Recently, the Canadian Radio-Telecommunications Commission, the equivalent of our FCC, agreed on "Usage-Based Billing" for the company Bell Canada. The drastic move reduced the monthly usage bandwidth from 200GB down to a mere 25GB per month. The move was met with an appropriate eruption of resistance from the oft complacent Internet community.
Perhaps Bell Canada merely applied too much pressure in too short a time. 200GB - 25GB a month is a massive and alarming leap and was met with the outpour it warranted. Comcast, however, seems to have a more accurate read on the temerity of its consumer base. Rather than trying to slam a lid on alloted bandwidth, Comcast used some reasonable and devious foresight in their approach. Knowing that with a delicate touch, and enough time for fervor to come and go, Comcast has implemented a somewhat reasonable usage cap and will charge those who will most certainly exceed it in the near future as the inevitable growth of data strains their bandwidth.
From Comcast.com:
"Your Comcast High-Speed Internet service has a monthly data usage allowance of 250 gigabytes (GB). If you are wondering whether you are at risk of exceeding this 250GB threshold, you should know that the vast majority - around 99% - of Comcast customers use significantly less than 250GB per month."
Certainly, a cap of 250GB will seem irrelevant to the typical Internet user when framed with statistics like "50 million plain text e-mails" and "25,000 songs", but when you consider things like high definition streaming video, online games, and entire families sharing that cap, the ceiling starts to look that much closer. However, perhaps the most important thing to remember when considering the effects of metered Internet remains "growth". With services like Netflix and Youtube expanding rapidly and the evolution of cleaner and clearer video and audio codecs, Comcast's 250GB cap will soon be an absurd limitation on Internet usage.
No comments:
Post a Comment