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Comcast announced bandwidth caps for broadband Internet customers today. After October 1 customers will be capped at 250 GB of traffic per month.
What does 250 GB of traffic mean to the typical Comcast customer? I’m sure that most of them have no idea what it means. Let’s try to put it into perspective.
250 GB of traffic means about 125 standard-definition movies per month (but who is watching SD on their pretty HD plasma screens these days?)
250 GB of traffic means about 25 HD movies per month or around 50 hours of HDTV per month (1.6 hours of HDTV per day).
250 GB of traffic means running a T1 connection (1.5Mbps) around full throttle for an entire month.
According to this interesting article if U.S. broadband Internet speeds continue to change at the same rate as this past year we won’t catch up to Japan’s broadband speeds for another 100 years. It kind of puts our plight into perspective.
I wrote an article for the Minneapolis Star Tribune titled Minnesota: An Internet Backwater Soon? I can’t lay claim to the article title but I think it’s kind of catchy. I’ve received positive responses from friends and colleagues. The article was sitting in the editors hands for months so I was happy to finally see it printed. Minnesota like many other regions of our country is facing bandwidth challenges. The major carriers are not stepping up to the plate. We need change.
Yes that’s bite, not byte. Some of the large carriers are trying to bite back against the evildoers on their networks — you know, the customers that actually use the bandwidth they are paying for. Big ISPs hate that. They want to oversubscribe the heck out of their networks. They want their customers to ignore the ancient copper cables in the ground. They want their customers to be content downloading emails and cute baby pictures.
Now the Comcast’s and AT&T’s of the world want to charge Internet users by the byte to curb Internet traffic on their networks. If you are selling a resource and trying to grow your services why the heck would you want your customers to consume less? Why would you buy services from these companies? Unfortunately some of you probably have no other option.
Time Warner Cable is planning to charge customers $1/GB for overages. That same GB costs them somewhere around 5 cents. I’m a big believer in allowing the market to set the price but this is borderline unethical. Try telling grandma what using 1GB of bandwidth actually means. Customers are going to be caught in this bandwidth dragnet. The TWC product manager that thought up this idea should be sacked.
It’s time to open up the infrastructure in this country. It’s time for cities to build and own Internet infrastructure. Google, you are our only hope.
