The slow-down was, at first, an intentional and much-welcomed sabbatical from the entrepreneurial life, planned to coincide with a big change in lifestyle. Although I launched my current advisory services practice in 2005, in truth I’ve been a full-fledged entrepreneurial analyst since 1999, when I launched my first publication in the full heat of the dotcom and telecom boom. And it’s been a wild and wonderful ride ever since.

Along the way, I have made great new friends across the tech, media, communications, publishing, blogging, policy, legal and political worlds while staying connected with the old friends who span my long career devoted to media and communications research.

Something about that sabbatical, however, made me take stock of my working life and once the break ended, I felt that something was missing. It wasn’t enough anymore -- and at the same time it was too much -- to create projects, pitch clients, develop conferences and blog away every day as a solo practitioner (although I was never really alone. I enjoyed generous support from partners, colleagues, former employers, clients, contractors, friends and so many others).

In short, I needed to become part of a team again. And I’ve found an excellent team to join at the Utilities Telecom Council (UTC), a trade association that represents companies, specifically gas, electric and water utilities, that own, manage, or provide critical telecommunications systems in support of their core businesses.

Most people who work in the mass media world (which includes the Internet industries) aren’t really aware that utilities design, build and maintain their own vast communications networks instead of relying on the public telecommunications infrastructure. In some respects, these communications facilities are even more vital to our economic well-being and national security than are the more familiar telecommunications networks that deliver consumer and enterprise voice, data and video services.

Although UTC advocates on behalf of its members in Washington, just as every other trade association does, it also runs a research program dedicated to helping member companies run their networks and stay abreast of new and important developments. That’s where I come in – as of December 15, I’ll be running the UTC’s research initiatives.

Unfortunately I will no longer be an independent analyst. As a consequence, I will no longer be posting anything here at IP Democracy, which has frequently been an outlet for some of my freewheeling and often pointed opinions. In other words, this is my last post at IP Democracy.

But, it’s not the last you’ll hear from me, rest assured. In the meantime, all of my contact information will change as of December 15. My new email address will be cynthia.brumfield AT utc.org. and my phone and snail mail info are as follows:

Utilities Telecom Council
5th Floor
1901 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20006
Phone: 202.872.0030
Direct Dial: 202-833-6828

I'll keep the old email addresses and web sites and phone numbers up and running for a number of months. But the new email address and phone number seem to be the fastest way to reach me and I'll still be on Twitter as MsBrumfield.

Thanks to all the regular readers and linkers. It’s been a blast.

"You never know where innovation will come from," he said, as he stressed the need to open up decision-making to the wisdom of the crowd. "A community makes a better decision than an individual," Schmidt said, adding that "open systems have this very clear promise of constant innovation and choice."

Schmidt repeatedly stressed that the government needs to take a bigger role in fostering innovation, particularly through increased spending on R & D. Decrying the decline in federal budget R & D expenditures during the Bush administration ("as if we don't care"), Schmidt said that "most of the interesting innovation...has taken place in universities" operating under federal grants. Obama's proposal to double R & D is therefore "long overdue," he said.

Extending visas for visiting scientists is another policy goal that should boost America's innovation, Schmidt said. "I've not had someone explain to me in a rational way why we don't want the best and brightest coming to this country. It's bizarre, it's disgusting."

Energy policy was the unexpected dominant theme of Schmidt's talk. "We're at one of those points where we have to get this right," he said. He ran through a variety of proposals, from mounting new wind and solar energy initiatives to giving utilities matching funds for clean energy projects they've already mounted to holding constant the per capita consumption of energy for twenty years. Not only do these programs promise to solve our energy problems, but they're also jobs programs that could ameliorate our unemployment issues.

In terms of Internet and communications technology, Schmidt highlighted lack of competition in broadband service as a key problem the government should solve. "We have no competition in these markets. We have one or two [providers in a given area] when we should have four or five."

He applauded the FCC's recent decision to open up the unused TV broadcast spectrum known as white spaces for new communications development, an outcome largely driven by Google itself, but suggested that the government could do even more. We can make "even more effective use of the spectrum" in spurring broadband competition.

