What if you threw a hearing and your guests of honor never showed up? The FCC will soon find out. The commission is holding public inquiry into the management practices of broadband networks, and while they reached out to a number of providers, according to opening statements by FCC chairman, Kevin Martin, hardly a broadband provider was to be seen.

"We [invited] the carriers to participate in this event, several weeks ago, [including] Comcast, who declined, Time Warner Cable, CableLabs and AT&T," said Martin. "[The FCC] reached out again to Comcast and Pando [after the companies' jointly announced they would work on a P2P Bill of Rights] and they declined, so I just want to make sure that we did try to make this as open and transparent as possible."

Added Republican commissioner Robert McDowell, "I'm disappointed that [the carriers] did not accept the commission's invitation to appear. It appears that we only have one network operator witness. I guess that's Lariat networks from Laramie, Wyoming. Congratulations, thanks for coming. You have a big burden on your shoulders, it's 20-to-one. You're the only one with real-time network management experience."

Asked why they declined to appear in front of the commission, Comcast responded:

Comcast has already appeared before the Commission on network management issues and has made extensive filings at the FCC both on our past and current practices as well as our recent announcements. We felt issues specific to us were well covered at the first hearing and the focus of this event should be broader than any individual company's issues.

Comcast has made a number of announcements relating to discussions and agreements that it is holding and has reached with numerous Internet companies, including our announcement with Pando. At this point, the most productive course is to continue our business to business discussions and to pursue the process that was outlined in the announcement with Pando. We will look forward to briefing the Commission and other interested parties as we make reportable progress.

Speculation around the Web chalked the company's absence up to its inability to "fill the seats" for the current hearing, an act that Comcast has admitted to committing in their previous hearing with the commission.

When asked why they too were conspicuously absent, a CableLabs spokesman speculated that the company's absence was due to late notice, but was still trying to confirm that statement.

We are following the hearing as it unfolds and will continue to give updates, broadband providers or no.

UPDATE: CableLabs said that they only received their invitation to the hearing on Tuesday of this week, which was too late to attend.

UPDATE II: AT&T e-mailed us a statement. "We have filed comments at the FCC explaining our views on what we consider to be reasonable network management. We fully adhere to and support the FCC's broadband principles. We are also happy to participate in any forum discussing the FCC's principles, which AT&T strongly supports and abides by. However, this hearing pertained mostly to the Comcast/BitTorrent matter and to that company's practices about which we have no firsthand knowledge. Furthermore, we have consistently made clear that we do not use TCP resets to manage network congestion."

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