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Fast, affordable Internet access for all.
Comcast is almost certainly telling the truth when it says the highest 1000 users were atypically intense bandwidth consumers. duh. Of course the top 1000 out of 14.4 million will be at the high end of the curve. No, the more interesting question is what the hell kind of a system is it where Comcast simply goes after the top 1000 users no matter how much they actually use, and why Comcast would adopt such a policy if it wants to reasonably manage network congestion? It seems rather . . . inefficient and arbitrary. Unless, of course, one is trying to save money running a crappy network and generally discourage high-bandwidth use.Now Comcast has a transparent cap - 250 GB/month - that we still have no way of really knowing how close we come to it (nearly all of us don't come close). Was that so hard? Apparently. Meanwhile, they keep claiming that network neutrality requirements would leave them unable to exercise reasonable network management. How would they even know what reasonable network management is? Though defining the public interest may be difficult, it is easy to show what is against the public interest: Comcast calls you and tells you that you have to use less bandwidth each month. You ask how much you can use and they say they cannot tell you but you need to use less. Fortunately, we now know how much is too much. If only we could tell how much we were using... Photo used under Creative Commons license, courtesy of Titanas on flickr.