April 6th, 2007
Comcast should surcharge bandwidth hogs, Torrents downloaders
PCMag.com's Chloe Albanesius has gotten quite a reaction from her Wednesday story that Comcast is cutting off "bandwidth hogs" whose downloads are far in excess of what the broadband access provider thinks is about right.
She mentions one case of a customer who downloaded 550 gigabytes of stuff, and whose service has been suspended as a result.
Although Comcast didn't comment specifically for the story, Chloe quotes a February, 2007 statement from Comcast, saying in part that "customers who are notified of excessive usage typically consume more than 100 times the average national Comcast bandwidth usage."
So now I am thinking how anyone could download 550 gigabytes in a month.
Hmm. Maybe torrents of movies?
If that's the case, these bandwidth hogs are abusing the system. Maybe Comcast shouldn't suspend their service, but hit 'em with a surcharge.
Hey, I smell a poll coming:
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Russell Shaw is an enterprise computing journalist, analyst and author based in Portland, Oregon. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
