PHILADELPHIA and SAN FRANCISCO, March 27 /PRNewswire/ -- Comcast
Corporation and BitTorrent, Inc. announced today that they will undertake a
collaborative effort with one another and with the broader Internet and ISP
community to more effectively address issues associated with rich media
content and network capacity management. While BitTorrent and Comcast are
talking directly, they are also in discussions with other parties to help
facilitate a broader dialogue and cooperation across industries.
The Comcast and BitTorrent discussions have already produced meaningful
results. On the one hand, Comcast announced that it will migrate by
year-end 2008 to a capacity management technique that is protocol agnostic.
"This means that we will have to rapidly reconfigure our network management
systems, but the outcome will be a traffic management technique that is
more appropriate for today's emerging Internet trends. We have been
discussing this migration and its effects with leaders in the Internet
community for the last several months, and we will refine, adjust, and
publish the technique based upon feedback and initial trial results," said
Tony Werner, Comcast Cable's Chief Technology Officer.
In turn, BitTorrent acknowledged the need of ISPs to manage their
networks, especially during times of peak congestion. "While we think there
were other management techniques that could have been deployed, we
understand why Comcast and other ISPs adopted the approach that they did
initially. Recognizing that the Web is richer and more bandwidth intensive
than it has been historically, we are pleased that Comcast understands
these changing traffic patterns and wants to collaborate with us to migrate
to techniques that the Internet community will find to be more
transparent," said Eric Klinker, BitTorrent's Chief Technology Officer.
"Earlier this year, Comcast announced its plans for the aggressive
deployment of wideband Internet services using the DOCSIS 3.0 standard,
which we project will be available in up to 20% of Comcast's households by
the end of this year," said John Schanz, Comcast Cable's Executive Vice
President of National Engineering and Technical Operations. "Additionally,
we plan to more than double the upstream capacity of our residential
Internet service in several key markets by year end 2008. We plan to take
advantage of multi- carrier technology to further increase upstream
capacity for all of our broadband customers in advance of the full DOCSIS
3.0 roll out."
BitTorrent and Comcast have also agreed to work with other ISPs, other
technology companies, and the Internet Engineering Task Force, to explore
and develop a new distribution architecture for the efficient delivery of
rich media content. "In the spirit of openness and fostering innovative
solutions, BitTorrent will take the first step in enhancing our client
applications to optimize them for a new broadband network architecture.
Furthermore, we will publish these optimizations in open forums and
standard bodies for all application developers to benefit from," said
Ashwin Navin, co-founder and president of BitTorrent, Inc.
"This new architecture would enable many new and emerging applications
and will be based upon an open, non-discriminatory framework that could
interface with or support multiple technologies. We believe that P2P
technology has matured as an enabler for legal content distribution, so we
need to have an architecture that can support it with techniques that work
over all networks," said Werner.
Both BitTorrent and Comcast expressed the view that these technical
issues can be worked out through private business discussions without the
need for government intervention.
"BitTorrent and Comcast can serve consumers best by working together
along with the broader ISP and Internet community to jointly develop more
efficient networks and applications. This should prove to be a productive
partnership that will provide consumers with a better Internet experience,"
said Doug Walker, CEO of BitTorrent.
"We appreciate the recent dialogue that we have had with BitTorrent and
the progress that we have made in addressing our respective concerns.
Working together, we can deliver a truly superior experience to all of our
customers," said Steve Burke, President of Comcast Cable.
About BitTorrent
BitTorrent is the global leader for delivering high-quality files over
the Internet. Millions of users worldwide are using BitTorrent's leading
peer- assisted content delivery platform to publish, discover and download
digital entertainment content quickly, easily and securely. Founded in
2004, BitTorrent is a privately held company backed by venture capital
firms, Accel and DCM (formerly known as Doll Capital Management). The
company is headquartered in San Francisco, California. For more
information, visit http://www.bittorrent.com.
BitTorrent is a trademark of BitTorrent, Inc.
About Comcast Corporation
Comcast Corporation (Nasdaq: CMCSA, CMCSK) (http://www.comcast.com) is
the nation's leading provider of entertainment, information and
communications products and services. With 24.1 million cable customers,
13.2 million high- speed Internet customers, and 4.6 million voice
customers, Comcast is principally involved in the development, management
and operation of broadband cable systems and in the delivery of programming
content.
Comcast's content networks and investments include E! Entertainment
Television, Style Network, The Golf Channel, VERSUS, G4, PBS KIDS Sprout,
TV One, ten Comcast SportsNet networks and Comcast Interactive Media, which
develops and operates Comcast's Internet business. Comcast also has a
majority ownership in Comcast-Spectacor, whose major holdings include the
Philadelphia Flyers NHL hockey team, the Philadelphia 76ers NBA basketball
team and two large multipurpose arenas in Philadelphia.
SOURCE Comcast Corporation
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Related links:
http://www.comcast.com
http://www.bittorrent.com
CONTACT:
D'Arcy Rudnay, +1-215-286-8582, or Charlie
Douglas, +1-215-286-3353, charlie_douglas@comcast.com, both of
Comcast; or Lily Lin of BitTorrent, +1-415-568-9007,
lily@bittorrent.com
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