Some time ago, I read an article that stated Comcast would cap downloads at 250 Gigabytes a month. You would get a call from Comcast if you exceeded that amount. They are planning to add an extra fee if you go over this amount. The fee will be something like an extra $10 for every 10G you go over 250G per month.Comcast’s spin on this new charge is that it will help ensure that everybody gets good performance. That is typical management speak. It means that they can give everyone good performance, but somebody other than Comcast has to pay. It almost seems like we are going back to a per-use charge. However they are leaving out the part where you get to pay less if you use less bandwidth. Companies are tricky like that to maximize their profit.
To tell you the truth, I have no clue how many Gigabytes I download on a monthly basis. Comcast says the medium amount for their users is less than 3G per month. I have not received any calls from Comcast recently. Maybe that means all is well. However I would still like to pay a lesser monthly charge if I only download 1G a month, and somebody else downloads 200G in the same time frame. You either charge us a flat fee, or you give me a discount. You can’t have it both ways.
I know I do watch videos on the Internet all the time. However these are usually short videos from YouTube. Someone calculated that 250G a month download is equivalent to downloading 4 high definition movies a day. Yeah I fall way under that limit. Comcast better give me a better Internet plan if they are going to charge the heavy users some more money.
This is post is not directed solely to Comcast. Other cable companies like Cox and Time Warner cap the monthly download at lesser rates. They too should either charge all users a flat fee, or give rebates to those of us who do not use up a lot of bandwidth. What do I have to do to be given a fair deal in broadband access? Call the FCC?
