes or more when their neighborhood cable modem termination system (CMTS) node has been near capacity for a period of 15 minutes or more, the consumers will lose priority when routing packets through congested portions of the network. If consumers then place a Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) call along a route experiencing congestion, they may find that their "VoIP call sounds choppy." There was no distinction made in the filing between Comcast's offering and those of its VoIP competitors.

The FCC pointed out that Comcast's website, however, suggests that there is a distinction between Comcast and its competitors. The Comcast website states that Comcast Digital Voice is a separate facilities-based IP phone service that is not affected by the company's new network management technique, but that customers of other VoIP providers - that rely on delivering calls over the Internet - may experience degradation of their call quality at times of network congestion.

FCC Questions Comcast's Stated Definition of its Digital VoIP Service

The FCC questions Comcast concerning the terms in which it describes its voice service. On the company's website, Comcast describes its Digital Voice service as a facilities-based IP phone service rather than an Internet voice service (used by its VoIP competitors), and not subject to degradation due to Internet congestion. The FCC makes the point that if Comcast Digital Voice service is a facilities-based phone service, it should be required to pay the fees associated with this type of service; but if Comcast Digital Voice service is an Internet voice service, then it should not be able to deliver better quality than other VoIP voice services at times of heavy congestion.

Comcast must respond to the FCC letter by January 30.