Monday, 14 July 2008

Comcast Inks Deal with Vonage

Cable operator Comcast and Internet telephony provider Vonage have announced to work together on network management of their respective products and services.

Comcast and Vonage will work to create a collaborative agreement to address the reasonable network management of Internet services, the companies said in a joint statement.

"This collaboration with Vonage, and our outreach to many key participants in the Internet community, demonstrate that we are committed to provide network management solutions that benefit consumers and competition," said Tony Werner, Comcast CTO.

No other details of the deal were provided, but this marks the third such agreement Comcast has brokered with Internet-based service providers in recent months. In March, Comcast reached a deal with BitTorrent whereby Comcast pledged to develop a protocol-agnostic network management practice by year's end. A month later, Comcast also partnered with Pando Networks to develop a P2P Bill of Rights.

Comcast, the second largest U.S. Internet service provider, has been accused of blocking some Web traffic via services such as file-sharing applications like the popular BitTorrent used by consumers to share large media files.

Comcast is currently facing a legal challenge over its initial decision to throttle BitTorrent traffic, and some speculate that these partnerships are designed to show good faith before the legal cases are decided.