Comcast’s Bandwidth Usage Caps – A Bad Idea

You might have heard this already, but Comcast is rolling out bandwith usage caps – specifically, 250 GB per month for all residential Internet customers. Their policy is also “two strikes and you’re out,” meaning that after your first infraction, you get a call. After the second one, you lose ALL of your Internet access for a year.

Yes, you read that right. This is unlike many ISPs in other countries, where if you go over your bandwidth limit you don’t lose your access – you just get throttled back into the stone age (being throttled back to 64 kbs is common). So if you (accidentally) go over your quota, you won’t be left out in the cold – you’ll just have to deal with the Internet being slow – until the end of the month when your quota gets reset.

Not so for Comcast customers. (In the interest of disclosure, I should mention that I’m a Comcast customer too – my local cable company was recently bought out by them, and I’ve written about my experiences during that time previously.) If you go over the limit twice (in a 6 month period), you lose your Internet access for a full year. No appeals.

Is this a little bit excessive? Probably. But don’t worry – it gets worse.

Comcast has no facilities (currently) for letting you monitor your bandwidth usage. So it’s up to you to find some way to monitor how much bandwidth you’re using. There’s software you can use – but if you have more than one computer in the household, or if you use on-line gaming (XBox, Wii, Playstation, etc.), it’s basically impossible to monitor your bandwidth usage accurately. (And what about unexpected bandwidth usage – such as Windows updates or service packs? What if they push you over the limit?) In an age when so much of what we do revolves around the web, setting a limit – even a supposedly high one – is a bad idea, at best.

Now, Comcast says that their usage cap of 250 GB per month is well above the median usage amount of their customers – which may be true, but let’s not misunderstand what “median” means! (If you haven’t taken a statistics course recently, you may want to brush up a bit – many people mis-understand what “median” means.)

Of particular concern to me (and others, I’m sure) is the issue of on-line backup services – such as Mozy, which I use (and love). This is a perfectly legal application (as opposed to the sometimes-dubious, legally speaking, P2P file-sharing that ISPs so often complain uses up all their networks’ bandwidth) which backs up my computer’s files. I happen to have quite a lot of files – and with more and more computers coming with 500+ GB hard drives, it is not unreasonable to expect other people to have more than 250 GB of files that might need to be backed up during a month’s time. (Alternatively, you might run over 250 GB of data transferred because you change files frequently – maybe you’re working on editing a video of your vacation – which needs to be backed up whenever they are changed. With large enough data sets this is not impossible, nor unresonable to expect.)

Of course, there’s the larger question of “why” Comcast is doing this… and I’m not the only one who’s confused:

“It remains unclear how the cap announced today helps solve Comcast’s supposed congestion problems,” said S. Derek Turner, research director of Free Press, another digital rights group critical of Comcast’s past network management. “Though the proposed cap is relatively high, it will increasingly ensnare more users as technology continues its natural progression.”

Naturally, of course, it goes without saying that Comcast’s own service – their “digital voice” phone service – doesn’t count against your quota. That particular little clause makes proponents of Net Neutrality start to fume – and with good reason. But that’s an argument for another day.

And if you’re thinking “well, 250 GB is more than enough for me” – let me remind you that 640 KB of memory was once considered “enough for anyone.” And it’s only going to get worse – bandwidth usage per-household is only going to increase as time goes on.

ZDNet’s Richard Koman hits the nail on the head:

The thing is, isn’t Comcast’s future – the commercial future of the Web – in higher-def video, stuff like the NBC Olympics site? Won’t Comcast be encouraging users to download video – and video ads – at greater and greater volumes even as it threatens to cut heavy users off?

Another ZDNet blogger, Sam Diaz, makes some equally good points:

But there’s just something about a cap on Internet access that screams out “Cap on Innovation.” Think I’m wrong? How about this? How many Comcast residential customers do you think would have stayed clear of online clips of Olympics coverage earlier this month, simply because they don’t know how to measure usage in megabytes or gigabytes (instead of hours or minutes)? How many do you think will say no to technologies like VoIP because they’ll be afraid of going over their Internet cap? Do you know of any parents out there who might forbid their kids from playing the XBox 360 because it connects to the Internet?

And what about the workplace and the Web-centric tools that were put in place to help trim a company’s bottom line – things like video conferencing, Skype International calling and even WebEx presentations? I realize I’m getting ahead of myself by worrying about the caps imposed at the enterprise level. But just because no one has suggested it yet doesn’t mean it won’t happen.

Lots of people are feeling the burn on this one – often for lots of different reasons. Some people are mad because there’s very little in the way of competition – in the overwhelming majority of areas, you have only one option for Broadband Internet. If you have two choices, consider yourself lucky. Other people are mad because they signed up when the service was advertised to them as “unlimited,” and now it’s not anymore. (Many companies “reserve the right” to change their terms of service at any time, but changing them this drastically is bound to upset people.)

It’s also somewhat frigtening to consider what sort of affect this move will have on the ISP industry as a whole – Comcast is a big company, after all, and if they do something, other companies may figure it’s “OK” to follow suit. The result could be a domino affect that cripples the Internet access available to US customers – and that could have very negative large scale effects in the long run.

The bottom line is that this sort of action has absolutely no benefit to Comcast’s customers. At best, some customers will just ignore it – figuring it doesn’t apply to them. At worst, customers will cancel their Comcast service because of this (and other) draconian policies. In the end, this is a bad move for Comcast. Doing something that you know is going to upset lots of your customers is never a good business strategy.