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Comcast Not Counting Their Video Service Against Bandwidth Cap
tekgoblin writes something not quite worth rejoicing over. From the article: "Comcast Internet subscribers can rejoice. Comcast has recently announced that they will not be counting content streamed via their Comcast Xfinity App on the Xbox 360 against their bandwidth caps. Comcast claims that since the data is only traversing their internal Comcast network that it will not count towards your 250 GB limit a month."
Comcast is claiming this does not violate net neutrality laws (and it very well may not); a number of folks are not very happy about it. I've always been perplexed by the large media interests of most U.S. last-mile providers.
This is the core issue of network neutrality! A network provider should be a neutral network provider, it should not prioritise one vendor's service over another vendor's equivalent service. Network operators being content providers at all is a violation of network neutrality in its purest form. Imposing limits on other services' traffic but not on their own is a blatant violation by even the loosest definition.
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The problem is the reason for the bandwidth caps to begin with was that the last mile was the weak link (cable being shared, your heavy usage affected your neighbors, thus the cap to get you to limit yourself). Now they want to put data from their service over that same link, causing the same congestion problems but not counting it towards the cap. This limits the spread of competing services that might use enough bandwidth to hit the cap.
Either congestion on the last mile is a problem requiring caps or it isn't. It shouldn't matter what's in the data packets or where they're from.
...they don't count their video/vod streams against your monthly data cap either, do they?
Correct. Step by step, major ISPs are transforming your internet connection into just another cable TV connection. Expect fees and restrictions to "outside" content to increase in an escalating war of combined telecom/content providers.
Someone mod this guy up. This is exactly what this is all about. It is about the central core of network neutrality, it is about making sure that no one can ever threaten the business model of the incumbent telcos, and it is about turning the Internet into TV. And it is the entire reason behind the marriage of content and ISPs.
The Internet is dead. Long live TV.
I just hope Sonic.net can grow their network fast enough so that I can get more than a 1.5 Mbit connection from them.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.