Comcast: Goodbye & Thanks For All The Bandwidth!
Unlimited. The Princeton on-line dictionary offers several possible usages of the word, however the one that would directly apply to the consumption of some resource would be the following:
inexhaustible: that cannot be entirely consumed or used up; "an inexhaustible supply of coal"
That definition makes perfect sense to most, but apparently not to some ISPs.
Comcast, who was recently accused of putting the kibosh on P2P traffic, is now cutting off customers that it feels have used 'too much' of their unlimited bandwidth.
According to Comcast the people are abusing the system, which actually makes the surfing experience worse for other users. Comcast also contends that they give a month-long grace period after a warning for users to either 'fix problems', or change providers. How much bandwidth does it take to get such a warning?
Sadly only about 1000 songs or 4 feature films per day. At first those numbers might seem a tad bit high, but consider what people who just bought a new Apple TV might be doing. Downloading a season of your favorite TV show once every few days should be the equivalent of 4 feature films per day for each day. Throw on top of that gaming, e-mail, and routine downloads/patches, and it might be possible for some users to hit those limits.
So what are disconnected customers doing about the situation? A few of them are fighting back:
inexhaustible: that cannot be entirely consumed or used up; "an inexhaustible supply of coal"
That definition makes perfect sense to most, but apparently not to some ISPs.
Comcast, who was recently accused of putting the kibosh on P2P traffic, is now cutting off customers that it feels have used 'too much' of their unlimited bandwidth.
According to Comcast the people are abusing the system, which actually makes the surfing experience worse for other users. Comcast also contends that they give a month-long grace period after a warning for users to either 'fix problems', or change providers. How much bandwidth does it take to get such a warning?
Sadly only about 1000 songs or 4 feature films per day. At first those numbers might seem a tad bit high, but consider what people who just bought a new Apple TV might be doing. Downloading a season of your favorite TV show once every few days should be the equivalent of 4 feature films per day for each day. Throw on top of that gaming, e-mail, and routine downloads/patches, and it might be possible for some users to hit those limits.
So what are disconnected customers doing about the situation? A few of them are fighting back:
“An unplugged client in Rockville, a suburb of Washington, has filed a complaint with the county he lives in, saying his contract with his service provider states that he is entitled to unlimited Internet access, officials in Montgomery County said.”
Is Comcast doing the right thing by defending the needs of multiple users by ridding themselves of a single user here and there or is this a clear cut case of Comcast needing to upgrade their capacity? Post your comments and let us hear what you have to say.
