
Comcast Considering Hard Bandwidth Limits and Overage Charges - terpua
http://uneasysilence.com/archive/2008/05/13185/
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xirium
They're going have plenty of angry customers because many casual users with
large harddisks and fast connections have no concept of file sizes. I
previously mentioned this a while ago regarding similar plans from Time-Warner
( <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=109743> ).

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xirium
They'll have _very_ angry customers if they want to charge US$15 per 10GB.
When you take into account the cost of harddisks and bandwidth, legal
purchased film downloads could be more expensive than buying physical media
from a retailer. The granularity of the proposed charge exacerbates the
situation. US$0.15 per 100MB would be preferable.

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Goronmon
I've heard comments in the past (though mainly in the direction of Time
Warner) that these types of limits could be used to push forth a internet
providers own distribution service. They could conceivably place hard-caps on
everything except for services they provide and attempt to lock you into their
own services so you can avoid the crazy overage fees.

I'm not saying there is any real evidence for something like this to happen,
just that the opportunity is there, and I wouldn't put it past a business to
leverage a position like that.

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wmf
That's such an obvious neutrality violation that the ISPs would be shamed into
changing their policies.

Of course, it gets trickier when the same company provides capped Internet
access and uncapped non-IP-based services.

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LogicHoleFlaw
Unfortunately it is well-established that the telecom industry has no shame.

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LogicHoleFlaw
I'd rather see hard bandwidth limits than the soft "you may be using _too
much_ bandwidth (but we won't tell you how much that is)" policy which is used
at present.

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redorb
As long as they can't continue to call it "Unlimited high speed broadband" ..
and say it up front, they should be able to do whatever they want.

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wmf
You could argue that it's still unlimited; you could transfer terabytes if you
want and you'll just get a bill for it. It's certainly not flat rate, though.

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fallentimes
The point is they say "unlimited" along with a price per month, which implies
a flat rate.

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goofygrin
This weekend I updated 2 Windows XP VMs and one XP computer. I would have
eaten up my monthly bandwith allotment in 3 hours.

Great.

Edit: re-read the article. I obviously didn't eat 250gb in a month. That seems
somewhat reasonable. I mean, 250gb is a lot of torrent activity!

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epi0Bauqu
This seems like a dumb idea in the face of FIOS competition.

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wmf
FIOS exists in few places. Cable companies already vary speeds and pricing
from city to city, so you can expect that they will only implement such
customer-hostile plans in cities where FIOS is not available.

You could argue that driving high-cost customers to FIOS is a good strategy,
but I suspect monthly transfer caps will even drive away some customers who
would never actually hit them but are just nervous about getting huge bills.