Google continues to play a key role in helping the upcoming Obama administration. President-elect Obama's decision to make his weekly addresses available in video via Google-owned YouTube was revolutionary. But, Schmidt said, the real impact of this development is that people are now debating what Obama said in the comments section of YouTube, enhancing even further the notion of engagement in the political process.

During Q and A, Schmidt was confronted by a representative of Consumer Watchdog, who chastised the CEO for failing to answer a letter that the group had sent seeking privacy protections from the online giant and for failing to set up a meeting to discuss the group's concern ("this is not the way to schedule a meeting with me," Schmidt said, stirring laughter in the audience.) Consumer Watchdog has apparently proposed a number of technical safeguards to guarantee user privacy, some of which Google won't adopt because it "makes things slower" Schmidt said.

Time Warner's intense efforts to turn around the ailing online unit over the past five years have produced almost no improvement in AOL. During the quarter, AOL lost 740K dial-up subscribers (leaving it with a still-remarkable 7.5 million paying customers) and, worse, experienced an ad revenue drop of 6% year-over-year to $507 million, despite lots of optimistic talk that early this year that AOL was being repositioned to take advantage of what was then an online ad boom.

Pretty much everything else was down at AOL too -- total revenue (down 17% year-over-year), total page views (down 3%), cash flow (down 7%) and operating income (down 9%).

On the other hand, Time Warner Cable posted a relatively strong performance during the quarter. Although the cable company lost 30,000 basic video customers during the quarter, bringing basic penetration solidly below the 50% mark, it maintained relatively healthy growth in high-speed subscribers and slowing but respectable growth in its digital voice service.

As a consequence of growth in high-speed, digital voice and digital video (net gains of 124,000 during the quarter, roughly on par with Q3 07 levels), Time Warner Cable's revenue rose 8.5% year-over-year to $4.34 billion while cash flow advanced by 8.8% to $1.55 billion. Free cash flow soared 143% year-over-year to $454 million.

That may be true on the TV network side of the business (where revenues rose 7% year-over-year) and possibly in the motion picture segment (where revenues slid due to a weaker 2008 slate), but not in publishing (where revenues dropped 7%). Overall, Time Warner revenues were basically flat at around $11.7 billion while company-wide net income slipped dipped by 2% to $1.07 billion.

Total revenue grew 7% year-over-year, but only .4% sequentially, reaching $8.13 billion. Cash flow advanced 6.6% year-over-year, but dropped 3.3% sequentially, to reach $3.25 billion. Comcast continued to pump up its free cash flow (cash flow less capex), which rose 77% year-over-year, but dropped 20% sequentially, to $928 million.

Despite the excess cash, Comcast may not complete its previously announced stock buyback program by the end of the year, as anticipated, CFO Michael Angelakis said during the company's earnings call. With the capital markets in crisis, Comcast will play it safe in terms of taking on more debt.

Free cash flow growth was aided in part by lower capex spending on consumer premises equipment, expenditures which dropped due to fewer installations of service for new subscribers and fewer installations of new services for existing customers. During the quarter Comcast lost 147,000 net basic customers, a loss that tops any other quarterly basic subscriber slippage since at least Q1 06. By quarter's end, Comcast counted 24.4 million basic subscribers, which represented a penetration rate of 48.5%, the lowest yet for the operator.

During the earnings call, Comcast CEO Brian Roberts acknowledged the bad economy as a possible challenge to further growth but said that Comcast is well-positioned to ride it out. These are "obviously unique and challenging economic times in the U.S.," he said. The picture won't brighten anytime soon, he suggested. "A lot of our planning is that the fourth quarter is a worse period."

COO Steve Burke, however, said that the bad economy can be both good and bad for Comcast's subscriber growth. Even as fewer customers are signing up for service, primarily due to slow housing starts, churn is down because the population is less mobile.

