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Comcast's New Network Throttling Now In Place

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richie
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07 Jan 2009, 11:33 am

Comcast's New Network Throttling Now In Place

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For the last few months, Comcast has been transitioning how it monitors and throttles broadband traffic. DSLreports.com claims that this transition is now complete for all of Comcast's markets, meaning that Comcast users might see their connection speeds drop if they use too much sustained downstream throughput and they can even potentially lose their service if they exceed Comcast's monthly broadband cap.


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pezar
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10 Jan 2009, 10:41 pm

Comcast has actually being doing this for years without telling people. But they ended up being sued, so they spelled out and announced properly the policy. It's still a ways away from eliminating net neutrality, but it is a crude way of keeping a handful of file sharers from gumming up the works. At least it's not the pay for access scheme they were pushing, where they could have charged hefty fees to ANY web site or program to access their network, potentially enabling them to force users to use only preferred websites. So many people screamed so loud, and the screamers included internet heavyweights like Google and Ebay and Amazon, that they had to drop it. For now they'll have to be happy with bandwidth limits. The limit is 250 GB from what I've read, which is fairly high. Even 100 GB/mo would only impact the top 10% of bandwidth users.



t0
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10 Jan 2009, 11:33 pm

Broadband subscribers have to decide: Pay for what you use, or don't use it.



pezar
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11 Jan 2009, 5:28 pm

t0 wrote:
Broadband subscribers have to decide: Pay for what you use, or don't use it.


I think there should be a base, like probably 75 GB/mo would make the average user, who surfs the web and uses email and maybe downloads the odd virus program update, very happy. Above that you really get into power use, like BitTorrent and other file sharing programs, and the file sizes can grow quite large, into hundreds of gigs a month for the real hardcore file sharing nuts, and those people need to pay. That is maybe 15-20% of all users at the most, and the vast majority are teens and college students who download all their music and TV shows to their home computers and use streaming video all the time. Per minute pay for access was common in the early days of the public internet. Maybe we need pay per GB plans.