Comcast Considering Hard Bandwidth Limits and Overage Charges | Hacker News Reader

Comcast Considering Hard Bandwidth Limits and Overage Charges

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11 pointsterpua19 comments

They're going have plenty of angry customers because many casual users with large harddisks and fast connections have no concept of file sizes. I previously mentioned this a while ago regarding similar plans from Time-Warner ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=109743 ).

They'll have very angry customers if they want to charge US$15 per 10GB. When you take into account the cost of harddisks and bandwidth, legal purchased film downloads could be more expensive than buying physical media from a retailer. The granularity of the proposed charge exacerbates the situation. US$0.15 per 100MB would be preferable.

They're talking about charging $15 for each 10GB over the 250GB limit. At 5GB per DVD you can still download 50 DVDs per month (ok, probably less due to protocol overhead). That sounds reasonable.

Assuming downloadable HD movies become more prevalent in the future, that 250GB cap no longer seems as generous.

Streaming video also throws a kink in the hose. There's no indication of how much bandwidth you are actually using when you use such a service. With no files persisting to the hard drive it's very difficult to say what your actual usage levels are.

You have the same problem with almost any streaming media, be it internet radio or youtube. I personally almost always have KEXP streaming in the background. I have no idea how much bandwidth I use for that alone but it's non-trivial.

I know of a house of non-geek professionals in London who collectively download 10GB per day, excluding protocol overhead. That's easily 300MB per month. Collectively, they're saturating a 2Mb/s connection much of the time. That may be obscene to some but in parts of Asia, 100Mb/s connections are affordable. So, if a 250MB per month limit becomes established and accepted, it could very quickly become constraining and economically damaging.

I've heard comments in the past (though mainly in the direction of Time Warner) that these types of limits could be used to push forth a internet providers own distribution service. They could conceivably place hard-caps on everything except for services they provide and attempt to lock you into their own services so you can avoid the crazy overage fees.

I'm not saying there is any real evidence for something like this to happen, just that the opportunity is there, and I wouldn't put it past a business to leverage a position like that.

There was a sentiment on the nnsquad [Network Neutrality Squad] mailing list that this could easily achieved using IP over ATM over optic fibre. You establish two ATM circuits: a public Internet connection that gets 1% of the bandwidth and a proprietary extranet that gets 99% of the bandwidth. Then, your ISP stalls and disregards network neutrality proposals. If you win equal access on the public bandwidth then it would only be a pyrrhic victory that obtains equal access to 1% of the avilable bandwidth. Meanwhile, your ISP could have a regional monopoly and have you beholden to any service which they choose to launch or not, at any price they choose, supporting any platform and DRM they choose.

That's such an obvious neutrality violation that the ISPs would be shamed into changing their policies.

Of course, it gets trickier when the same company provides capped Internet access and uncapped non-IP-based services.

Unfortunately it is well-established that the telecom industry has no shame.

In Australia, Telstra already does this. They run an On Demand Entertainment business (music, movies, games and sport) where the content is 'unmetered' (when downloaded it does not get attributed to your Usage Allowance). They also have exclusive rights to online AFL content (national league of Australian rules football), so you can't watch AFL matches, press conferences and various other things online unless you use Telstra as your internet provider.

FYI, you can see their exorbitantly priced plans here: http://my.bigpond.com/internetplans/broadband/adsl/plansando... Their overage charges are $1500 AUD per 10GB. Many A Current Afair story have been about some poor family slugged with a $10,000+ internet bill.

Since Usage Allowance's are so low in Australia, pretty much all ISP's provide unmetered value added benefits, like ftp mirrors and game servers. I had never realised that these kinds of thing were not net neutral. If these features were revoked, my internet bills would increase by 25%, which I obviously would not be too pleased about. Gah, now I am troubled; I'll be thinking about this all day.

EDIT: It appears these kinds of things are net neutral, because they don't restrict other people's packets.

I'd rather see hard bandwidth limits than the soft "you may be using too much bandwidth (but we won't tell you how much that is)" policy which is used at present.

As long as they can't continue to call it "Unlimited high speed broadband" .. and say it up front, they should be able to do whatever they want.

You could argue that it's still unlimited; you could transfer terabytes if you want and you'll just get a bill for it. It's certainly not flat rate, though.

The point is they say "unlimited" along with a price per month, which implies a flat rate.

This weekend I updated 2 Windows XP VMs and one XP computer. I would have eaten up my monthly bandwith allotment in 3 hours.

Great.

Edit: re-read the article. I obviously didn't eat 250gb in a month. That seems somewhat reasonable. I mean, 250gb is a lot of torrent activity!

This seems like a dumb idea in the face of FIOS competition.

FIOS exists in few places. Cable companies already vary speeds and pricing from city to city, so you can expect that they will only implement such customer-hostile plans in cities where FIOS is not available.

You could argue that driving high-cost customers to FIOS is a good strategy, but I suspect monthly transfer caps will even drive away some customers who would never actually hit them but are just nervous about getting huge bills.

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