Apparently Comcast and Time Warner are adopting and implementing tiered bandwidth pricing and I’m personally starting to really like the fact that I have Qwest here in Minneapolis. I’ve been a Comcast user via my parents’ house connection for years and I fear that the golden age of bandwidth may be drawing near the end. There are too many reasons why this is absolute bullshit, so here’s three:
Reason one: the caps will inevitably be inadequate. Time Warner plans on charging 55 bucks a month for a 40 gb allowance. A 40 GIGABYTE ALLOWANCE? I know for a fact that between streaming movies and large downloads I’ve eaten up 40 gigabytes in a weekend. I haven’t been able to find out for sure what kind of pricing Comcast is thinking of, but I’ve heard rumors of a 250 gigabyte allowance. Inadequate nonetheless.
Reason two: Comcast has already admitted to throttling p2p applications such as BitTorrent, even when use was legitimate and in-line with the ISP’s acceptable use policies. They’re being taken to court over this, and I hope they hurt.
Reason three: People are being charged extra for what they already pay for. Rumors are brewing that overage penalties could be as stiff as $15/10gb. This changes everything about the way you think of your internet connection. Comcast advertises a 12 megabit connection, for example. A 12 megabit connection can download at a maximum of 1.5 megabytes a second (1 byte = 8 bits). As one can imagine, with 1 gb = 1024 mb, overages will not only occur, but they will be very very harsh given the ability of the connection to rapidly exceed its monthly transfer quota. But since when are we paying for the amount of data transferred? This completely changes the epistemology of bandwidth usage on personal internet connections. Its unprecedented, unfair, and downright greedy.
Ok, so I get the whole “well somoene’s gotta pay for it” spiel. I completely reject it for the garbage it is. This is simply a case of cable companies out-doing themselves. Their bandwidth capacity is being outdone by what they’ve pledged to give people.
My only hope is that DSL companies like Qwest don’t follow suit. My current connection has probably 15-20% less bandwidth than a Comcast connection, but it comes with one undeniable advantage: unmetered usage. So I only download something at 700 kb/second, at least I’ll be doing it all day and overage free.
