Comcast Launches Broadband Meter

nlawalker writes "Beginning on Tuesday, January 12, Comcast high-speed internet users in Washington state will have access to an online tool that displays their bandwidth usage for the most recent three calendar (not billing) months of usage, including the current month. Washington is the second market to receive access to the tool, following its introduction in Portland. 'For the fraction of less than 1 percent of our customers who are concerned about exceeding our excessive use threshold, we believe this meter will help them monitor and calibrate their usage,' said spokesman Steve Kipp. Perhaps those who aren't using 250GB a month should take it as a challenge."

Comments

Transpacific bandwidth

[tepples]

Transfer caps are disclosed, enforced, and comparatively low in New Zealand and Australia because transpacific bandwidth is so expensive. I think the perceived lack of caps in U.S. ISP has something to do with the fact that popular web sites are hosted on the same continent as Comcast's customers, so no one has to pay for transpacific bandwidth.

Re:It's all about timing

[Urza9814]

Haha, I'm currently at Penn State. They just upped the bandwidth limit this year - we now get a whole 10GB :)

And yea, there are all kinds of ways to get around the system. I'm not sure about Comcast and how they're measuring it, but Penn State only measured bandwidth out of their network - and they also had a proxy run by 'Academic Services and Emerging Technology', so people always just use that. Since your traffic is only going to the proxy, which is on the PSU network, anything that goes through that proxy doesn't count against your limit. And then there's always the wireless network - they try to make it unavailable in the residence halls, but you can get it in a lot of them, and they don't count your bandwidth on the wireless network.

As a final thought: What I thought they meant when I read the article was that they were creating a physical broadband meter. That I would actually think would be a good idea. I mean if you're going to limit how much people can use, you should give them a simple way to measure it. And what's better than something similar to the water/gas/electric meter they're already used to? Of course it'd be inside near their computer, but if you're going to limit or charge for bandwidth, that's the only fair thing to do.

Re:Old...

[iamsolidsnk]

Also, if you own a Linksys WRT54G model router, of most firmware variations, you can get custom firmware that will track WLAN usage. It was quite handy when I had to pick a broadband connection plan when I moved to a new state.

Freakonomics

[Hatta]

Perhaps those who aren't using 250GB a month should take it as a challenge.

You're not kidding. There's a story in Freakonomics about a daycare center that had problems with people not picking their kids up on time. So they figured they would charge a fee; penalize people for leaving their kids and they'll stop, right? Instead, more people started showing up late. Turns out that paying a fee assuaged peoples guilt for not showing up on time. Before they felt like jerks for being late, now they could just pay a fee and feel better. Moral of the story, incentives don't always work the way you think they will.

So when you give people this new information, what's going to happen? 90% of people are not using that much bandwidth already. Comcast is giving them a chart that says "look how little bandwidth you're using, you could use a lot more and not get in trouble". Some of those people are going to start using more bandwith, and I'll bet those people will more than offset the minority of heavy users who might curtail their usage.

The real solution to this problem is for Comcast, and every other ISP to invest more into infrastructure.