Quote:
Comcast to limit customers' broadband usage
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Comcast Corp, the largest U.S. cable operator, said on Thursday it will cap customers' Internet usage starting October 1, in a bid to ensure the best service for the vast majority of its subscribers.
Comcast said it was setting a monthly data usage threshold of 250 gigabytes per account for all residential high-speed Internet customers, or the equivalent of 50 million e-mails or 124 standard-definition movies.
"If a customer exceeds more than 250 GB and is one of the heaviest data users who consume the most data on our high-speed Internet service, he or she may receive a call from Comcast's Customer Security Assurance (CSA) group to notify them of excessive use," according to the company's updated Frequently Asked Questions on Excessive Use.
Customers who top 250 GB in a month twice in a six-month timeframe could have service terminated for a year.
Comcast said up to 99 percent of its 14 million Internet subscribers would not be affected by the new threshold, which it said would help ensure the quality of Internet delivery is not degraded by a minority of heavy users.
U.S. Internet subscribers are typically not aware of any limit on their Internet usage once they sign up to pay a flat monthly fee to their service provider.
As Web usage has rocketed, driven by the popularity of watching online video, photo-sharing and music downloading services, cable and phone companies have been considering various techniques to limit or manage heavy usage.
But Comcast has come under fire from a variety of sources for its network management techniques.
The U.S. Federal Communications Commission investigated complaints by consumer groups that it was blocking peer-to-peer applications like BitTorrent, and earlier this month ordered Comcast to modify its network management.
Comcast has said that by the end of the year it will change its network management practices to ensure all Web traffic is treated essentially the same, but has also been exploring other ways to prevent degradation of its Internet service delivery.
One consumer group said while Comcast's new 250 GB limit was "relatively high," it could eventually ensnare customers as technology progresses.
"If Comcast has oversold their network to the point of creating congestion problems, then well-disclosed caps for Internet use are a better short-term solution than Comcast's current practice of illegally blocking Internet traffic," said S Derek Turner of Free Press, a Washington, D.C.-based consumer advocacy group that filed a complaint about Comcast's network management practices earlier this year.
The Philadelphia-based company is not alone in trying to come up with ways to limit heavy Internet usage.
Time Warner Cable Inc, the second-largest U.S. cable operator, said in January it would run a trial of billing Internet subscribers based on usage rather than a flat fee.
Comcast spokesman Charlie Douglas said Comcast was also considering so-called consumption-based billing, but no decisions had been made.
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The business model that ISPs use to dole out internet usage has been flawed for years. All that so-called 'fair use' policies do is deny customers the right to use the service they're paying for.
The only reason that the model's still working is that most people don't use big amounts of bandwidth most of the time. Largely, people went on websites and checked their emails - hardly bandwidth-heavy activites. As far as the ISPs are concerned, anybody trying to use the bandwidth they've paid for is clearly illegally filesharing and would get throttled back or cut off. But now there's a big problem.
BBC iPlayer went live at the end of 2007 and all of a sudden, people had a perfectly legal reason for wanting lots of bandwidth, on demand, at video-streaming capacities. The ISPs can't claim that it's illegal filesharing and throttle them or deny them a connection. Which means that they've responded by saying that it's not fair for the BBC to come along and prove that their business model is broken beyond repair.
Of course, iPlayer isn't the only big worry for the ISPs, though it's a major one in the UK. Websites such as YouTube and services such as iTunes have been stressing the ISPs' networks increasingly - perfectly legally - and now things are really coming to a head.
And what will happen is that the ISPs will throttle the users' bandwidth and then try to charge them to alleviate the throttling. You'll pay for an hour or two of SuperBoostSpeed which'll give you the bandwidth that you're already paying for for a short while.
At the end of the day, ISPs have been caught out. They can't deliver on their promises to consumers and now we're finding that out. And if you think you're being robbed blind, and want to sort it out, what can you do? Fuck all.