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Re: Update #2 from Karl
From »www.comcast.net/terms/network/amendment/
Today, we're announcing that beginning on October 1, 2008, we will amend our Acceptable Use Policy (AUP) available at » www.comcast.net/terms/use/ and establish a specific monthly data usage threshold of 250 GB/month per account for all residential customers.
This is the same system we have in place today. The only difference is that we will now provide a limit by which a customer may be contacted. As part of our pre-existing policy, we will continue to contact the top users of our high-speed Internet service and ask them to curb their usage. If a customer uses more than 250 GB and is one of the top users of our service, he or she may be contacted by Comcast to notify them of excessive use. At that time, we'll tell them exactly how much data per month they had used. We know from experience the vast majority of customers we ask to curb usage do so voluntarily. So
•No way for users to monitor their own usage, but
•If you do go over, they'll notify you and give you a chance to fix it.
These sentences, "As part of our pre-existing policy, we will continue to contact the top users of our high-speed Internet service and ask them to curb their usage. If a customer uses more than 250 GB and is one of the top users of our service, he or she may be contacted by Comcast to notify them of excessive use," pretty much suggests that nothing at all has changed -- that 250 GB isn't actually the real threshold but it's whatever they consider "the top users." (Aren't there recent press quotes about something involving half of one percent?)
(It's a odd business when being someone's "top user" means you're going to get punished.)
What happens next is based on whether Comcast's positioning is good and if it behaves like it says it will behave. If people see this announcement in the way that I think Comcast is intending it, then they won't shy away from bandwidth-heavy uses. Time will tell.
Net, net -- 250 GB/mo == 750 Kbps -- I can't get excited about that when the service is sold at 50, 16, 8, and 6 Mbps (or 10 to 100 times faster than 750 Kbps). That said, 250 GB is probably a useful number for consumers to make comparisons. It needs to be disclosed in the offers for service, and it probably should be incorporated directly in to the main agreement instead of being an admendment to a document that is referred to from it. I would also hope that Comcast increases this cap annually so that it doesn't end up being a cap on our future growth and innovation.
I especially like that it sends a "raise the bar" message to other providers. Comcast has a cap that is 12 times higher than Beaumont Texas's normal subscribers have! That's indefensible -- be you Roadrunner or Coyote.
Although no cap is what consumers actually want, and I challenge Comcast to work toward attaining that. But if you can't give them that, then giving them an honest and useful one works for me. Let's hope it is both.
edit: 250 GB/mo == 500750 Kbps
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Robb Topolski -= funchords.com =- Hillsboro, Oregon
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