Aside from losses associated with Hurricane Gustav, the real culprit behind the subscriber loss is competition from the phone companies, particularly AT&T, which has stepped up deployment of its U-Verse multichannel video service. "Clearly we’ve seen a shift of late where AT&T has become a more aggressive competitor than they were," Burke said.

In terms of Comcast's efforts to swipe customers from the telcos, the company added 433,000 net new digital voice customers during the quarter, a run-rate that is down 29% year-over-year and 13% sequentially.

On a seasonal basis, high-speed data growth cooled too, although growth in this service category remained relatively strong. During the quarter, Comcast added a net 382,000 broadband customers, up 37.4% over Q2 08 levels but down 19.4% from the gains posted in the year-ago quarter.

Digital service subscriptions, which should already be gaining lift as consumers prepare for the coming digital TV transition, showed the same pattern. Comcast added 471,000 net new digital customers during the quarter, up by 47.2% sequentially but down by 6.4% year-over-year. During the earnings call, Burke said that consumers are distracted and not focusing on the digital transition.

(Download detailed data on Comcast's current and historical financial and operating performance here.)

But those fears eased up a little today. Verizon issued its Q3 08 earnings report this morning showing a bounce-back in both FiOS broadband and video customer gains and company execs say that FiOS is already cash-flow positive. During Q3 08, Verizon added 225,000 net new FiOS high-speed subscribers, down only slightly from the comparable 233,000 net gains during the year-ago quarter and up by 20% over the gains posted during Q2 08.

But even as FiOS broadband gains steam, Verizon's DSL service is slipping. During the quarter, Verizon lost 96,000 DSL customers, a downturn that follows the company's loss of 133,000 DSL customers during Q2 08. CEO Ivan Seidenberg acknowledged that DSL, along with traditional switched access lines, are shrinking businesses for Verizon. "We’re not surprised about the access line loss. We’ve been saying for years that DSL will become less potent" he said, adding that Verizon does have momentum in mobile and FiOS.

Verizon made even greater strides with its FiOS TV service, which posted 233,000 net adds, a run-rate up by 15% year-over-year and almost 33% sequentially, thanks to ramped-up roll-out of the multichannel video option. During the quarter, Verizon made the service available to 1.2 million new homes, thanks to finally getting the green light to sell its cable-like wares in New York City earlier this year.

According to COO Denny Strigl, FiOS TV has already achieved 10% penetration in Queens. "Despite the rhetoric of cable companies and their advocates, FiOS is a formidable competitor," he said during the company's earnings call.

The growth in Verizon's mobile business is all the more impressive given that the carrier was competing against AT&T's iPhone during a quarter when AT&T launched a 3G version of the desirable device. As a consequence, wireless revenues jumped 12% year-over-year to $10.9 billion, while data revenue soared 40% to $2.8 billion.

The success in mobile, and to a far lesser degree FiOS, outweighed the chronic loss of local access lines -- during the quarter landline losses accelerated at Verizon, with access lines dropping by 1.01 million compared to a loss of 930,000 during Q3 07 and a loss of 920,000 during Q2 08.

Because of mobile (and FiOS), Verizon's net income jumped 31.3% year-over-year to reach $1.67 billion, while operating revenue rose 5.4% to $24.75 billion.

(Download detailed data on Verizon's historical and current financial and operational performance here.)

To illustrate the value of the Extreme 50 tier, Comcast says that a customer can download a 6 GB high-def movie in sixteen minutes, a 2 GB standard-def movie in five minutes and a standard-def TV show in only seconds. Comcast says it plans to continue to roll out wideband across its footprint with a goal of reaching more than 10 major markets and passing nearly 10 million homes and businesses in the next several months.

Comcast is also implementing speed boosts for all existing broadband subscribers. "Performance" tier customers will see their speeds double to 12 Mbps/downstream and 2 Mbps/upstream, while "Performance Plus" customers will see download speeds double to 16 Mbps. (Some Broadband Reports' users in New England say they are already enjoying these speed boosts.)

With this launch of the long-awaited wideband services, Comcast is stepping up to the competitive threat that Verizon, with its fast FiOS service, has posed over the past two years.

