Comcast Scrutinized By FCC For Phone Service

The FCC (Federal Communications Commission) is investigating Comcast for allegedly giving its own digital phone service preference in terms of bandwidth over rival digital phone services like Vonage or Lingo. According to complaints, Comcast is limiting the bandwidth it allows digital phone services to use across its networks but is not limiting its own service in the same way.

This isn’t the first time Comcast has been investigate by the FCC for bandwidth limiting. Comcast quietly started limiting P2P file-sharing across its networks and when caught, refused to change its practices until forced to by the FCC.

Comcast is still slowing traffic for heavy users but it now does it regardless of the type of data that is moving. While this is certainly a fairer way of limiting bandwidth usage, many question the need to do it at all, given the steady increase in available bandwidth that Comcast and others are providing.

The FCC is being very clever in handling this infraction by Comcast and is saying that if Comcast isn’t freely transmitting telecommunications over its network then it should be regulated as a telecommunications company and pay the associated taxes and license fees.