Comcast Data Throttling

Posted on September 5, 2008

We wrote back in June that Comcast was considering throttling bandwidth and putting quotas on its customers’ downloads and either charging for excess bandwidth used or canceling accounts of offenders.

Well, they have now confirmed that all residential customers will be subject to a 250 gigabyte per month limit starting October 1, insisting that 250 GB is “an extremely large amount of data, much more than a typical residential customer uses on a monthly basis.”

To dramatize its points, Comcast calculated some examples of what it would take to go over the limit — send 50 million e-mails, download 62,500 songs, download 125 standard-definition movies, or upload 25,000 high-resolution digital photos.

Interesting statement they make that it would be out of the norm for someone to use that much bandwidth, so why set the limit then?

Do you know what this is really all about? I don’t believe it is about managing the users at all. I don’t believe it has anything to do with piracy at all. Think a minute….who is this? It’s Comcast…and what is their business? Well, primarily, its providing video to customers through its cable TV services.

Beginning to get the picture? What is the big explosion taking place on the Internet? VIDEO! And what does Comcast provide? VIDEO! And how much of their video is provided over the Internet? NONE! So if they don’t throttle the bandwidth, what do they stand to do? LOSE!

You see, if you are a customer of Comcast, they’re not after you. They’re trying to shut down, or at least slow down Apple TV, Microsoft’s Xbox Live Marketplace, and every other online distributor of content. Comcast does not want its customers in the habit of buying movies, TV shows, music, and other content products from Apple, Microsoft or other companies. They see those products as a direct threat to their cable TV/Pay Per View business so they are trying to throttle the development of that market before it has a chance to grow into a real threat.

Microsoft already offers some HD movies and TV shows in its Xbox Live Marketplace and that stuff is huge in size. All of this is news Comcast doesn’t like as some of its customers might opt to get their HD movies and TV shows from other providers. Basically Comcast sees that it might just become a provider of bandwidth with its content business being killed by more agile and compelling competitors.

..they might be right.