Comcast: metered use, monthly bandwidth caps, overage penalties and tiered pricing on the horizon
By Leslie Poston
If you thought Comcast couldn’t be any worse a cable provider after recent issues with throttling and its history of poor customer service and rampant outages, think again. The technology rumor mill is thick with the anger and indignation of Comcast users everywhere in response to news that the cable giant wants to punish users for actually using the bandwidth they already pay for.
The possible new rules include metered use of bandwidth, monthly caps on bandwidth use as low as 250GB, overage fees as punishment for exceeding that cap (think as much as $15 extra dollars for every extra 10GB used), and tiered pricing. The changes may be aimed at torrenting P2P users, at least in the minds of Comcast, but it is a punishment for everyone.
Think how quickly even the average user will reach 250GB if they use the internet for anything exciting, like watching or uploading videos to sites like YouTube, maintaining personal web sites, sending family movies to friends and relatives, downloading movies from iTunes and more. It doesn’t take long to be considered a heavy user.
Right about now some people are having the knee-jerk reaction of “well someone has to pay for it”, and that’s true. We already are paying for it, with some of the most expensive internet in the world, for less speeds than other countries, like Japan, less coverage and lower quality. This is the road to highway robbery and, indirectly, an internet without necessary controls on the big telcos like network neutrality.
Comcast already penalizes users who fall into a range of use from 100 – 600 GB a month by simply disconnecting them with no more than a letter after the fact (letter here). The letter does not give them any information about how exactly they exceeded the magical mystery bandwidth limits, either.
With Comcast as the sole option for connection for many in the United States, this kind of heavy handed practice does not bode well for the average internet user. As for the torrenters Comcast is so bent on stopping – they’ll find a way around the restrictions – they always do. It’s the regular people who will feel the brunt of a change such as this.
Image courtesy LonelyMachines.
Related:
Entry was posted
on Wednesday, May 7th, 2008 at 6:03 pm
under
Read more entries by Leslie Poston.
Stumble It!
May 7th, 2008
Someone should sue the spit out of them and as a class action give all of its users 6 months of free internet as a penalty.
May 7th, 2008
So you think you are so hard done by, eh?
Come to Australia. See if you can get any ISP to provide you with a 250GB download limit every month. If you can, you will pay hugely more than you will in the US.
I get 10Gb/month for $50 on a DSL connection that averages around 2-3Mbs, when theoretically it should be up to 24Mbs. That is the best bang-for-buck I can find in my region, because I live outside of a major city. AND it is very generous compared to the only other fast DSL provider available to me.
Such treats like bit-torrent etc are things I have learned to do without, because of my download limit, and the speed of my connection.
All I can say is be thankful for what you have, because the reality is that most of the world would envy what you are decrying as woeful.
Otherwise you give off the impression of a rich, spoilt, greedy brat!
May 7th, 2008
This blog sounds like a knee-jerk reaction. If you are so informed please tell me how much bandwidth an “average” user does consume. Hint I bet it’s no where close to 250gb.
May 8th, 2008
The issue is not what I think is fair or not. The issue boils down to restriction of trade and brings up new issues of a internet provider being a monopoly.
Whereas only one company such as Comcast might be the only game in town that provides broadband can likely be legally construed as a monopoly in some areas.
These proposed controls (via monthly caps) affect what one could see, listen to, and more importantly what one could purchase, rent, subscribe to and these “caps” affect commerce and free trade.
Now we are in a different ballgame now, its not just a simple matter if some company wants to restrict bandwith and enact caps.
That company is restricting free trade and domestic and international commerce and also
can seriously affect development of new forms of avenues for entertainment from TV programs, movies, digital music downloads, podcasting such as “Coast to Coast” which people pay about $60 a year for a subscription.
The issue is not that Comcast will upset subscribers (which it does). The issue pits Comcast against a huge digital online industry which includes Hollywood, The Recording Industry, Movie Rentals, TV shows ,Netflix, I-Tunes, Rhapsody, Napster.
As far as the FCC looking into this, I predict the Justice Department and all the major entertainment companies will be looking into this, as it will ultimately affect “thier” bottom line.
September 15th, 2008
If they are going to cap our bandwidth then they should provide some sort of Advertisement blocker that blocks all of the tons of bandwidth that those advertisements are eating up. After all we are paying for the service and being bombarded by advertisements for our money. I average 65 gig a month and I would bet that if they blocked the advertising from it I would use less then 10 gig a month. I am a paying customer and you are limiting my usage and forcing me to read tons of advertisements for my trouble. Fine you block the ads and we will use less bandwidth. Some sites have gotten so bad that the popup blockers can’t even stop all the popup ads (respected news sites are the worst).
April 13th, 2009
Tiers = Okay
Unregulated Tiers = Scary
The average user will get nowhere near 250GB/mo, unless they’re actively archiving illegal materials. Just as an indicator, a season of House (20+ episodes) is about 8GB. 40 mins per episode, *20 = 800 minutes, about 13 hours of entertainment. Lets assume you have 13 hours a day free to watch TV, and you download all of your shows illegally. That’s 8 GB / day for 30 days per month, or 240GB per month. That still leaves about 10 GB to screw around with for your joe-shmo internet usage, like e-mail, browsing /., and chatting.
If you were streaming the shows instead, you can bet they’d be at a lower resolution than the downloaded version, so you would not be using 8GB/day just by streaming junk on Hulu.
I myself tend to download random linux distributions, panick and reinstall WoW (which is a big download since I don’t have the CDs) a couple times a month, chat a lot, try out software and game demos (about 1GB a pop), and do many other very nerdy bandwidth-consuming things on the internet.
I think a 250GB cap is good. It’s the kind of holy-crap-how-would-I-ever-use-that-much cap that penalizes none but the SUPER heavy users, the kinds that have bittorrent running 24/7/365. Also, like it or not, piracy IS illegal, so you can’t exactly use that as a reason for why there shouldn’t be bandwidth caps.
The important thing is that someone monitors these caps and sets them at appropriate levels. Time Warner’s caps scare me a little, some as low as 5GB/month, with heavy over-use fees.
Point being: these companies have every right to prevent the top 0.1% of bandwidth abusers from screwing over the quality of service for the other 99.9%. Limits just need to be set very high so that people still FEEL like they have unlimited, like they’re not being affected. With the advent of cloud computing, off-site backups, and other heavy bandwidth-consumption services, it’s important that THEIR businesses are protected as well.
Oh; and if you want to block ads get firefox, adblock plus, and flashblock. Currently ads comprise about 66% of website traffic, and if limits are set too low we’re going to find ourselves struggling with some scary new pay-models for websites that survive on ads, or lose those sites altogether.
October 14th, 2009
Uh, the service in the US is not anything to brag about. Sure, its better than most other countries in the world, but then, we are way more expensive than just about every place I have been to.
Unlike some of the people above who only think torrenting is the sole cause of high use, or that ad-blockers actually stop bandwidth usage, I actually use lots of bandwidth, legitimately. We Americans already pay high fees. And the broadband providers invest little to upgrade and improve their existing infrastructure. I am certain the additional fees would only be pocketed, and not reinvested.