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Download Limits
September 19, 2007
Comcast has been on the hot seat as of late for its policy of shutting down excessive downloaders, which continues to echo through the blogosophere.
The company is now running damage control.
Comcast Corporate spokesman Charlie Douglas said on Tuesday that reports of Comcast limiting residential use are incorrect.
Instead, only a fraction of users have been shutdown -- those who are violating the acceptable use policy all customers adhere to.
What's unacceptable? Those using "exponentially" more bandwidth than typical residential customers; the equivalent of "sending 256,000 photos a month, or sending 13 million e-mails every month (or 18,000 emails every hour, every day, all month)," Douglas said.
The argument is that excessive downloaders hog Internet capacity and slow down the network for other customers. And on cable networks, several hundred subscribers often share an Internet connection, so one high-traffic user could slow the rest of a neighborhood's connections.
DSL phone lines, conversely, are run directly to each home; a single bandwidth hog will not slow other connections.
The Washington Post ran a story about two weeks ago about a Maryland women who was sent a letter in March by Comcast that she was using the service too much. They shut her down, and she filed a complaint with the county regulator, which brought the story out into the open.
Douglas said Comcast is now contacting customers by phone.
Usually, what's happening is that customers were either using a server out of their home or their ISP address had been hijacked by a spammer usually through an unprotected wireless router. In those cases, Comcast will work with the customer and straighten out the problem.
If the customer is actually responsible for the excessive use, they will either be dropped by the company or given the option of upgrading to a commercial tier of service, which is about $1,500 a month.
"More than 99.99% of our customers use the residential high-speed Internet service as intended, which includes downloading and sharing video, photos and other rich-media," Douglas said.
Posted by Ned Randolph on September 19, 2007 | Comments (0)
