Comcast Planning to Dump Bandwidth Hogs

By PatB
Contributing Writer, [GAS]

After a stinging rebuke from the FCC over Comcast’s efforts in bandwidth shaping to preserve bandwidth for all their customers, Comcast is planning to retreat behind a stingy Acceptable Usage Policy. Instead of shaping bandwidth, they are just going to give the finger and pull the plug on P2P users.

From Bloomberg here:

Comcast Corp., the largest U.S. cable operator, said subscribers whose use of the Internet exceeds 250 gigabytes of data a month may get a warning call and could lose their service.

Customers who breach the threshold — enough to send 50 million e-mails or 125 standard-definition movies — may be asked to reduce their use, the Philadelphia-based company said today in a Web posting. Those whose “excessive use” continues may be cut off for a year.

The limit officially becomes part of Comcast’s acceptable use policy Oct. 1. The company reported 14.3 million high-speed Internet customers at the end of the second quarter.

Cable operators are wrestling with how to keep high-speed Internet services operating smoothly as demand soars for features such as streaming video that place heavy demands on networks.

I sympathize with Comcast users, mostly over the company’s horrible track record with customer service. Heck, any company that will cause a grandmother to take a hammer and smash up the customer service center over bad service is a bad company. But the brouhaha over the net neutrality debate has forced Comcast to exert their rights as an ISP. Comcast’s suggestion to bandwidth hogging P2P users: Let’s see how well bit torrent works over dialup.