As I posted earlier, Comcast came out today with a monthly bandwidth cap limit beyond which broadband customers are considered to be consuming "excessive" bandwidth. The cap is 250 GB and it will become company-wide policy starting October 1. (That's a lot of data...given current usage levels, although some commenters have pointed out that as HD video becomes more prevalent, 250 GB might not look so generous.)
According to Comcast spokesman Charlie Douglas, less than 1% of Comcast's customers exceed this cap, with the median usage pegged at 2 to 3 GB per month. Comcast says that 250 GB is equivalent to downloading 125 standard definition movies or 62,500 songs.
This delineation, however, has nothing to do with Comcast's impending implementation of a "protocol agnostic" network management program that has been spurred by the controversy surrounding Comcast's P2P throttling initiatives. The 250 GB cap is merely a way of making transparent what has been company practice for years; namely to pull the plug on bandwidth "hogs."
Comcast came under fire for cutting off "excessive" bandwidth consumers without first informing them what constitutes excessive usage. The 250 GB, now incorporated into Comcast's acceptable use policy, makes explicit what has been implicit all along.
Customers who exceed the 250 GB limit will get notified of this fact in their monthly bills, Comcast's Douglas says. Comcast won't provide a monitoring tool so that users can track their bandwidth consumption levels. Such heavy users "will know what tools exist" for tracking consumption. "More than 99% of our customers don’t need such a tool," according to Douglas.
Customers who exceed the limit will also be given the option of upgrading to a commercial tier of service, typically costing many times over the monthly rate charged for residential broadband service. Contrary to earlier reports, Comcast won't charge extra fees on a metered basis if a customer exceeds the caps although "that is something we're looking at," Douglas says.
Even if only 1% of Comcast's customers could hit the cap's limits, every customer could theoretically be affected by the protocol agnostic management plan Comcast is developing. "They're both important programs for Comcast for how we manage our network and whether our customers have a good experience," according to Douglas, although the 250 GB cap is a "totally different topic."
"Protocol agnostic has to do with aggregate use [in a real-time situation]. We want to avoid a situation where we have congestion," Douglas says. "It's dynamic and real-time" as opposed to cumulative monthly usage.
So, under the protocol agnostic network management program, which is still under development, users could face bandwidth constraints as traffic on a congested network gets slowed down. Once the congestion subsides, the constraints would be lifted.
Comcast has yet to specify what those real-time bandwidth constraints might be. Trials of protocol agnostic management methods are currently underway but "we’re committed to getting at that technique by the end of the year," Douglas says.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 6:59 PM | Print | Comments (2)Update at end of post.
As usual, Karl Bode broke the news today that Comcast, the nation's top cable operator and the second largest broadband provider in the U.S., will implement a 250 GB broadband cap starting in October as part of the company's shift to a protocol agnostic network management scheme.
According to sources, customers who exceed this limit will be charged $15 for each 10 GB over the cap. Although consumer advocates and cap foes are likely to raise a ruckus over this limitation, in reality it's a generous cap, at least by current bandwidth usage standards. Moreover, it's a huge improvement over some of the bandwidth caps being tested or implemented (check out the crazy low limits in place at Sunflower Broadband) and it certainly beats Comcast's current practice of throttling P2P applications.
More troubling to me is something else that Karl reports -- there has also been "consideration of a new system whereby users who received more than four DMCA letters in a twelve month period potentially faced account suspension." Hollywood and the record industry have been pressuring broadband providers to carry their water both domestically and internationally, urging these third parties to cut off customers who are alleged to have violated copyright laws.
The problem is that these two industries have often gone above and beyond reasonableness in issuing DMCA letters, even to the degree of not permitting legal uses of copyrighted material. The studios and record companies can send as many DMCA letters as they want, but it doesn't mean that the customers who receive them are violating the law. Comcast and other broadband providers shouldn't be in the habit of protecting other industries' business models based on such shaky evidence and they certainly shouldn't cut off customers at the whim of the studios and record companies.
In the meantime, more details about Comcast's broadband caps should be forthcoming in the form of a press release, according to the report. I've got an email into Comcast and will provide more details if I hear anything.
Update: I just got off the phone with spokesman Charlie Douglas who said the new policy (spelled out here), aimed at extreme users, doesn't say anything about disconnecting customers who receive DMCA notices. More on the specified cap in a separate post.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 11:05 AM | Print | Comments (2)
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