May 8th, 2008
Comcast considering bandwidth caps, surcharges
Today’s Press of Atlantic City had a tiny sidebar on a troubling trend of bandwith caps and surcharges coming down the proverbial pipe from Comcast:
Comcast Corp., the nation’s second-largest Internet service provider, is considering setting an official limit on the amount of data that subscribers can download per month and charging a fee for those who go over…
For years, Comcast directly called customers who used up several times more bandwidth than the typical subscriber’s 2 gigabytes per month - for instance, by downloading hordes of movies. The big users were asked to reduce their use or have their accounts canceled.
Broadband Reports expands on the Comcast plans from a source:
A Comcast insider tells me the company is considering implementing very clear monthly caps, and may begin charging overage fees for customers who cross them. While still in the early stages of development, the plan — as it stands now — would work like this: all users get a 250GB per month cap.
Users would get one free “slip up” in a twelve month period, after which users would pay a $15 charge for each 10 GB over the cap they travel. According to the source, the plan has “a lot of momentum behind it,” and initial testing is slated to begin in a month or two.
I’m not a huge downloader or anything but this kind of thing scares me. First they implemented Sandvine to forge TCP packets and kill BitTorrent traffic, now bandwidth caps and surcharges.
