Comcast mulls capping punters
If the cap fits you will just have to wear it
CABLE OUTFIT COMCAST is thinking about capping subscribers' bandwidth to 250 gigabytes a month.
According to a Deep Throat within the outfit, Comcast plans to charge punters $15 for every 10 gigabytes they use above the cap.
It will be following the lead of Time Warner Cable which is also thinking about doing something similar.
To be fair, capping at that level will not hurt that many people. You have to be doing some fairly serious daily downloading to need that much. You would be talking about downloading two HD movies a day or about 3,000 MP3 albums a month.
Alleyinsider.com said that its sources thought that it will only hurt about 14,000 of Comcast’s subscribers. It has 14 million of them.
However, if the cap stays at that level for too long, and HD Web Video becomes more mainstream, more people are going to find that 250 gigabytes is not enough. µ
L'Inq
Alley
Insider
Comments
Not too bad to start
250 isn't too bad to start, as long as it scales as video downloads take over.Even the average family most likely isn't going to download 2 HD movies a day.
I know there will be a lot of people up in arms over it, a lot of people mentioning they are downloading up to 10 HD movies a day. But realistically, the average user probably won't hit that 250 limit.
With readily available HD pron, I could see some people hitting the limit part way through the month.
HD?
"You would be talking about downloading two HD movies a day"4.1 GB is not what I call an HD movie.
Broadband ranking
It is looking as if America's broadband ranking under Australia is starting to look justified.Scumbag Monopoly Players
I love how municipalities allowed these two corporations to essentially come in, wipe out the competition and take over. Now they can pretty much do as they wish.Contemplating!! Ha! More like Implementing!
Premium subscriber here...
I am a Premium Comcast subscriber. I pay a great deal more for the 768K up / 8Mb down package and as far as I am concerned, Premium customers should not get capped.Wrong service, wrong provider
OBVIOUSLY there is something wrong with using a TV cable company as Internet service provider. Of course the cable company wants to put a cap on the total amount of data transferred by their customers. And to make matters really bad, companies like Comcast prevent their customers from running servers on the customers' computers. So customers end up with something like a one-way Internet à la AOL. After all, the Internet might be the biggest competition to a low quality TV program. And don't think that a phone company is any better if the phone company also sells a TV program.What the Comcast customers have to figure out is why so many people ditched AOL and what Comcast customers should do. There are alternatives.
Or maybe it is time to break up the companies and separate Internet and TV again. Any sensible lawmaker available?