This past Saturday we noticed our internet connection was acting up a bit. We could get to Google and search but no result links would load. I could get to the My Yahoo logon page but not to my work sites I really wanted to use (of course). I haven't been one to complain about Comcast's internet service; it has been good for me for over three years now.
However this story from Slashdot helped explain Saturdays debacle and some other random slow downs over the past few months. I can say that I don't use P2P or torrents (I'm not kidding, really!). Most of my larger downloads are Linux related and they used to come down really fast. Then they started to slow down and I just figured it was more network traffic from my neighbors. I think I'll rethink that stance. I hate moving to a new ISP (switching email addresses sucks, I know I should just use Gmail all the time) but maybe I'll give the other giant a try. So far I haven't heard anything bad about Verizon's FIOS I guess I'll found out first hand this spring or summer.
I'm not suprised at Comcast's attempt at "network shaping". IMO however I am suprised that they would try something in their production environment without more testing to see how it would effect regular internet traffic. Anymore that does involve sending a bit of data up and down since many folks can work from home. I could see if it was a small company with a one or two guy IT department rushing to deploy something mistakes could happen. But you would think that my Comcast bill alone should have paid for a pretty decent lab environment for them by now. I know I would get chewed out pretty good if an update of mine took down a main system for a day.