OPINION: The art of treading lightly
By Paul Sweeting -- Video Business, 9/5/2008
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As VB’s Danny King reports this week, Comcast for the first time will begin imposing a monthly bandwidth cap on its broadband customers starting next month. Users will be limited to 250GB of bandwidth per month, a ceiling the company argues—fairly enough—is many times higher than the average subscriber’s current monthly consumption.
The target of the cap, the company says, is the small number of users who consume huge amounts of bandwidth, generally because of extensive peer-to-peer file sharing.
The company has not said what will happen to users who exceed the monthly cap.
Comcast’s decision to impose the cap is in part a response to getting its wrist slapped by the Federal Communications Commission last month after the company was found to be intentionally slowing down some BitTorrent traffic on its network, ostensibly to relieve congestion that could affect all users.
The FCC gave Comcast to the end of the year to come up with some other way to manage traffic on its network that did not involve discriminating against particular protocols or applications. Thus, the across-the-board cap.
Even as it prepares to impose the cap, however, Comcast is appealing the FCC’s ruling in federal court, claiming the agency lacks the legal authority to impose such sanctions on the company.
“We filed this appeal in order to protect our legal rights and to challenge the basis on which the Commission found that Comcast violated federal policy in the absence of pre-existing legally enforceable standards or rules,” Comcast executive VP David Cohen said in a statement.
Comcast’s most intriguing recent move, however, was its very quiet launch last week of its Fancast video download store, offering 3,000 movies and TV episodes for rental or electronic sell-through, supplementing the thousands of hours of free, ad-supported content it already offers.
Read the full column on ContentAgenda.com.
