Comcast's Troublesome Attitude Towards Its Heaviest Users

Wanted to take a moment to share my thoughts on the ongoing saga surrounding Comcast’s mysterious bandwidth caps.

To set the stage, over the last few months on more than one occasion I’ve encountered stories about how Comcast treats its heaviest Internet users. (Here’s a whole blog devoted to one person’s experiences.)

To summarize: Comcast has a strict bandwidth cap that they enforce by cutting off access to people who exceed it. So if you’re downloading movies all day long via BitTorrent, Comcast may stop you from using their service with little to no notice.

The two more troubling aspects of this practice are:

- There’s usually no easy way for these “abusers” to get their service reactivated. The response I most often hear Comcast giving is that these people need to upgrade to business accounts, which cost more than $1000 a month. So even if the user is willing to pay for additional bandwidth, there’s no reasonable mechanism that enables them to do so.

- Comcast won’t confirm the exact number of their cap. There’s literally no way to know how much is too much and to make sure you’re not getting too close to the limit.

What heightens this even further is the fact that there are pockets all across the country where cable is the only broadband option available. So heavy users in these areas are often left stuck, penalized for using the Internet too much with no easy way to get back online.

Here’s the paradox I see in all this: the same companies that are touting the increasing speeds of their network are penalizing people for more fully utilizing that connectivity.

Of course, this situation isn’t altogether surprising. The prevalent all-you-can-eat model of consumer broadband doesn’t provide any release valve for network operators. Simply put, as demand for bandwidth increases, it's increasing their costs and squeezing their margins.

Because of this, ISPs have put themselves in the awkward position of selling a product they want people to buy but not use.

And if that weren’t enough, the primary way they can make more money selling Internet services is to drive upgrades to faster speeds, which hold the potential of dramatically increasing the amount of bandwidth users consume.

We have to find a way to flip all this on its head.

We can’t keep punishing the people who are pioneers in the use of the Internet as there’s no better way to stifle the growth of the Internet than that.