Comcast, one of the largest Internet providers in the US, has announced that, as of October 1, the maximum traffic will be reduced to a monthly 250GB per user. This comes as a repercussion of the fact that the company, lacking the means to offer customers the connection speed they needed, decided to interfere with the access to peer-to-peer applications. Later on, it was revealed that the Internet provider took the measure regardless of the level of congestion registered at a particular moment in time.
In an order released 10 days ago, the Federal Communications Commission underscored that the practices of Comcast were discriminatory, since they had the same effect on both customers who only used little bandwidth and who exceeded the normal limits. Normally, in case of a network overload, certain limits or conditions should be imposed only for the latter category.
“They [Comcast] affect customers who are using little bandwidth simply because they are using a disfavored application; they are not employed only during times of the day when congestion is prevalent; the company’s equipment does not target only those neighborhoods suffering from congestion; and a customer may use an extraordinary amount of bandwidth during periods of network congestion and will be totally unaffected so long as he does not utilize an application disfavored by Comcast.” read the report of the FCC.
The Commission called for immediate measures on part of the company, which, in turn, decided to slow down the traffic for 10 to 20 minutes, in case a congestion appeared. Apparently, the FCC was not happy with the temporary solution since it failed to deal with the very core of the problem. However, Comcast’s most recent decision may have better chances of working things out for the great majority of its customers.
The 250GB limitation means that users can, on a monthly average, either send 50 million emails or download 125 movies of 2GB. The typical customer does not exceed a 2 to 3GB bandwidth consumption a month, so only approximately 1% of the users will be affected by the decision. Those who exceed the limit will be asked to decrease their traffic, via a letter delivered to them together with the Internet bill. And, from what Comcast says, people usually react well to this kind of requests and willingly reduce the data flow.
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