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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.
A recent article in PC Magazine laments the slow death of Usenet. If you don’t know what Usenet is then don’t worry you haven’t missed anything. Usenet served a purpose back in oh… 1993. I remember reading the rec.music.makers groups every night. The content was useful and the participants maintained a relatively high signal-to-noise ratio.
But slowly over time most of us moved over to the web. It was simply a richer information management solution. I’m sure there are some diehards that are still on usenet today. And their threads are probably valuable and relevant. The problem is that the vast majority of content on Usenet isn’t valuable anymore. Once you get rid of the porn and the warez there just ain’t much left.
I’ve been hearing buzz the past few days about a huge flaw discovered in the Internet DNS (Domain Name Services) protocol. Apparently this flaw would allow attackers to perform cache poisoning on DNS servers. All world-wide DNS servers contain this flaw. I asked three different technology people today if they had heard about this DNS flaw yet. None of them had heard about it so obviously the message needs to get out.
DNS cache poisoning is serious stuff. If this flaw was widely exploited it would cause untold worldwide financial damage. Imagine being able to route traffic destined for a website to any place you want. You could siphon off user logins to savings and mutual fund accounts. You could disrupt online retail and B2B transactions. You could direct Obama website visitors to the McCain website. You get the picture.
So far security researchers are keeping quite about the exact DNS cache poisoning attack vector. All DNS servers world-wide will need to be patched. Wow.
Why would Comcast actively block legitimate traffic on their Internet networks? (otherwise known as traffic shaping) I think the reason is pretty simple. Let’s walk through my thought process together.
What is the primary driver of Comcast’s revenue? Answer: video.
What is the primary driver of increasing bandwidth utilization on the Internet? Answer: video.
What is an Internet protocol like bittorrent mainly used for? Answer: video distribution.
Comcast is simply trying to disrupt video distribution on the Internet before the Internet disrupts Comcast’s primary video distribution model. It’s like telcos trying to add latency to 3rd-party VOIP packets in order to diminish the quality of voice calls. These providers will fight back if you threaten the golden goose.
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.
