Dampier
Phillip M Dampier
join:2003-03-23
Rochester, NY
| reply to nasadude
Re: our competitive market
The real issue to take from a 250GB cap is not whether or not people are going to come close to hitting it in October 2008 when it gets implemented, because the overwhelming majority of customers won't.
The issue is what happens in 2009, 2010, and 2011. People aren't hitting 250GB a month using the majority of today's web applications because so few of them consume that amount of bandwidth. If you're running a torrent server or engaged in lots of online backups, you could easily hit this cap when it gets implemented. But the average person web browsing or watching YouTube will not... yet.
What will change all of this is streaming HD video content which is precisely where the next generation of applications are going to make an impact. It takes several gigs to deliver an hour of programming in HD, and as set top boxes connect to the net, consumers will easily consume many times the bandwidth they do right now.
Comcast's cap starts high and seems generous, but quickly becomes an impediment, particularly in establishing a precedent for usage caps, and likely will not grow with the times.
The abusers Comcast always likes to talk about are a tiny minority on Comcast's network, but the company punishes their entire customer base to deal with a few "problem customers." This, even after the company has a track record of dealing with users who consume "excessive" bandwidth.
So what is the real agenda here? To control "abuse" on their network which they were already doing, or attempt to manipulate the marketplace with caps, limits, and new revenue streams, particularly impacting the potential competition the video side of their business faces from a next generation Internet with high quality video streaming. |
