cheers

Is there an element of greed there?

Now that the mega-download-kids are being charged for their “overage”… shouldn’t everyone else’s bill decrease when they don’t spend 250gb worth of bandwidth?

No? Less service, same price, Comcast? Niiiice.

Someone is starting to sound a lot like an oil company now that they are big.

But, here are some places where it will become problematic.

1) I use Netflix to watch a lot of movies online, sometimes only one or two movies in a month, but, sometimes 10+, or entire seasons of TV shows. As time goes on, quality improves, the size of these downloads increases. In a few years, the amount of HD content available to stream from netflix or other services, legally, will be many volumes more. There have been nights where Netflix has replaced my television outright.

2) An average online game will use about 300kb per minute. Some games use 500k to 1 MB per minute. As time goes on, this will increase, as it has been. 60 MB an hour adds up relatively fast, especially for MMOs, where a player may literally not disconnect for more than 5 hours at a time. Remember that this is in right now “2008″ terms, in “2013″ terms, this will be more like 200 MB an hour. This doesn’t even refer to the games being downloaded themselves, which is more.

3) Voice over IP, Video Conferencing, Internet Radio, Internet television technologies, all bundled together, and being used in households that have multiple computer users (mine only has two, some have 4 or 5) all add up quickly. Right now, a single user would be hard pressed to outdo the 250gb limit without a very special scenario, but, add in 2 or 3 more people to that family/apartment, banging on that same router, and take into consideration that the quality of online media will increase over time… you can very quickly see a reasonable percentage of people running into that limit in 2010 or 2012.

Now Comcast wants to charge more for this?

$140 per month for a DVR, Crappy Channel Selection, no premium channels, and the same old cable internet everyone else has? That’s what I pay. Now they want more when I go over?

It’s possible that this is all accidentally left future vulnerable, but, I would wager that comcast specifically failed to future proof so that they could scrape up $150-160 a month from their average customer base when they offer to remove the cap for an additional fee.

Commercially-speaking, the words that come most readily to mind are “goose” and “golden eggs”!

And for the record this has ABSOLUTELY nothing to do with infrastructure, Comcast got the totally FIBER network that Adelphia had built. They could handle tons more, TONS MORE. I knew a guy that worked for Adelphia, and he said the old network could handle amounts of close to the FIBER.

I think its more to free up bandwidth for a forthcoming digital content launch.

And just for arguments sake, what about those of us with more than 1 computer? It then becomes a division 2= 125.50 GIG, etc.

For all those with way less than 250GB a month (1GB a day or less), what would you do with 8GBs? I don’t even know could I download that much data a day: I’d run out of things I wanted to watch and listen to pretty quickly.

You get a 16 Mbit / 1 Mbit ADSL2 flatrate plus phone flatrate for land based calls for 40 Euro which is roughly $60.

Especially granted that in australia the problem isn’t infra-structure, just lack of investment.