To find out when Comcast's wideband will be available in your market, check out this easy (finally) pre-qualification tool.

AT&T ended the quarter with 74.87 million wireless customers, up 14% year-over-year and 3% sequentially, with wireless revenues jumping to $12.6 billion, up 15% year-over-year and 5% sequentially. Wireless data revenues, driven by not only the iPhone but other advanced handsets, soared 50% year-over-year to $2.73 billion.

During the company's earnings call, Ralph de la Vega, CEO of AT&T's newly created Mobility and Consumer Markets division, said that the 3G iPhone promises to be even a bigger hit for AT&T. During the 83 days that the 3G model has been for sale, AT&T has sold 2.4 million units. It took nine months for the original iPhone to reach this level of sales.

Moreover, AT&T retail store traffic is up thanks to the new device. So far in October, same store traffic is up 12% while overall store traffic is up 25%, de la Vega said.

Even as AT&T's overall revenues rose to $31.34 billion, up 4% year-over-year and 2% sequentially, net income dropped 14% year-over-year (but rose 5% sequentially) to $3.23 billion due to the costs of launching the 3G product. During the earnings call, CEO Rick Lindner appealed for patience in the face of this dilution.

"Some may be concerned with the dilution. This investment funded the acquisition of nearly one million high-end customers new to AT&T," he said. "We’re confident that this investment will provide value in the future."

AT&T continued to lose traction in its wireline business, with renewed, although tepid, growth in broadband and promising gains in its U-Verse video business offsetting continued loss in landline voice subscribers and softness in the enterprise business. During the quarter AT&T added 148,000 net new broadband customers, up from the paltry 46,000 net new broadband subscribers added during the previous quarter.

But U-Verse, AT&T's terrestrial-based multichannel video delivery service, experience a true surge in growth as the telco seemingly pulled back on marketing its DBS partnerships. During the quarter, AT&T added 230,000 net new U-Verse customers, a run-rate that doubles any previous quarter's gains. By the end of the quarter, AT&T served 781,000 U-Verse customers.

During the earnings call, Lindner said that AT&T is on track to end the year with more than one million video customers. Despite the strong growth in U-Verse, AT&T's video customer count rose by only 179,000 during the quarter as the number of the telco's DBS-related video customers dropped by 53,000.

As for how the company is faring in the face of the economic downturn, Lindner said "While no business is immune to the broader environment, our business is more immune than most" and noted that the overall trends are relatively stable. He said the company is committed to improving efficiency and operations through cost-cutting and other measures to maintain profitability going forward. "While the macro environment is not ideal, there is still opportunity to improve operations," he said.

(Download a spreadsheet featuring detailed historical and current data on all of AT&T's businesses here.)

Other rumored candidates for the job include high-tech visionairies and leaders such as Vint Cerf, Steve Ballmer, Jeff Bezos and Princeton's Ed Felten. Whoever gets the job, Computerworld has this excellent run-down of recommendations to the next president from tech luminaries (one of whom is Cerf), who advise the President to step-up science and tech education, spend more on R&D, reorient DARPA away from short-term war-related goals and toward long-term research and generally make science and innovation a new priority.

Skype's status as the skunk in eBay's barn is not wholly deserved. During the quarter, the VoIP pioneer added 32.8 million net new registered users, up from the 26 million net adds posted during Q3 07. By quarter's end, Skype had a global user base of 371 million, compared to 246 million at the end of Q3 07.

The problem is that eBay hasn't been able to figure out a way to monetize this massive telephone user base. Revenues stem almost solely from Skype Out minutes (calls made to landlines or mobile phones as opposed to calls made PC-to-PC), which jumped to 2.2 billion during the quarter, up from 1.8 billion during the preceding quarter.

(Download our historical and current financial and operational data for Skype here. It's free, but you have to regsiter.)

Larry Lessig, one of the original copyleft advocates, says "Bravo to the campaign." Public Knowledge took the opportunity to point out the irony of McCain-Palin invoking the DMCA on the same day that President Bush signed the Pro-IP Act, which gives copyright holders (read Hollywood and the record companies) even more power to control the use of their content on the Internet. Maybe now "Congress will consider taking a look at the beneficial effects fair use has on society, including on political speech," Public Knowledge President Gigi Sohn said in a statement.

