Lifetime has “Sherrie” at 7 p.m. and Rita Rocks at 7:30. Logo has “The Decorating Adventures of Ambrose Price” at 10 p.m., and BET has “The Mo’Nique” show at 11.

The two-hour season premiere of Ugly Betty will be pushed back a week from October 9 to October 16 on ABC. Then it will settle into every Friday at 9 p.m.

The Versus network opened its fifth season of NHL game coverage with about 830,000 total viewers total watching the Bruins vs. Capitals and Avalanche vs. Sharks. Versus is the only cable channel that airs NHL matches.

The first two-hours of the three-hour/two-week premiere of Stargate Universe did well for itself, drawing 2.35 million total viewers, beating Dollhouse on Fox, though some will argue that these numbers represent live views only and not DVR views. This argument holds that Sci-Fi nerds have nothing better to do on a Friday night than watch Stargate, while Dollhouse’s stalwart fanbase is out clubbing on going on dates.

NBC will cut back its drama “Day One” from 13 episodes to a meager four-part miniseries after budget issues.

Comcast is continually trying to take over the digital world. The company is in talks to buy NBC Universal and it’s also working with Hulu to try and get that company to charge for its online video service.

Network neutrality is a contentious subject. In a way, everyone has an understanding that ISPs will provide an uninhibited flow from content providers to the end users without purposely affecting traffic. Companies that provide internet connections, like Comcast and Verizon, often discuss their displeasure in the fact that content providers, like Google and Amazon, make their profits using the infrastructure that the ISPs have set up, without having to pay for any of it.

In theory, ISPs could choose which traffic is allowed to travel over their pipes, blocking entire domains if they wanted to. While this has never officially happened in the US, there exist no rules to actually bar ISPs from doing so. While blocking domains is a rather draconian measure that would likely never occur, Comcast has been known to throttle BitTorrent traffic, giving other data priority over the file-sharing platform.

Comcast got a scolding from the FCC, but BitTorent wasn’t a company out to make a living, so there weren’t really any damages — other than the dishonesty over its actions to Comcast’s customers. Nevertheless, it’s easy to see how an ISP could throttle one company’s traffic over another’s, resulting in damages to a business.

The FCC panel is made up of Chairman Genachowski, two democrats, and two republicans. The panel previously voted 3-2 to favor net neutrality rules, so this could be an indication of how they will vote in the future to formally codify these rules.

Fancast has always provided VOD, over 3,000 film and TV titles are currently available, with pricing starting from $3.99 for 24-hour film rentals, $9.99 for film purchases, and $1.99 for TV shows.The difference being, with it’s recent push in both the hardware and now content, it’s stands a chance against the likes of Hulu.com and Veoh.com, among other video sites, when it begins streaming it for free of charge. Available only to those whom already have an cable subscription with them.

While no specifics were mentioned (When will I be able to watch any show from any cable network at any time?), and the issue of recent bandwidth usage caps wasn’t addressed, the most we can be sure of is Comcast’s cautious steps into the wild west of the digital realm. With a complex system of how to pay for all the content it’s going to provide, subscribers to Comcast should look forward to milking this deal before it will surely become a paid-for-service entirely. Who needs Blockbuster or Netflix when you got this?

The “customer-defined” usage limit is 250GB a month. Comcast says it’s “an extremely large amount of data, much more than a typical residential customer uses on a monthly basis.”

They include in their Terms of Service that this roughly constitutes: 
 
* Send more than 50 million plain text emails (at 5 KB/email); 
* Download 62,500 songs (at 4 MB/song); or 
* Download 125 standard definition movies (at 2 GB/movie). 
 
Comcast also released some of their current customer usage data, which puts the average residential Internet traffic downloads at 2-3 GB a month.

You should notice some key word usage in the statement, that will be coming as a bill stuffer, as harmless and not worthy of another glance. “Managing the network is essential as Comcast works to promote the use and enjoyment of the Internet by all of its customers. The company uses reasonable network management practices that are consistent with industry standards. Comcast tries to use tools and technologies that are minimally intrusive and, in its independent judgment guided by industry experience, among the best in class.”

The italics are mine. With such mitigating word usage, Comcast is trying to drive the point to it’s docile customers that it’s doing this for your good, and the good of the network. 
 
To all the Comcast customers who just check their email, you won’t be reading this unless it’s forwarded, and you won’t care about the limit.

To the people who read news and emails and visit Myspace or Facebook, you might think about it for a second, but disregard it.

For the users who email, social network, game online and download, a notice about this usage cap will hold more weight.

Finally, there’s the Comcast customers whom utilize the Internet more efficiently and can do all of the activities above while running a P2P agent in the background. These users know exactly what it means to them.

So why should anyone who doesn’t live on the Internet care? The speed of technological advancement dictates that pretty soon, this “massive” usage cap will become a noose we so quickly placed on ourselves. With the advent of not only high-definition video on demand, and digital downloads, there are a score of other programs that use the bandwidth while people just check their email, or just check their networking sites.

Even websites have become more content rich. Heavy text news sites have become a multi-media room. What 56K once could handle is a neanderthal-like usage now with higher speeds becoming standard. As Internet speeds rise, and our daily lives connect more to the Internet, the usage cap will seem more and more stringent. 
 
“Though the proposed cap is relatively high, it will increasingly ensnare more users as technology continues its natural progression,” said Free Press Research Director S. Derek Turner. 
 
