Comcast Throttling Is Back?
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While I am not really one to put a ton of credence with the first article stating that a company may be doing something that is going to gain a lot of bad press, but after seeing that Comcast is indeed throttling traffic again from PC World, The Inquirer, and IT World, I think it is safe to say that more than ever - Comcast using Geeks are about done with this nonsense.
They way I see it, considering the rates the customer is being raked over the coals for anyway, attacking usage numbers that do not fit into their little world to me illustrates just how “broken copper truly is” for a means of providing high speed Internet to their customers. Yes kids, fiber my eye. Comcast does not provide fiber to your door and bundle this with an already overtaxed network we begin to see this sort of bandwidth throttling.
To be totally fair, considering how badly the network is in need of some serious CPR to actually accommodate the today’s user, this throttling might be unavoidable. Speaking for myself, I remain unconcerned about it. I use FiOS and my bandwidth remains true all-day-long. Will FiOS one day face something like this as well? Sure, 10 or 15 years from now perhaps. For now though, I am just glad I do not pay the same rates for half the service I need.
3 Comments
Randy Allen
January 7th, 2009
at 6:52am
Bandwidth is becoming a huge problem because AT&T, Comcast, Time-Warner and others won’t reinvest their profits in the infrastructures. Instead they would rather cap usage and charge the “hogs” more if they go over the cap or throttle them back. With more companies offering web entertainment, the problem will only get worse. Us “hogs” enjoy podcasts, Netflix, Hulu, iTunes and other forms of entertainment, but we have all been labeled as pirates because of using a lot of bandwidth. This is not always true, we are just using the offerings from the Internet. Our ISPs are killing Internet business and innovation with their efforts to control our bandwidth habits. In some cases it is nothing but unfair competition because if you go over using their personal entertainment offerings, you don’t get charged extra. It’s just another way for Comcast and Time-Warner to stop the stampede away from cable. What can I do about it? Nothing, because I have no viable options for my broadband. It’s DSL or even more restrictive satellite options.
FIOS will eventually have the same problem, because the backbone isn’t getting any bigger and won’t until all companies are forced to fix the problem. What will probably happen is we, the taxpayer, will have to pay for it when the government steps in to correct it, and the ISPs will reap the benefits of the intervention.
Matt Hartley
January 7th, 2009
at 12:04pm
Well put Randy, I agree 100%.
Bryan Price
January 7th, 2009
at 2:04pm
I find it absolutely amazing that Moore’s Law hasn’t been able to solve this. True, wait along enough and it SHOULD get cheaper. We’ve got DOCSIS 3.0 getting deployed, but it just means that we run into our caps faster. And caps really don’t fix the problem that they say they have.
Actually buying the infrastructure for FTTH sounds good, but you have to connect it to something. Buying dark fiber doesn’t do anybody but the fiber sellers any good. So we’ve got the backbone to worry about, IP V6 to worry about. And with the current economy woes going on, do we really expect it to get any better?