Re: read -- Comcast Considering 250GB Cap, Overage Fees

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

________________________________________
From: Richard Bennett [richard () bennett com]
Sent: Wednesday, May 07, 2008 7:15 PM
To: David Farber
Subject: Re: [IP] read --  Comcast Considering 250GB Cap, Overage Fees

It's my understanding that this number wasn't pulled out of thin air. Comcast has known for a long time that only 
1/1000th of its customers download more than 250GB/mo, and they don't care to serve this segment for the same price 
that everybody else is paying, and who can blame them?

Of course, this kind of crude metric doesn't address peak load, and that's the problem I have with it. It makes no 
difference to anybody what happens at 3:00 AM, and by failing to distinguish peak load pricing from off-peak, they've 
created a perverse incentive for people to jam up the cable at the most inconvenient times for the network.

At this point, the usage cap is a trial balloon that Comcast is floating to see who shoots at it. As the populist 
telecom regulation lobby has all more or less endorsed usage-sensitive pricing, they presumably can't object, but given 
their track record it's reasonable to predict they will anyway.

If I had my way, they'd let customers prioritize traffic. That would eliminate the need for any caps, but they don't 
particularly listen to me.

Meanwhile, Verizon couldn't be happier.

RB

DAVID FARBER wrote:


Begin forwarded message:

From: Karl Auerbach <karl () cavebear com<mailto:karl () cavebear com>>
Date: May 7, 2008 3:40:13 PM EDT
To: dave () farber net<mailto:dave () farber net>
Cc: ip <ip () v2 listbox com<mailto:ip () v2 listbox com>>
Subject: Re: [IP] Comcast Considering 250GB Cap, Overage Fees


With regard to "Truth in Advertising" - I would hope that Comcast properly advertises that 250GigaBYTES per 30 day 
month is an average transfer rate of about 771,605 bit/second combined in+out.  (It's less for those 31 day months.)

As others have pointed out this works out to a small stack (roughly 60) of DVD movies a month - but we are entering an 
HD world.  HD imagery requires rather more bits.  So, the entire Comcast budget would be consumed by a family that 
watches about one HD movie per day.

And, when measured over a period of a month even seemingly "low bandwidth" channels start to consume gigabytes of that 
Comcast monthly data budget.

A dumb continuous-motion security camera that emits an average of 100,000kBITs/second is going to burn through about 32 
of that 250 gigabyte budget.

And an open VoIP call, with decent sound quality, can burn twice that when one considers that data flows, and is being 
counted into the Comcast budget, both in and out.

I hope my simple math hasn't slipped too many decimal points or missed too many bits-to-bytes conversions.

But my point remains - In tomorrow's world 250Gigabytes/month won't amount to a very large hill of beans.

And let's hope that Comcast clearly advertises that it is really selling a 771,605 bit/second (in+out) average rate 
service.

--karl--







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Richard Bennett


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