Intellectual Property Law

Here's the Skinny on Comcast's Bandwidth Caps

By Cynthia Brumfield

As I posted earlier, Comcast came out today with a monthly bandwidth cap limit beyond which broadband customers are considered to be consuming "excessive" bandwidth. The cap is 250 GB and it will become company-wide policy starting October 1. (That's a lot of data...given current usage levels, although some commenters have pointed out that as HD video becomes more prevalent, 250 GB might not look so generous.)

According to Comcast spokesman Charlie Douglas, less than 1% of Comcast's customers exceed this cap, with the median usage pegged at 2 to 3 GB per month. Comcast says that 250 GB is equivalent to downloading 125 standard definition movies or 62,500 songs.

This delineation, however, has nothing to do with Comcast's impending implementation of a "protocol agnostic" network management program that has been spurred by the controversy surrounding Comcast's P2P throttling initiatives. The 250 GB cap is merely a way of making transparent what has been company practice for years; namely to pull the plug on bandwidth "hogs."

Comcast came under fire for cutting off "excessive" bandwidth consumers without first informing them what constitutes excessive usage. The 250 GB, now incorporated into Comcast's acceptable use policy, makes explicit what has been implicit all along.

Customers who exceed the 250 GB limit will get notified of this fact in their monthly bills, Comcast's Douglas says. Comcast won't provide a monitoring tool so that users can track their bandwidth consumption levels. Such heavy users "will know what tools exist" for tracking consumption. "More than 99% of our customers don?t need such a tool," according to Douglas.

Customers who exceed the limit will also be given the option of upgrading to a commercial tier of service, typically costing many times over the monthly rate charged for residential broadband service. Contrary to earlier reports, Comcast won't charge extra fees on a metered basis if a customer exceeds the caps although "that is something we're looking at," Douglas says.

Even if only 1% of Comcast's customers could hit the cap's limits, every customer could theoretically be affected by the protocol agnostic management plan Comcast is developing. "They're both important programs for Comcast for how we manage our network and whether our customers have a good experience," according to Douglas, although the 250 GB cap is a "totally different topic."

"Protocol agnostic has to do with aggregate use [in a real-time situation]. We want to avoid a situation where we have congestion," Douglas says. "It's dynamic and real-time" as opposed to cumulative monthly usage.

So, under the protocol agnostic network management program, which is still under development, users could face bandwidth constraints as traffic on a congested network gets slowed down. Once the congestion subsides, the constraints would be lifted.

Comcast has yet to specify what those real-time bandwidth constraints might be. Trials of protocol agnostic management methods are currently underway but "we?re committed to getting at that technique by the end of the year," Douglas says.

Full post as published by IP Democracy on August 28, 2008 (boomark / email).