The Facts & Fiction of Bandwidth Caps

wjamesau writes "What's the deal with broadband caps, like Comcast's 250GB/month data transfer limit, which goes into effect tomorrow? Om Malik at GigaOM has a whitepaper laying out the facts and fiction about Comcast's short-sightedness (which other carriers are mimicking), and how it will impact the future Internet: 'Given the growth trend due to consumers' changes in content consumption, today's power users are tomorrow's average users. By 2012, the bill for data access is projected to be around $215 per month.' Ouch." The white paper is embedded at the link using Scribd; for a PDF version you'll have to give up an email address.

Comments

Re:Article summary

[lysergic.acid]

i live in the suburbs of L.A. but my broadband bills are still several times those of similarly dense population centers in other countries.

if you were talking about Australia or Canada, where they have large sparsely populated wilderness and rural communities then that might be a fair excuse. (Canada actually has cheaper broadband than the U.S. in spite of this.) but most Americans live in metropolitan areas or their surrounding suburbs. a relatively small percentage of the population actually lives in places like Wisconsin or rural America.

check out this chart of average broadband speeds to see how far ahead Japan and Korea are. if we want to catch up to those countries, then we need expand infrastructure to meet demand, rather than artificially manipulate demand by putting tight restrictions on consumer broadband usage.

Re:The projected costs are worthless.

[hairyfeet]

Yeah,and I really wouldn't get comfortable with that 250GB cap either. I'm willing to bet my soon to be worthless last dollar that will end up the "Elite ultra class" service at $250 a month. More likely you will end up with what I got unless you get lucky and Verizon decides to run FIOS to you,which is 36GB,which with phone(VoIP) and basic cable is running me $146. And that was the best deal in town. So download like mad,load up as much as you can with that 250GB Comcast users,because I'm betting it won't last. Don't ya just love monopolies?