No word yet from YouTube, although it's safe to assume that the company doesn't want the responsibility (or potential liability) of deciding what constitutes fair use. And no word from the Obama-Biden campaign either -- Robert Bauer, General Counsel of Obama for America, was copied on the letter in the hopes that the Democratic ticket would join in the effort.

The letter doesn't specify which commericals the campaign is referencing although Saul Hansell cites the abhorrent "Lipstick on a Pig" commercial, which includes a few-second clip from the CBS Evening News with Katie Couric. Last month, CBS asked YouTube to take down this commercial saying that it doesn't want to appear to be endorsing any candidate. As excreble as that commercial is, the McCain campaign is right - the short clip of Katie Couric would undoubtedly meet any judge's definition of fair use.

Watch for yourself. Another irony surrounding this complaint is that even though the commercial is not seemingly available on YouTube anymore, it's still available all over the net. I found it at DailyMotion after a simple Google search.

One thing is for sure: YouTube seems to be the only place that counts for the McCain-Palin campaign...and all other campaigns. Although YouTube was crucial to politics before (remember the Macaca video that sunk George Allen) it has become with this election season the undisputed dominant video hub for anybody interested in politics.

Um, not so much anymore. As the chart below shows, the new competitive telecom environment has fostered companies that can rise and fall with investor sentiment. Every single major publicly traded U.S. fixed or mobile carrier has seen its stock price fall by over 33% over the past year, with three (Sprint, Qwest and Fairpoint) plummeting by over two-thirds.

Perhaps equally important to phone companies (and even more so cable companies) is the ability to gain access to the credit markets and we won't know if phone companies are getting hammered in this regard until the next round of earnings calls, due to start next week. With shrinking market caps and possible credit market issues, telcos are going to have a hard time laying out dough to build new networks or launch capital-intensive services unless the picture brightens soon.

The upside for phone companies: in such a weakened financial state, and with competition plus the recession looming over everything, Washington is bound to stay friendly, particularly if the election ushers Obama into the White House. The Democratic candidate has made pushing broadband into underserved markets a priority and the telcos (and possibly cable operators) can rightly say that if they ever had the cash to do something like that, they certainly don't now.

The paper itself is a scholarly analysis (complete with formulae and schematics) of how the new bandwidth caps and metered usage schemes being implemented by broadband carriers, most particularly Comcast and Time Warner Cable, are bad for Internet innovation and efficiency because the caps and pricing plans target one group of users: power users, or what broadband providers call "bandwidth hogs." Power users are useful to the functioning of the Internet because they serve as content and application hubs for all other Internet users, the paper argues.

Comcast, Time Warner and other broadband providers are measuring usage simply on the basis of bytes used per month, a pricing strategy that will either inhibit innovation or force power users to seek out carriers that don't have usage-based policies. Instead of fostering these kinds of distortions, broadband providers should instead capture for themselves the "hub" function that power users serve today by, for example, caching "hot" content and applications in their own data centers, headends or central offices.

Kudos to Om and Muayyad for rising above the quotidian kind of blogging that has surrounded the P2P/bandwidth cap/metered usage issues. Too often the debate is framed by empty rhetoric, "horror stories," uninformed opinion and news scoops rather than dispassionate analysis that seeks to identify the best solution to the problem.

Which is not to say that I think that Om and Muayyad have offered a useful alternative to the caps and metered pricing plans that we all will soon confront. Part of the problem is that the solution offered, namely a pricing strategy that takes into account "applications, supply/value chain, consumer behaviors and types of assets to deploy" is far too complex for your average broadband provider -- or government regulator. It's far easier to base pricing on something that is already known and can be easily measured.

Another problem with this solution, as Om and Muayyad acknowledge: It requires carriers to spend money, potentially a lot of money, on servers, caching equipment, etc., which is simply not something any broadband provider can justify to Wall Street, particularly these days.

