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Old 09-03-2008, 11:48 PM   #8 (permalink)
Kadin
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Location: Virginia
I really only have two issues with this: one is that, at least as of right now, there's no way to tell how much bandwidth you've consumed, or what your monthly average is, or basically to tell in any way how close you are to getting capped. This is stupid; if they're going to cap, they at least should do what they did for Usenet once they started limiting that, and have a little "meter" on your Comcast.net page that you can go to and check to see where you are for the month. That's the bare minimum.

Two, it's pretty obnoxious that they count all bytes transferred the same way. While it may be simple, it's stupid and has little correlation with what data transit actually costs them at any given time. What they really ought to be doing is billing at varied rates based on time of day, essentially imposing a network congestion fee, if resources are scarce at peak periods. Also, traffic that stays inside Comcast's network ought to cost much less than traffic going out to the Internet at large (which would drive the optimization of better P2P systems).

A billing system that actually related Comcast's costs to the charges they're imposing on users would be a lot more palatable (and seem a lot less like a cash-grab and way to avoid delivering on their implicit promises) than one with totally invented caps.
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