Technology Slice Blog

Comcast And Netflix On Fees - Comcast Corp. has begun imposing a fee on Internet middleman Level 3 Communications Inc., one of the companies that Netflix Inc. has hired to deliver movies and TV shows to Web customers. Comcast, the largest U.S. cable TV company, has set up an Internet “toll booth,” charging Level 3 whenever customers request content, the Broomfield, Colorado-based company said in a statement yesterday. Level 3 plans to complain to U.S. regulators who may enact so-called net-neutrality rules next month. The Federal Communications Commission is seeking to bar phone and cable providers from interfering with legal traffic on their networks. The rules are backed by President Barack Obama and companies led by Google Inc., EBay Inc. and IAC/InterActiveCorp. Phone and cable companies say rules aren’t needed and may hurt investment. “This action by Comcast threatens the open Internet and is a clear abuse of the dominant control that Comcast exerts in broadband access,” Th...

Comcast Outage Hits Boston - Comcast's cable Internet service on the U.S. east coast was hit with problems late Sunday that left many users unable to access the Internet. The outage affected at least Boston, the company said, but comments on Twitter pointed to service being down in several other cities including Washington, D.C., and Baltimore. "Our engineers are working very aggressively to fix the problem," said Doreen Vigue, a Boston-based spokeswoman for Comcast. She said she didn't have any specific information about the cause of the fault or the cities affected beyond Boston. Twitter postings point to a DNS (domain name system) server problem. DNS is the system that converts human-friendly Internet address like "www.pcworld.com" into a numeric Internet address, which are vital to Internet communications. If the DNS servers go down there's no way for a user's PC to address data correctly and so communication stops. Several users said ...