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Comcast has been cutting off some of their heaviest users for:
…abusive activity that adversely impacts on everybody else’s experience.
Using your connection to download or upload large files, it would seem, is abusive. Will Comcast’s Internet customers soon be voting with their feet?
In order to be cut off, a user would have to download approximately 1,000 songs or four feature films a day. One would assume that four feature films they mean four DVDs, which would make the cut-off point about 18GB. While that is a lot of bandwidth to be consuming, it is not out of the realms of possibility. If someone pays for unlimited access, he or she would expect to be entitled to it. They are not paying for a bandwidth level that Comcast thinks is fair. The trouble is that many of the customers being cut off would have been downloading pirated material. You can be sure that Comcast is well aware of this fact.
This writer expects restrictions to grow tighter as cable companies clamp down on heavy users to provide more bandwidth for their high definition television services. Cable companies have traditionally been able to provide cable TV services and provide Internet without difficulty. Now, with the advent of HDTV it seems that they have a conflict of interest. It appears that they are trading in their more demanding Internet customers to allow them to satisfy a larger number of resource demanding HDTV customers. As the needs of their HDTV customers grow, there is no guarantee that their interpretation of reasonable use will remain the same.
Source: Yahoo News (via AFP)
Tags: Internet, Op-Ed
1 response
Sep 10, 2007 at 6:44 am
i can just see the lawsuits already.
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