TELECOM Digest OnLine - Sorted: Re: Comcast High-Speed Internet Bandwidth Usage Warning

Re: Comcast High-Speed Internet Bandwidth Usage Warning

Barry Margolin (barmar@alum.mit.edu)
Wed, 18 Apr 2007 21:12:18 -0400

In article <telecom26.103.7@telecom-digest.org>, BubbaGump
<BubbaGump@giganews.com> wrote:

> This is all very ambiguous. I guess Comcast thinks they can run a
> business by screwing 1% of their customers based on the assumption
> that the same 1% will offend every month (otherwise 1% + 1% + 1% + ...

It's not an assumption -- you don't get cut off UNTIL you offend for
several months in a row. So they've identified those "same 1%" already.

> is eventually going to equal a lot of customers). By screwing I mean
> they don't give any reasonable way to determine how much bandwidth is
> too much. "Too much" is based on some average, but I have no way to
> determine the average, and the average is always changing. It's a
> lottery.

I doubt it. The people who get caught by this almost certainly know
that they download much more than most Internet users. I find it hard
to believe that you're surprised at being in the top 1% -- you're
probably downloading for several hours on a daily basis.

And the fact that the average is always changing is a GOOD THING. A
year or two ago most Internet users weren't downloading movies and TV
shows from iTunes, or watching Internet replays of TV shows at network
web sites. I wouldn't be surprised if the average amount of bandwidth
used by broadband customers has doubled in the past few years.
Comcast didn't respond to this by telling all these customers to stop
downloading. On the contrary, they've been increasing the speeds of
their cable modem services. The average is always a moving target.

But I think that no matter what it is, the exorbitant users know who
they are.

Barry Margolin, barmar@alum.mit.edu
Arlington, MA
*** PLEASE post questions in newsgroups, not directly to me ***
*** PLEASE don't copy me on replies, I'll read them in the group ***

[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Except, Barry, I sincerely doubt that
Comcast bothers to drop the multitude of spammers they host on their
system.Few of the large ISPs ever bother with that ... but they
certainly do count (against the regular users) the volumes of
spam/scam as 'downloads' in the mail each day. I know SBC certainly
did nothing to help their small users with that plague, but as far as
Comcast is concerned, their glorious history of screw-ups is well
known. Read http://massis.lcs.mit.edu/judy-sammel.html for an example
of Comcast's business practices. Why should their 'bait and switch'
unlimited usage be any different? PAT]

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