Law Students

Comcast Implements Bandwidth Throttling

By Pete

So Comcast got in trouble with the FCC not too long ago because they were singling out certain kinds of traffic and screwing around with it. So they changed the way they’re doing it to this:

For the last few months, Comcast has been transitioning how it monitors and throttles broadband traffic. DSLreports.com claims that this transition is now complete for all of Comcast’s markets, meaning that Comcast users might see their connection speeds drop if they use too much sustained downstream throughput and they can even potentially lose their service if they exceed Comcast’s monthly broadband cap.

The stereotypical nerd reaction, as evidenced in the Digg story is the gnashing of teeth and the taking up of pitchforks and torches. Here’s the thing… this new throttling is a GOOD thing.

Okay, fine, so it’s not good if you’re one of those people who is constantly downloading huge files or pulls more than 250GB of traffic a month. But it’s good for everyone else, and here’s why:

Cable internet is a shared service. If I’m constantly saturating my connection with huge downloads, that degrades the quality of my neighbor’s service. This, to be frank, is a bit of a dick move. If you’re clogging the whole neighborhood’s tube with your downloads, you are an asshole, and I don’t really care how pissed off you are about having that taken away from you.

This new setup allows Comcast to protect a huge portion of their customer base from a few bad seeds. It also finally puts onto paper restrictions that have pretty much always been around, but were much more secretive. So, in other words, what this new policy provides is more complete information, and a higher quality of service for the vast majority of users.

All this at the expense of a few assholes who want the rest of us to subsidize their ridiculous download sprees.

Sounds like a win/win to me. (Now, Comcast, with the money you save by doing this, please invest in some more customer service reps who aren’t jerks or morons, and give the few good ones you already have a nice raise.)

Full post as published by PeteHoliday.com on January 07, 2009 (boomark / email).