Moreover, if I understand the theory, broadband providers are being asked to accept a more active role in delivering third-party video, voice and other applications to co-opt the hub functionality of power users. Believe me, most broadband providers would love to do this. One tiny problem, however, is that copyright owners (in the case of, say, Hollywood films) or application providers (in the case of, say, Skype) would want their share of any revenues generated by the broadband providers that flow from the "increased value" offering.

This is the "negotiating better partnerships" aspect of the solution, I suppose. But that's the heart of the business for every cable operator and phone company. It's the sum total of what they do. And it ain't easy.

So, Om and Muayyad are onto something good, which is to identify the network distortions generated by bandwidth caps and metered pricing. The solution offered, however, isn't all that practical given that it costs money and entails a whole lot of difficult industry-changing negotiations.

Still, I'd much rather read this kind of challenging analysis that advances the ball any day of the week. Thanks Om.

The FCC's ongoing broadband data collection effort is widely considered to be inadequate, plagued by carrier confidentiality protections which limit the granularity and utility of the data, among other problems. States are doing what they can to fill the gap but, as California State PUC Commissioner (and former FCC Commissioner) Rachelle Chong noted, data collection is a "huge challenge for state regulators [because] we don't regulate broadband." In order to get broadband providers to play ball, "we schmooze them," she said.

The fundamental problem, of course, is that broadband providers "don't want to give it up," according to Art Brodsky, Communications Director, Public Knowledge. It's not enough that broadband providers report where broadband is available and at which price, Debbie Goldman from the Communications Workers of America said. Broadband speed data is equally critical to understanding national competitiveness.

On this measure, the U.S. seems to lag the rest of the world. "I almost feel like I'm coming from a third world country in terms of communications speeds," she said.

It's hard to develop innovative public policy without data, University of Texas Professor Ken Flamm said. "We really don't have a lot of scientific data available on broadband right now," he said.

A lot of diverse third-party efforts are underway that seek to collect the missing data. Virginia Tech has one such effort, the e-Corridors Program, aimed at documenting broadband service in Virginia. e-Corridors is reverse engineering the process by asking users to report data on their service options and it's already yielding surprising results. "By mining these utilities, we find that Blacksburg, VA doesn't have three providers [as existing data suggest]; it has ten," Virginia Tech's Jean Plymate said.

One real question is which governmental entities, the states or the federal government, should be responsible for collecting basic broadband data. "The idea that we would let the states figure this out seems mildly insane to me," Jeffrey Campbell, Director of Technology and Communications Policy at Cisco, said.

But, "the states must bear this responsibility," Jane Smith Patterson, head of a North Carolina initiative called e-NC Authority, said. "States have an imperative that does not exist at the federal level and that's economic development," MIT Economist William Lehrer said.

Ireland has taken a web-based approach to monitoring and fostering broadband growth through a portal called broadband.gov, explained Eamonn Confrey, First Secretary, Information and Communications Policy, Embassy of Ireland. Broadband providers post their available services through this site -- and consumers then locate the various options available.

Holding up Google's just-unveiled Wi-Fi-enabled GPhone, Page said that the boom in unlicensed Wi-Fi devices is nothing compared to what could happen if the FCC allows companies to use the unlicensed white space spectrum as a basis for new devices that could radically spur innovation. Despite the revolution ushered in by Wi-Fi, that portion of the spectrum is severely limited. "It doesn't go through walls...there's no Wi-Fi signal in this room [hearing room in Dirksen Building] that works," he said, noting that portions of his own home lacks wireless access because "I haven't gone to the hassle of putting in multiple hubs."

"All the FCC has to do is say 'you can produce this device if it's shown that it doesn't cause interference,'" Page said. But political pressure from broadcasters has turned policy-making in a "perverse" direction by reframing the debate so that "you shouldn't even try" because the devices might cause interference. "This notion that we're hearing from the broadcasters that it will cause interference...is garbage, it's not true."