For those Blast Magazine readers live on the Internet and are worried about what would happen if you crossed the line, don’t worry. “As part of our pre-existing policy, we will continue to contact the top users of our high-speed Internet service and ask them to curb their usage.”

“If a customer uses more than 250GB and is one of the top users of our service, he or she may be contacted by Comcast to notify them of excessive use. At that time, we’ll tell them exactly how much data per month they had used. We know from experience the vast majority of customers we ask to curb usage do so voluntarily.”

For now anyway, although the Internet is abuzz with future network shutdowns and or including excessive bandwidth usage fines, all of this is on top of the confirmed diurnal network bandwidth-throttling practices that Comcast got in trouble for.
 
For the non-Comcast customer, all this should be a red flag. Comcast clearly states in their ToS that, “The need to engage in network management is not limited to Comcast. In fact, all large Internet service providers manage their networks. Many of them use the same or similar tools that Comcast does.” Comcast is leading Internet service provider, so it’s only rational to expect other major ISPs to follow suit, especially if they see any Comcast practices as a “success”.

Enjoy the gallows.

Filing against Comcast, the Free Press and Public Knowledge non-profit organizations prompted the FCC into litigious action. As the battle went on in the courts, it seemed to be going in favor of the consumers. Last Thursday, FCC Chairman Kevin Martin dealt another blow in keeping with that trend.

“The commission has adopted a set of principles that protects consumer’s access to the Internet,” Martin told The Associated Press late Thursday. “We found that Comcast’s actions in this instance violated our principles.”

His word was the tipping point that consumers and organizations supporting ‘net neutrality’ needed.

Comcast has said publicly that the FCC’s policy on broadband standards is not enforceable and that the commission has “never before provided any guidance on what it means by ‘reasonable network management.’” The FCC approved a policy statement in September 2005 that outlined a set of principles as a means to ensure that broadband networks are “widely deployed, open, affordable and accessible to all consumers.” Those standards have been set forth as:

• To encourage broadband deployment and preserve and promote the open and interconnected nature of the public Internet, consumers are entitled to access the lawful Internet content of their choice
• Consumers are entitled to run applications and use services of their choice, subject to the needs of law enforcement
• Consumers are entitled to connect their choice of legal devices that do not harm the network
• Consumers are entitled to competition among network providers, application and service providers, and content providers

Other Internet Service providers argue that this kind of unclear regulation and enforcement, naturally leads them to come up with network solutions, among them ‘network bandwidth throttling’, and ‘ceasing P2P network patterns’, to manage their billion dollar hardware network traffic as they choose. This activity isn’t central to America. Bell Canada Enterprises and Rogers Communications Inc. have also reacted in much the same way as Comcast has.

FCC chairman Martin (a Republican) had strong support from the two Democrats on the commission, who are proponents of the network neutrality concept. Their two votes were enough for a majority ruling on the five-member commission. Without being dealt a fine, but a stern warning instead, the commission asked that Comcast release any information that pertains to the practices of its current mode of ‘network management’, and to divulge to its consumers on how its implementation of any future network management practices will affect them. Any new network management practices will be in use by the end of the year.

“We want to make sure the Internet stays as it is,” said Ben Scott of Free Press, earlier in the year. “Should we give more control to the network owners, who can then decide which Web sites load quickly?” Scott asked. “Can they become the gatekeepers for Internet content?”

The Institute, spurred on by a CNET report showing that Comcast defended its blocking of BitTorrent P2P traffic to the FCC “as a necessary practice that is done only during periods of heavy network traffic.”

Using the well-documented diurnal pattern of most P2P network (meaning it is more active in the daytime than nighttime) the study’s tests were instead done during the evening and morning hours. The Institute wanted “to see if hosts in Comcast and Cox networks see fewer of their upstream transfers blocked during early morning or weekends (when network load is generally low) than during other times of the day.”

The study found that the cable companies lied about their regulation practices of their networks, blocking traffic no matter what time of day.

The Max Planck Institute conducted the testing between March 18 and May 15 from 8,175 unique hosts that ran its specific BitTorrent tests. Participating hosts were in 90 countries, connected through 1,224 ISPs, and ran the Glasnost testing tool. The only locations where cable ISPs blocked BitTorrent traffic to a significant extent were in the United States, with Comcast and Cox the guilty parties, along with Singapore’s Starhub.

Comcast had blocked 30-80 percent of BitTorrent uploads. Cox blocked 20-100 percent of BitTorrent uploads, except for one period at 3 a.m. where one request wasn’t blocked.

The Institutes’s report notes that “ISPs may throttle (rate-limit) BitTorrent traffic without blocking it. The results we present here are limited to hosts whose BitTorrent transfers to our servers are blocked, i.e., interrupted by RST [Reset] packets generated … along the path.”

The report also noted that only upstreams were completely severed and downloads were largely untouched. While cable ISPs were actively shutting down the upstream connections, DSL hosts were largely unaffected.

“P2P traffic doesn’t necessarily follow normal traffic flows,” Comcast said responding to the report. “[Comcast is] now working with a variety of companies including BitTorrent [to] move to a protocol-agnostic network management technique.”

The backlash has already begun. Organizations like The Open Internet Coalition have beefed up calls for so-called “network neutrality” legislation that would prohibit service providers from blocking any Internet traffic or favoring certain types of content over others.

Net Neutrality is shaping up to be one of the biggest battles of the Internet age. The problem is that many consumers are largely apathetic to what’s going on (or not) in the background.