Making an unexpected visit to the event was Rep. Jay Inslee (D-WA), who represents Redmond, home to Microsoft. Noting that both Microsoft and Google, otherwise notorious policy and marketplace foes, are aligned on white spaces, Inslee joked that "it's nice to see peace across the Valley."

Like Page, Inslee is pushing the FCC to allow development of devices in the white spaces. "It's clear that white hats are on the side of white spaces," he said. "If you are for innovation, you are for white spaces."

Not only will use of the white spaces speed communications innovation, it can also help solve the country's energy problems, Inslee said. "Virtually every machine we use that uses energy will be reporting back to a grid-based spectrum," allowing more intelligent and efficient use of energy resources, Inslee said.

Other industry speakers at the event stressed the innovation benefits that white space use could yield. Gary Grube, Senior Fellow at Motorola, said that "this piece of the spectrum is golden for the long-range." Marc Berejka, Senior Director for Technology Policy & Strategy at Microsoft, said the entrenched cellular industry, which should theoretically embrace use of white spaces, has opposed it because it is warehousing spectrum in rural America, making it hard for rural wireless providers to establish communications backhauls.

Dell Technology Policy Director Neeraj Srivastava said that it's hard to anticipate just what kind of revolutionary services could crop up if white spaces were exploited. "In 1985, there was not an engineer on the planet that would say Wi-Fi would come out of" unregulated use of the 2.4 Ghz spectrum, and now one billion devices are dependent on this relatively inferior slice of the airwaves.

Comcast submitted three documents to the FCC, one of which (PDF) delves into technological detail on how Comcast interferes with P2P traffic today and one of which (PDF) spells out how its "protocol agnostic" system will work. Although network engineers will no doubt find both of these documents fascinating, the most striking difference between the two network management practices is that the first, the current system which affects only P2P traffic, focuses solely on upstream bandwidth management, while the new protocol-agnostic method focuses on both upstream and downstream management.

The implications of this shift in focus could be significant for consumers, although it's too soon to tell. As Comcast explains to the FCC, its current P2P-oriented management system targets upstream traffic-only, presumably because the "asymmetric" nature of cable's Internet architecture makes the upstream, which has less capacity, more vulnerable to congestion.

But the new protocol agnostic system, which is contingent on bandwidth used regardless of application, throws users into what Comcast is calling an "extended high consumption state" if they exceed 70% consumption thresholds on either the upstream or downstream, i.e., if they use more than 70% of their allocated bandwidth in a fifteen-minute interval.

The User Consumption Threshold is measured as a user’s consumption of a particular percentage of his or her total provisioned upstream or downstream bandwidth (the maximum speed that a particular modem can achieve based on the tier (personal, commercial, etc.) the customer has purchased, e.g., if a user buys a service with speeds of 8 Mbps downstream and 1 Mbps upstream, then his or her provisioned downstream speed is 8 Mbps and provisioned upstream speed is 1 Mbps). The User Consumption Duration is measured in minutes.

Moreover, Comcast says that the consumption threshold is set high enough to cover much of what consumers do today on the Internet. Comcast’s standard-level service provisions downstream bandwidth at 6 Mbps, while streaming video from Hulu uses less than 2.5 Mbps, a Vonage or Skype VoIP call uses less than 131 Kbps, and streaming music uses less than 128 Kbps, the company says.

Still, if two users in a household are simultaneously watching Hulu on two different computers, then they'd be pushing up against the threshold and potentially subject to delays. (Comcast stresses that the new system affects users only when traffic is truly congested. If the network isn't being taxed, then no one should experience delays.) And as consumers continue to ramp up their use of online video and other bandwidth-intensive applications, it's possible that an increasing number of Comcast users would become frequently classified as "extended high consumers" and experience delays.

Whether that happens or not, the new system is clearly aimed at dowstream bandwidth consumption in addition to upstream traffic congestion. It makes a lot of sense to factor downstream capacity into any network management system. Comcast even states that "consumers still download much more than they upload."

But until now, Comcast hasn't been "managing" traffic to limit any kind of downstream capacity focusing instead on P2P via the upstream. For better or worse, that's about to change.